Quotes about earthquake

A collection of quotes on the topic of earthquake, world, nature, likeness.

Quotes about earthquake

“More than anything else, I want to make every day count now. I want to make every single normal day, every ice show, every practice and every competition count. That's what I have been thinking about the most since the day of the earthquake.”

Yuzuru Hanyu (1994) Japanese figure skater (1994-)

Page: 165.
Blue Flame
Original: (ja) 今はとにかく、一日一日を大事にしたいと思う。何気ない日常の一日一日、アイスショーの日々、練習の日々、試合の日々をすべて大切にしたい。そんなことを、あの日を境により強く感じるようになりました。

Thinking

“All Earthquakes and Disasters are warnings; there’s too much corruption in the world”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

World

“An earthquake is such fun when it is over.”

George Orwell book Burmese Days

Source: Burmese Days (1934), Ch. XV

“Jesus tells us to keep our eyes open so we are not fooled by the signs indicating that the End Times are near. As we get closer to the End Times, many people are going to claim to be the Messiah and claim to have the answers for a troubled world. Additionally, the book of Revelation tells us to expect a period of ceaseless, unending, terrible war. It appears that we are already preparing for this time as fifty percent of all research scientists today are involved in arms development and there is at least one military weapon and four thousand pounds of explosives for every man, woman, and child on earth. Finally, there will be more and more disease and devastation. Today, as you read this, millions of people in the world are being afflicted by insufficient food, the spread of new diseases, and the devastating effects of natural disasters. As we get closer to the End Times, there will be more and more famine. There will also be an increase in earthquakes and natural disasters. Christ also spoke of pestilence: the spread of new diseases. Our world will experience a spate of tragic new diseases that we will be unable to control.”

David Jeremiah

Source: The Prophecy Answer Book

War, People, Books, World

“The Spirit of God tells me an earthquake will hit the East Coast of America and destroy much in the '90s. Not one place will be safe from earthquakes in the '90s. These who have not known earthquakes will know it. People, I feel the Spirit all over me!”

Benny Hinn (1952) American-Canadian evangelist

[The Underground Christian Network, "Benny Hinn and Beyond: Word Faith movements hidden agenda: The Joker, The Guru and the Jack of Spades" http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=420067844, CD Edition 1 of 2, SermonAudio.com, 2006-04-21]

God, People, Feeling

“With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Revolt of Islam

Canto V, st. 23
The Revolt of Islam (1817)

“Welcome baby,
It's your turn to live,
They lie in wait for you, chicken pox, whooping cough, smallpox,
Malaria, TB, heart disease, cancer, and so on.
Unemployment, hunger, and so on.
Train wrecks, bus accidents, plane crashes, work accidents,
Earthquakes, floods, droughts, and so on.
Heartbreak, alcoholism, and so on.
Nightsticks, prison doors, and so on.
They lie in wait for you, the atom bomb, and so on.
Welcome baby,
It's your turn to live.
They lie in wait for you, socialism, communism, and so on.”

Nâzım Hikmet (1902–1963) Turkish poet

From Welcome (10 September 1961)

Hunger, Alcohol, Lie, Disease

“It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much from mankind if he forgets how to make war. And yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war, that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervor born of effort of the annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's fellows, to that earthquake-like soul-shaking that a people needs when it is losing its vitality.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Human, All Too Human (1878)

War, People, Soul, Effort

“Probable nor'east to sou'west winds, varying to the soutard and westard and eastard and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes with thunder and lightning.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

New England Weather, speech to the New England Society (December 22, 1876)

“Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Life, God, World, Dreams

“Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Les opinions ont plus causé de maux sur ce petit globe que la peste et les tremblements de terre.
Letter to Élie Bertrand (5 January 1759)
Citas

“Her Majesty's new Ministers proceeded in their career like a body of men under the influence of some deleterious drug. Not satiated with the spoilation and anarchy of Ireland, they began to attack every institution and every interest, every class and calling in the country…As time advanced it was not difficult to perceive that extravagance was being substituted for energy by the Government. The unnatural stimulus was subsiding. Their paroxysms ended in prostration. Some took refuge in melancholy, and their eminent chief alternated between a menace and a sigh. As I sat opposite the Treasury Bench the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Attacking William Gladstone's Liberal Government
Source: Speech to the Conservatives of Manchester (3 April 1872), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), pp. 530-531.

Men, Time, Sea, Country

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

“Forced Emigration,” New York Daily Tribune, 22 March 1853.

Life, Way, Housing

“There's an insistence that the Being that's spoken into being through Truth is Good. This is the most profound ever. It is also the most believable idea ever. What cures in therapy is Truth. Of course, you must encounter the things that you're afraid of, but this is enacted Truth, because if you know that there's something you need to do by your own set of rules and you're avoiding it, then you're enacting a lie. You're not speaking the lie, but you're enacting it, and that's the same thing: untruth. If you can confront If I can get you to face what it is that you know you shouldn't be avoiding, then what's happening is that we're both partaking in the process of you attempting to act out your deepest truth. That improves people's lives radically. The clinical evidence for that is overwhelming. We know that if you expose people to the things that they're afraid of and are avoiding, they get better. You have to do it carefully, cautiously, and with their approval and participation. Of all the things that clinicians have established that's credible, that's #1. It's redemptive insofar as both people are telling the truth. The difference between deception and repression is very small. People can handle earthquakes and cancer and even death, but they can't handle deception. They can't handle the rug being pulled out from underneath them by people who they love and trust. This does them in. It makes them ill, it hurts them psycho-physiologically, and worse than that it makes them cynical, bitter, vicious, and resentful. And then they also start to act all that out in the world, and that makes it worse.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Love, Death, People, Truth

