Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The concern around probable questions, which in a sense have been hidden, will grow around the world and the matter is critical, the reason we are doing all this is so we can respond correctly to what is reported to be a major catastrophe on the African continent.
In 1906, just as we were definitely giving up the old shed laboratory where we had been so happy, there came the dreadful catastrophe which took my husband away from me and left me alone to bring up our children and, at the same time, to continue our work of research.
Before I left the 'Star' last year to write books full-time, I welcomed catastrophe. It was material. Missed planes, broken pipes, dead lawns, digestive disorders, you name it, if it was something that had gone horribly wrong, it was worth banging out 600 words about.
In our grandparents' generation news of an earthquake in Nepal would reach around the world some days later. In our parents' day the nightly news communicated the catastrophe. Now it's a matter of minutes. We've barely processed one crisis, and then we hear of another.
Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.
There was a time when the community that was on the Net was homogenous and civilized. Now it's not. We're in the middle of chaos. It may calm down. But the alternative is that there's a total meltdown of the system and that it becomes unusable. That would be a catastrophe.
'Perfect Sense' is a film about love and catastrophe, which I hope is a powerfully romantic and emotional take on the apocalyptic sub-genre. Its aim is to be a minimalist concept movie - where seismic events occur in simple ways that ask the audience to use their imagination.
The U.S. is friends with dictatorial regimes, then invades places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and what happens afterwards is a catastrophe. In the place of their leaders, fundamentalist movements that use the name of Islam spring up, and all that's left is terror and bloodshed.
In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror.
If you are a good person, you will probably be a good father. Try not to worry too much. If you don't feel apprehensive just before your first child arrives, you are abnormal. Though catastrophe doesn't come as often in childbirth as it did a few generations ago, we naturally fear it.
To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.
After high school, I worked as a messenger boy at a local bank. I was miserable. I felt like Robin Hood chained in the Sheriff of Nottingham's dungeon. As a would-be writer, I thought it was a catastrophe. As a bank employee, I could barely add or subtract and had to count on my fingers.
The Earth has been lawned with life for something over 3.5 billion years. That's a span of time great enough to encompass some honest-to-goodness catastrophe. For example, 700 million years ago, Earth underwent a planet-wide deep freeze, with ice covering the oceans from the poles to the equator.
The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event - not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics - then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.
Five centuries from now - barring unimaginable catastrophe - the moon will be developed real estate. There's economic incentive to exploit the moon - the helium-3 will be useful in powering fusion reactors, and the rare earth elements could supplant the limited terrestrial supply of these materials.
We are in the midst of a momentous catastrophe of world history, of a transformation of all aspects of life and of the entire inner human being This is perhaps fortunate for the artistic person, if he is strong enough to bear the consequences, because what we need is the courage to have inner experience.
I was a mother who worked ridiculously hard to keep catastrophe at bay. I didn't allow my kids to eat hamburgers for fear of E. coli. I didn't allow them to play with rope, string, balloons - anything that might strangle them. They had to bite grapes in half, avoid lollipops, eat only when I could watch them.
By isolating the issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, climate change, environment, governance, economics, catastrophe and whatever other problems the present embodies or the future may bring, science fiction can do what Dickens and Sinclair did: make real the consequences of social injustice or human folly.
The fact that we walked away from the Middle East, as distasteful as it was for us to stay involved and prevent wars, based on our long involvement there, we have helped to create and provide a foundation. Obviously for ISIS and also for the absolute barbarianism and human catastrophe that Assad impacted on his people.
I often compare myself as a kid to my own grandchildren, who are around 11 and 14 now. That's the age kids usually read my book. And I remember myself; we'd gone through a world war. My father was an army officer so I was aware of what was going on. But I wasn't bombarded with images of catastrophe like many kids are today.
While the emphasis on effects became a catastrophe for science fiction, it was a relief for the capitalist culture of which 'Star Wars' became a symbol. Late capitalism can't produce many new ideas any more, but it can reliably deliver technological upgrades. But 'Star Wars' didn't really belong to the science fiction genre any way.
Even leaving aside government policy, whole industries are already making expensive changes around the perceived need to 'go green.' Al Gore and countless other prophets of global catastrophe are making megamillions pushing these expensive solutions. Schoolchildren around the globe are being frightened by tales of impending calamity.
I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians.