Disaster Preparedness Quotes

While natural disasters capture headlines and national attention short-term, the work of recovery and rebuilding is long-term. ~ Sylvia Mathews Burwell

Any relationship, no matter how fulfilling and restorative it may be, can always be enlivened and enriched. Regardless of how elated or deflated you feel about your work, what can you do to breathe new life into it - to make it more rewarding than it has ever been? Do you need to leave your current work and answer another calling? What is your spiritual employment, dear reader, carrier of so many gifts? ~ Carolyn Baker

Preparation through education is less costly than learning through tragedy. ~ Max Mayfield

Death doesn't bother me but murder makes me edgy, and my lack of weaponry suddenly felt like a potentially fatal mistake. If we got back to the hotel alive, I wasn't coming back here again without my knife and the baseball bat. And maybe a tank, if I could find one fast enough. ~ Seanan McGuire

Preparedness, when properly pursued, is a way of life, not a sudden, spectacular program. ~ Spencer W. Kimball

Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster. ~ Jim Wallis

Over the years, Americans in particular have been all too willing to squander their hard-earned independence and freedom for the illusion of feeling safe under someone else's authority. The concept of self-sufficiency has been undermined in value over a scant few generations. The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society. ~ Cody Lundin

Quality parenting in a Last Emergency world requires our letting go of control and trusting what we have instilled in our offspring. A part of them already knows or senses what lies ahead; whether they wish to consciously acknowledge it or not or discuss it openly with us or not, our emotional availability and love surpass all else we may be able to provide. ~ Carolyn Baker

A post-petroleum world will necessitate walking long distances and exerting much more physical energy to accomplish even routine tasks than we are now accustomed to. Most of our bodies in current time are not up to the task. Yet preparing the body for living in a collapsing world is one of the most fundamental of preparations. Although we may not be able to store vast quantities of food or water, may not have our homes or property equipped as much as we would prefer in preparation for collapse, and may not have learned all the skills we would like to master, becoming present in our bodies and keeping them healthy and fit are factors over which we have control. ~ Carolyn Baker

What, then, is the soul of community? It is a desire to be connected with something greater than the egos of other people and the projects in which we might engage with them. Fundamentally, a successful human community is the unfolding of a spiritual dynamic. It cannot be contrived or made to happen. Rather, it erupts from our desire for the depths, and that desire is certain to constellate the shadow in ourselves and the other. ~ Carolyn Baker

For those of us who have come to believe that unless we are thinking we are wasting time, it may be challenging to simply linger with a beautiful sunset, an exquisite painting, or an arresting piece of music. The intellect often reacts to the seductions of beauty by attempting to recapture us. ~ Carolyn Baker

Jeevan's understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he'd seen a lot of action movies. He ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Industrial civilization has held us in a subhuman state all our lives, and we now have the opportunity to discover the powers of the universe coursing through us and our environment. Likewise, we have the extraordinary privilege as consciously self-aware humans of intentionally participating with those powers in an intimate, passionate, caring relationship with the universe. ~ Carolyn Baker

The extraction of deep wisdom can be done at any age, and if we are to love the time of our life, it must be. Imbedded within us is the deeper story we came to live, and the core issue at every age for any awakened human being is the extent to which we are living that story in the present moment. ~ Carolyn Baker

Disaster doesn't like being flirted with. Disaster wants to fuck. Disaster doesn't want to dance around and double talk and feel just a little horny and never act on it. If you so much as wink at it, Disaster is going to fuck you in the ass. ~ Brad Vance

Don't let your present problems defeat you. The Chinese have a saying that if you live with a disaster for three years it will turn into a blessing. Look back in your own life at what appeared to be a devastating situation five or ten years ago. Many of those situations were the turning point that caused a number of great things to happen in your future. Regardless of what happens today, realize it is the beginning of something good. ~ Bob Proctor

When you haven't been in the world long, it's hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don't even feel the need to. Adults, ~ Elena Ferrante

For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years. ~ David Whyte

Love is ancient and mysterious and you can't mess with it. If you do it just backfires and you meet with disaster. ~ Alice Hoffman

