Chemical Chaos Quotes

Turn the page . . . jump in. ~ R.K. McWilliams

From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins. ~ Jeff Goodell

We began before words, and we will end beyond them.
It sometimes seems to me that our days are poisoned with too many words. Words said and not meant. Words said 'and' meant. Words divorced from feeling. Wounding words. Words that conceal. Words that reduce. Dead words.

If only words were a kind of fluid that collects in the ears, if only they turned into the visible chemical equivalent of their true value, an acid, or something curative – then we might be more careful. Words do collect in us anyway. They collect in the blood, in the soul, and either transform or poison people's lives. Bitter or thoughtless words poured into the ears of the young have blighted many lives in advance. We all know people whose unhappy lives twist on a set of words uttered to them on a certain unforgotten day at school, in childhood, or at university.

We seem to think that words aren't things. A bump on the head may pass away, but a cutting remark grows with the mind. But then it is possible that we know all too well the awesome power of words – which is why we use them with such deadly and accurate cruelty.

We are all wounded inside one way or other. We all carry unhappiness within us for some reason or other. Which is why we need a little gentleness and healing from one another. Healing in words, and healing beyond words. Like gestures. Warm gestures. Like friendship, which will always be a mystery. Like a smile, which someone described as the shortest dist ~ Ben Okri

It will take time to restore chaos ~ George W. Bush

In any case, this was a deep human prejudice. Human beings to find a central command in any organization. States had governments. Corporations had CEOs. Schools had principals. Armies had generals. Human beings tended to believe that without central command, chaos would overwhelm the organization and nothing significant could be accomplished. ~ Michael Crichton

Chaos is the enemy of any organization the strives to be outstanding. ~ Karen Martin

Jason reached out for my hand, and we headed out the hospital exit, on our way to rebuild our lives together free of chaos and lies. ~ Zane

Personally I find the democratic chaos of the Internet fascinating, and for the most part really benign. ~ Moby

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos. ~ Eric Temple Bell

Make plans. Train your body. Follow the guiding spirits. Be ready for anything, but never seek control. It's an illusion. You control nothing. At any point, the universe can come for you--with all its might and love and chaos. ~ Gabby Rivera

In manufacturing, where mechanization and the use of chemical processes are much easier, it is easier to raise productivity than in services. In contrast, by their very nature, many service activities are inherently impervious to productivity increase without diluting the quality of the product. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

When you help yourself, you feel good. But when you help somebody else get back on their feet, it's a high that no chemical drug can ever match. It's the greatest high in the world. It's addictive, it's contagious, and the world needs more of it. ~ Greg Plitt

Coercion cannot but result in chaos in the end. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I finally figured out that not every crisis can be managed. As much as we want to keep ourselves safe, we can't protect ourselves from everything. If we want to embrace life, we also have to embrace chaos. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Having told of so much beauty, how is it possible to tell of her? There are no words left on the earth in any tongue that will do. Such words vanished from the world when it shook itself free from the ocean of chaos, in a cataclysm that reshaped it like one of the balls small children throw in the air at play. ~ Tanith Lee

I tell you," went on Syme with passion, "that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,' it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person's mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated - created from connections that were not there before ~ James Gleick

The United States, a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, destroyed the last of its stocks of VX and other chemical agents on the Johnston Atoll, 825 miles southwest of Hawaii, in November 2000. ~ Barton Gellman

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke. Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People sceamed, wept, gave away t heir possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn't know the world to "Sugar Magnolia." Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward. ~ Donna Tartt

Empathy is the poor man's cocaine, and love is just a chemical by any other name ~ Eyedea

biochemistry tells us that there is no receptor for calories, that is, no way for cells to sense how many calories are coming in, only how much of each type of macronutrient. The available chemical energy will ultimately show up but there is no reason to think that there will be a direct relation between calories and weight gain or loss. Calories do count but not in a simple way. ~ Richard David Feinman

And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackens, that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order, and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it. ~ John Le Carre

There is a new science of complexity which says that the link between cause and effect is increasingly difficult to trace; that change (planned or otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways; that paradoxes and contradictions abound; and that creative solutions arise out of diversity, uncertainty and chaos. ~ Andy Hargreaves

Few chemicals confer maleness, but many take it away. Which, if any, are responsible for our own troubles is hard to say.

The Pill changed men's lives in more ways than one. It caused reproductive hormones to leak into tap water and has been blamed both for the sex changes in freshwater fish and for the drop in our own sperm count. The jury is still out on the issue, but other hormones have had a disastrous effect. A drug called diethylstilbestrol was once thought - in error - to prevent miscarriage. Five million mothers took it and for a time it was even used as a chicken food supplement. A third of the boys exposed to the drug in the womb suffer from small testes or a reduced penis. In rats, the chemical causes prostate and testicular cancer (although there is as yet no sign of those problems in ourselves).
To give a powerful steroid to pregnant women was at best unwise, but the effects of other chemicals were harder to foresee. The 1950s saw a wonderful new chemical treatment for banana pests. Soon the substance was much used. Twenty years later the workers noticed something odd: they had almost no children. Their sperm count had dropped by five hundred times. ~ Steve Jones

Maybe I've always been more comfortable in chaos. ~ Florence Welch

As a 25-year-old banker, I decided to leave my career and change the world. This sounds like a move that a 25-year-old banker might make today - to escape the chaos. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

As happens so often in history at the dying of one age and the birth of another, an era of phenomenal ugliness, strife, and chaos was about to unfold. ~ Russell Shorto

Here is a sermon for you, Reverend: Everything not dead dies. Just like those little fellows scooting around beside that dead mamma goose, little downy fellas who are gonna meet a hungry weasel or vicious farm dog before nightfall, their world stands in chaos, and not of their own doing. ~ Allan Dare Pearce

It may just be," he added, "that there is something fundamentally unworkable about government itself. As long as Homo sapiens terra is a wild animal, which he has always been and always will be until he evolves into something different in a million or so years, maybe a workable system of government is a political science impossibility, just as transmutation of elements was a physical-science impossibility as long as they tried to do it by chemical means. ~ H. Beam Piper

When the soul hears no other calls than those of the sweet chaos of daily good and evil ... ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini

Those who every morning plan the transactions of the day and follow out that plan carry a thread that will guide them through the labyrinth of the most busy life. The orderly arrangement of their time is like a ray of light which darts itself through all their occupations. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidents, chaos will soon reign. ~ Victor Hugo

Where there are more restrictions and prohibitions, there is also more poverty. Where there are many sharp weapons, there is also more chaos. Where the people are full of clever schemes, there are also strange outcomes. Where there are many laws and edicts, there is also an abundance of criminals. Therefore, the wise person: Practices non-action so that the people are naturally transformed. Welcomes quietude so that the people will naturally be civilized. Does not interfere so that the people will naturally be prosperous. ~ Lao-Tzu

Peace is not something you can force on anything or anyone ... much less upon one's own mind. It is like trying to quiet the ocean by pressing upon the waves. Sanity lies in somehow opening to the chaos, allowing anxiety, moving deeply into the tumult, diving into the waves, where underneath, within, peace simply is. ~ Gerald May