Disaster Quotes

"A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened."

"When disaster strikes, it tears the curtain away from the festering problems that we have beneath them,"

"A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential -- there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster."

"What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?"

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same."

"I cannot get any sense of an enemy - only of a disaster."

"I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity."

"The man does better who runs from disaster than he who is caught by it"

"Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster."

"The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal."

"The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts."

"This is the largest response to a single natural disaster in the 125 years of the American Red Cross, and there's no doubt it will set many records in terms of the length and expanse of the operation."

"There's a resistance for people to talk about things that make them feel guilty. When natural disasters happen, it's easier not to feel guilty about it."

"[Mental health is a critical issue faced by survivor of the disaster.] People don't have timely and accurate information, and this has caused serious troubles, ... Kids who were exposed who are now 20 years old have been called Chernobyl invalids. They have an annual medical exam by 20 doctors so they think for sure something's wrong."

"People are trying to decide whether the man-made disaster is worse than Mother Nature's disaster."

"Even when there's no natural disaster Blacks have lived the closest (to these facilities),"

"think that the best way to [deal with the disaster] is simply to write a huge check to the very government agency that failed so spectacularly."

"We have opened our hearts, our homes and our university to families and individuals displaced by this disaster. But as the relief effort moves from despair to hope and destruction to rebuilding, all of us are being called on to share our blessings in this unprecedented undertaking to rebuild communities and help those in need put their lives back together again."

"By no means would we send people to a disaster shelter that was not ready to accept them."

"[Benigno Aguirre, of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, has been watching and reading about looters in Louisiana.] It may look from the outside as if they are stealing or breaking the law, ... when in fact some of them are trying to survive."