It's hard to feel sorry for those willing to fling themselves into disaster. They are their own undoing, my dear. They bring it upon themselves. They don't merit your pity. ~ Serena Valentino

When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster. ~ Maurice Blanchot

Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust? ~ Julie Orringer

I will be asking my network to lead a discussion on the issues of class, race, energy, the environment, disaster planning, Iraq
all those things and more. This encompasses so many of the major issues of our time. ~ Brian Williams

In 1914, Thomas Edison, at age sixty-seven, lost his factory to fire. It had very little insurance. No longer a young man, Edison watched his lifetime effort go up in smoke and said, "There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burnt up. Thank God we can start anew." In spite of disaster, three weeks later, he invented the phonograph. What an attitude! ~ Shiv Khera

Catastrophe is change on the fast track. Disaster is a laboratory for adaptability. ~ Robert Watson

And I've been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds. ~ David Almond

Lenore had pushed her into had been a complete disaster. ~ Fannie Flagg

Heeding Clausewitz's warning that military plans which leave no room for the unexpected can lead to disaster, the Germans with infinite care had attempted to provide for every contingency. Their staff officers, trained at maneuvers and at war-college desks to supply the correct solution for any given set of circumstances, were expected to cope with the unexpected. Against that elusive, that mocking and perilous quantity, every precaution had been taken except one - flexibility. While ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The explosion of a terrorist's single nuclear device in a major metropolitan center would trigger an unparalleled humanitarian and environmental disaster. An accidental military launch of multiple warheads could result in a worldwide nuclear holocaust. Medical researchers and military analysts forebode grim consequences. ~ Alan Cranston

Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase "meant to be"
usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people. ~ Jennifer Egan

I'm a wonderful disaster. So are you. We're all a mess. We're in this culture that says take this pill and you'll be happy, go on this diet and you'll be thinner, have your teeth whitened, people will love you more. ~ Emilio Estevez

I used to think that communing with nature was a healing, positive thing. Now, I think I'd like to commune with other things - like room service and temperature control. ~ Roseanne Barr

[He was disgusted] at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster. ~ Pat Frank

Her heart swelled up with misery, until it felt too large for her bosom. It beat with odd little jerks; her hands were cold, and a feeling of disaster oppressed her. There were pain and bewilderment in her face, the bewilderment of a pampered chhild who has always had her own way for the asking and who now, for the first time, was in contact with the unplesantness of life. ~ Margaret Mitchell

You are a princess. And princesses do not run away when things become difficult. They throw their shoulders back and they face what disaster awaits them head on. Bravely, and without complaint. ~ Meg Cabot

Even more real than the disaster that has befallen our brothers and sisters must be our own willingness to sacrifice and help with the healing. ~ Debra L. Lee

When your young life offered its first disaster, naturally it loomed large. After you'd survived dozens, you basically just told the next one to take a number and get in line. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

As the United States continues its slow but steady recovery from the depths of the financial crisis, nobody actually wants a massive austerity package to shock the economy back into recession, and so the odds have always been high that the game of budgetary chicken will stop short of disaster. Looming past the cliff, however, is a deep chasm that poses a much greater challenge
the retooling of the country's economy, society, and government necessary for the United States to perform effectively in the twenty-first century. ~ Fareed Zakaria

When a friend needs consoling, do not give in to the temptation of telling stories similar to theirs of disaster or bereavement. It is something people often do to show empathy but nothing is more tiresome than other people's problems when you want to focus on your own. Listening is by far the best form of consolation. ~ Giles Andreae

Why do I have a sense of impending disaster?
(He reflects) Sonders is after my niece and has discovered the secret address where I am sending her to the safe keeping of my sister-in-law Miss Blumenblatt, who has never laid eyes on him, or, for that matter, on Marie either since she was a baby - while I have to leave my business in the charge of my assistant and an apprentice, and follow my new servant, whom I haven't had time to introduce to anyone, to town to join the parade and take my fiancée to dinner in a uniform I can't sit down in.
One false move and we could have a farce on our hands. ~ Tom Stoppard

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination. ~ Ada Louise Huxtable

Those who have not undergone minor disasters are usually being held in reserve for something major ~ Gore Vidal

If the Poe Lock were ever rendered unusable due to a terrorist attack or natural disaster, it would halt commerce on the Great Lakes and these industries would be helpless. ~ Bart Stupak

Alas, all too often, the dream turns into a mud puddle. I am left looking at a disaster. What to do! Keep working. I ask the Almighty for help. That frees me ... ~ Jules Olitski

I was like a lost moon―my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster-movie scenario of desolation―that continued, nevertheless, to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity. ~ Stephenie Meyer

I really love New York, but I have to say, the humidity during the summer is a nightmare for a cartoonist. Not only am I sweating in my studio, my bristol board is curling up, the drafting tape is peeling off the board, my Rapidograph pens bleed the minute I put them to paper ... it's a disaster. ~ Adrian Tomine

For the survivors, the disaster of the Indy is their My Lai massacre or Watergate, a touchstone moment of historic disappointment: the navy put them in harm's way, hundreds of men died violently, and then the government refused to acknowledge its culpability.

What's amazing, however, is that these men, unlike contemporary generations who've been disappointed by bad government, are not bitter. Somehow, a majority brushed aside their feelings of rancor and went on to help build the booming postwar American economy of the fifties. ~ Doug Stanton

PTSD seems to have an even higher prevalence and greater severity following violence or disaster that is man-made; natural disasters, "acts of God," seem somehow easier to accept. (...). This is the case with acute stress reactions, too: I see it often with my patients in hospital, who can show extraordinary courage and calmness in facing the most dreadful diseases but fly into a rage if a nurse is late with a bedpan or a medication. The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessly to the will of others is not, for human behavior always carries (or is felt to carry) a moral charge. ~ Oliver Sacks

Day after day in the season of disaster, it can be hard to recognize a chance in fortune when it comes. ~ Gregory Maguire

Those who mistake their good luck for their merit are inevitably bound for disaster. ~ J. Christopher Herold

Dinner was a disaster. Brent introduced himself while staring at my bulge, and I was glad to be shown to our table so that we were seated with a table between us, forcing him to look me in the eye. Apparently, my eyes have moved down to my pecs, though, as that's where he decided to fix his attention throughout dinner. ~ Brett Kiellerop-Morris

Nature has a myriad of weapons to combat human arrogance. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

I would be a disaster as a prime minister. ~ V. P. Singh

To the average eye, my bedroom was a complete disaster. The floor was hardly visible with all of the empty soda bottles, chip bags, and piles of clothes covering it. The rustic nightstand by my bed was so cluttered with papers, more soda bottles, notebooks, and hoodies that it looked like a pile of contemporary art. And my bed? It was just a pile of dark blue blankets and pillows scattered on an old mattress. What's the point in making your bed, anyway? You're just gonna mess it up and unmake it at the end of the day. Why even bother? My bedroom might look like a mess to anyone else, but to me, it was my own personal oasis. I liked it just the way it was. I never bought the whole saying, "A cluttered room is a cluttered mind." Me? Cluttered? Nah. More like creative. The more cluttered your room is, the more creative you are. And judging by my room, I must be pretty creative. I ~ Savannah Ostler

For the first time, I was the center of attention. Everyone watched me as if I were a bomb. Would I explode and cause a disaster or would I pop and cause a miracle? ~ Maria V. Snyder

The military operation swiftly became one of disaster management and damage control, search and rescue. ~ A. Ashley Straker

The disasteris not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect
this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they're not critical to a culture's existence. ~ Twyla Tharp

A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self - a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama - a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience. ~ William Styron

Falling in love too quickly spells disaster. But I've always lived dangerously, and I spell disaster with a Z. ~ Jarod Kintz

Travel is a joy, full of surprises. Perhaps some of the most enjoyable times are those where one comes close to disaster: the risks add spice, and make for great stories when you are safely back home again. ~ Jane Wilson-Howarth