Catastrophically Quotes & Sayings

Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality. — Milan Kundera

Academic historians of the last hundred years or so get all stiff and tweedy when you suggest that people will go to all ends for the sake of their religion. They'll assure you that religion is just a cover for other, more "rational" motivations. They would prefer to explain the world in terms of economic self-interest, of class warfare, or of dynastic imperatives. But has not the early twenty-first century made it catastrophically clear how many people (and not just the desperate, either) are ready to leap over the brink in the name of their religion? The same was certainly true of "the age of discovery." While greed should certainly be given her due, there is no reason to think that da Gama was not perfectly sincere when he said that he came in search of Christians and spices. — Michael Krondl

I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse. — Robert Metcalfe

All this time I'd thought we were strangers, and it turned out we knew each other intuitively, in our bones, in our blood. It was kind of romantic. Catastrophically romantic. — Gillian Flynn

A common and depressing assumption on the part of many college students is that they must stay on the academic rails until they are professionally established - go directly to grad school from college and directly from grad school to a job, as if there were some big rush and even a few years lost would put them catastrophically behind everyone else. Nonsense. Suppose you intend to retire at sixty-five. If you don't start your career until you're thirty, that still gives you thirty-five years to make it professionally. If you can't make it in thirty-five years, you weren't going to make it in forty or forty-five. — Charles Murray

Yet the life expectancy for white people without a high school diploma has dropped catastrophically since the 1990s - down by five years for women, three years for men - suggesting a cultural crisis among poor whites akin to that in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. Yet the morally preening powerful, confident in their supposedly progressive views, largely ignore this collapse and the people suffering from it. — R. R. Reno

My hero is the mayor in Jaws. He's a fantastic guy, and he keeps the beaches open, if you remember, even after it's demonstrated that his constituents have been eaten by this killer fish. Of course, he was proved catastrophically wrong in his judgment, but his instincts were right.'
Boris Johnson is the mayor of London.
Taken from Time Magazine interview: June 25, 2012; page 76. — Boris Johnson

I do not believe that our relationship to the earth is liable to change for the better until it gets catastrophically worse. Our record indicates that we can walk with our eyes wide open straight into sheer destruction if there is a profit on the way-and that seems to me to be what we are doing now. I have no great expectation that human cussedness will somehow be quickly modified and turned into generosity or that humanity's care of the earth will improve much. But I do go around planting trees on the campus. — Joseph Sittler

The internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996. — Robert Metcalfe

It is not that the Hegartys don't know what they want, it is that they don't know HOW to want. Something about their wanting went catastrophically astray. — Anne Enright

With secret delight, he began teaching Bad Eye catastrophically bad English. From that day forward, when asked, "How are you?," Bad Eye would smilingly reply, "What the fuck do you care? — Laura Hillenbrand

The crisis is a concrete threatening reality today. It stands to get catastrophically worse unless we take action before the accumulation [of] this global warming pollution reaches such toxic levels that the problem becomes bigger than we can solve. — Al Gore

And when I say "exploded" I mean "interacted catastrophically with the topography of space/time in ways we're not entirely able to explain," but "explode" gets the gist of it, particularly with regard to what would happen to a human caught in it. — John Scalzi

Without birds to feed on them, the insects would multiply catastrophically ... The insects, not man or other proud species, are really the only ones fitted for survival in the nuclear age ... The cockroach, a venerable and hardy species, will take over the habitats of the foolish humans, and compete only with other insects or bacteria. — H. Bentley Glass

This lack of coverage had been convenient for the US and other Western governments because it enabled them to play down the extent to which the "war on terror" had failed so catastrophically in the years since 9/11. This failure is also masked by deceptions and self-deceptions on the part of governments. — Patrick Cockburn

Aggregate aid is to the Ethiopian economy what Obama's fiscal stimulus was to the American economy: minus these injections, both economies would suffer catastrophically. The theatrical blustering of the Ethiopian government notwithstanding, donor countries have a make-or-break power over the Ethiopia's prosperity. — Eskinder Nega

The problem with the unruffled boosters of the Enlightenment as well as its unreconcilable enemies is that they can't get their minds around the idea that a value may need its opposite not to become dangerous. For them, all good things cohere together, in one single consistent package. The things which we inescapably find good often conflict, sometimes tragically. The attempt to hide this from ourselves is not only an intellectual failing, it is also a source of catastrophically destructive action, as we try to dragoon reality into our narrow conceptual net. — Charles Taylor

I feel we are so blessed to live in a country where we enjoy so many rights that other countries cannot even begin to imagine. However, it terrifies me that we seem to have lost touch with our connection to the earth. I am concerned that we have risen to such heights of arrogance in our refusal to acknowledge that our earth is rapidly changing in ways that might affect us catastrophically but instead, we hold steadfast to our belief that nothing can happen to us as a people. — Sheryl Crow

The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before. — Paul Kingsnorth

You can create a good impression on yourself by being right, he realizes, but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong. — Michael Frayn

What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms. We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, 'What can the state do that is good?' — Tony Judt

You said I am a good man, but I am not that good a man. And I am - I am catastrophically in love with you.

~William Herondale, Page 413 — Cassandra Clare

I am catastrophically in love with you. — Cassandra Clare

The role of Italy and of Austria has diminished as has that of France and Britain; Germany and Japan have suffered catastrophically. — Emily Greene Balch

This concept of the afterlife really functions as a substitute for wisdom. It functions as a substitute for really absorbing our predicament, which is that everyone is going to die; there are circumstances that are just catastrophically unfair; evil sometimes wins and injustice sometimes wins, and that the only justice we are going to find in the world is the justice we make.
We have an ethical responsibility to absorb this, really down to the soles of our feet. And this notion of an afterlife, of how it's all going to work out and its all part of god's plan, is a way of shirking that responsibility. — Sam Harris

If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly and even catastrophically, you will never be rich. — Felix Dennis

Her Leo, so bright, so beautiful.
And in the end, so catastrophically flawed. — Sherry Thomas

With the IoT, we're headed to a world where things aren't liable to break catastrophically - or at least, we'll have a hell of a heads' up. We're headed to a world where our doors unlock when they sense us nearby. — Scott Weiss

I am aware, sure, I am aware. Catastrophically aware. — Sylvia Plath

Maybe I was just one of those people who couldn't rest easy unless things went catastrophically wrong. — Ann Aguirre