Natural Disasters Quotes

Any species that devours its natural environment will eventually fall victim to the resulting silence and I call the toxicity of silence: Extinction Silence

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

And now that we exercise so comprehensive a medical and technological mastery over whole regions or nature at whose mercy our ancestors lived out their lives, we enjoy the unprecedented luxury of being able to render the 'natural' at once remote and benign. It is we who summon it, rather than the reverse, and we do so at our pleasure; it dwells with us, not we with it. We are free to sentimentalize or romanticize it, or even weave a veil of empty and unthreatening sanctity around it - until the moment when disease, age, infirmity, or random violence suddenly defeats us, or fire, flood, tempest, volcanic eruption, or earthquake surprise us by vaulting past our defenses. Then nature astonishes and horrifies us with its power, immensity, and sublime indifference. Even at such times, though, it is unlikely that we truly hate it; ours is a disenchanted world because it is one from which our love, reverence, dread, and hatred have all been irrevocably alienated. Nature for us is a single, internally consistent thing, an event, lovely and enticing, then terrible and pitiless, abundant and destructive at once, but moved neither by will nor by intelligence; it is sheer fact.

David Bentley Hart

If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible for cancer, meningitis, millions of spontaneous abortions everyday, mass killings of people in floods and earthquakes-and too great mountain of other natural evils to list besides. It would also,as the putative designer of human nature, ultimately be responsible or the ubiquitous and unbeatable human propensities for hatred, malice, greed, and all other sources of the cruelty and murder people inflict on each other hourly.

What we are now witnessing in the 21st century is the fracture or complete breakdown of families, societies, and governments as a result of centuries of dehumanization that have taken a toll. More natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, etc.) merely uncover the reality of the national disasters we have created by grandting sanctuary to dehumanization via the law.

Liza Lugo

That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture.

Tariq Ali

Let me summarise our delicate position in this universe: Our every word can be our last word; our every look can be our last look! Our every moment can be our last moment! Are we happy about this fragile situation? No! Are we going to deceive ourselves with some childish stories, in other words with religion? No! Then what are we going to do? We will change this desperate situation, we will strike this chaotic universe with human mind, with high intelligence, in short with science! Humanity’s ultimate objective is to reshape this dangerous universe so that no threat will ever remain for our existence!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Let me summarise our delicate position in this universe: Our every word can be our last word; our every look can be our last look! Our every moment can be our last moment! Are we happy about this fragile situation? No! Are we going to deceive ourselves with some childish stories, in other words with religion? No! Then what are we going to do? We will change this desperate situation, we will strike this chaotic universe with human mind, with high intelligence, in short with science! Humanity’s ultimate objective is to reshape this dangerous universe so that no threat will ever remain for our existence!

Mehmet Murat ildan

You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.

Christopher Hitchens