“Many if not most of his decisions are thrust upon the president, out of the blue, by events beyond his control: oil spills, financial panics, pandemics, earthquakes, fires, coups, invasions, underwear bombers, movie-theater shooters, and on and on and on. They don’t order themselves neatly for his consideration but come in waves, jumbled on top of each other. “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama said at one point. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.” On top of all of this, after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it. People being led do not want to think probabilistically.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Michael Lewis, "Obama's Way" https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama, Vanity Fair, (October 2012). 2012

People, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“Politically, America is the same as it is physically: the land of the earthquakes.”

Jose Cecilio del Valle (1777–1996) Honduran politician-

1833

“Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. But can there be anything more puerile, more short-sighted, than the views of those Economists who believe in all earnest that this woeful transitory state means nothing but adapting society to the acquisitive propensities of capitalists, both landlords and money-lords?”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Source: "Forced Emigration," New York Daily Tribune, 22 March 1853.

Housing, Life, Money, Way

“At this point in life they leave
strengthening homegrown earthquakes,
after having verified that the questions
Thrown into the air they then fall in the form of a slap.”

Mariano Torrent

Source: Book: Behind infinity is life (2021)

Question, Life

“I understood what triggered her earthquakes, most of them.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

“Hey, Mr. Nakata. Gramps. Fire! Flood! Earthquake! Revolution! Godzilla's on the loose! Get!”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1850s, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? (1852)
Context: At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

God, Feeling, Light

“Crazy Curran ranked right up there with monsoons, tornadoes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Strikes

Nature

“I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument— and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.”

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People

Way

“A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Nature

“I hate the moon. I hate tides and earthquakes and volcanoes. I hate a world where things that have absolutely nothing to do with me can destroy my life and the lives of people I love.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer book Life As We Knew It

Source: Life As We Knew It

Love, Life, Hate, People

“This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy for dreaming of something else.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Life, Pain, Dreams, Way

“It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."
"And freezing."
"Is it?"
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately.”

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

“The safest place to be during an earthquake would be in a stationary store.”

George Carlin book Brain Droppings

Source: Brain Droppings

“I like the way Mahler wandered about in his music and still retained his
passion. He must have looked like an
earthquake walking down the street.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

Music, Way, Passion

“I know it all —
All ye would ask. But ne'er shall hope be mine
Till the dread secret works its fatal will
In daylight visible, with wrath and scorn,
And ceaseless memory of forgotten things.
Then Jove shall learn what all his sulphurous bolts,
Soul-piercing torments, earthquakes, fiery plagues,
Disease, and loathsome, black deformity,
And all confounding shame, shall ne'er persuade
My voice to utter.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Prometheus
Poems (1851), Prometheus

Secret, Disease, Hope, Soul

“Earthquakes radiate waves with periods of tenths of seconds to several minutes. Rocks behave like elastic solids at these frequencies. Elastic solids allow a variety of wave types and this makes the ground motion after an earthquake or explosion (called an event) quite complex. There are two basic types of elastic wave: one involving compression and rarefaction of the elastic material in the direction of propagation of the wave, and one involving no compression but shear of the elastic material perpendicular to its direction of propagation. These are called P and S waves respectively, for primary and secondary since the P wave travels fastest and arrives first.”

David Gubbins (1947) British university teacher

[Seismology and plate tectonics, Cambridge, UK; New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990, http://books.google.com/books?id=tZRxPzwoChIC&pg=PA4] (pp. 4–5)
Seismology and Plate Tectonics (1990)

Travel

“How could that have happened? … Even if it was a hand of God … I’d read – and I don’t know how they know this – but in approximately 3000 BC there was a massive undersea volcano and earthquake, which created a tsunami wave that had to have been a couple of hundred feet high. Just off the heel of Italy. Diagonally across you’re staring right up the mouth of the Nile, so I’m wondering if that had anything to do with that.”

Ridley Scott (1937) English film director and film producer

On the parting of the Red Sea in the tales of Moses, as quoted in "Exodus: Gods And Kings - How Ridley Scott And Christian Bale Are Rebooting The Biblical Epic" at Yahoo Movies (16 September 2014) https://uk.yahoo.com/movies/exodus-gods-and-kings-set-visit-97667462271.html

God, Reading

“…as I write, Johnny Rotten's first moments in "Anarchy in the U. K."–a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets–I AM AN ANTICHRIST–Remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today–listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang–my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat.”

Greil Marcus (1945) American historian

Lipstick Traces : A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), p. 1.

World, Smile, Way, Tear

“Do not be worried about the events and earthquakes that have occurred. Know that God created this world as a test … The supreme leader holds a great many of the blessings God has given us and at a time of such uncertainties our eyes must turn to him.”

Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi (1934) Member of Iran's Assembly of Experts

"Discontented Muslim clergy challenge Iran's supreme leader behind scenes" by Bill Meyer in World News at Cleveland.com (8 July 2009) http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2009/07/discontented_muslim_clergy_cha.html

God, World, Time

“I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, "Are you going to start listening to me here? Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. Because they know what needs to be done. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending."”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

political rally, 2011-08-29, quoted in * Michele Bachmann rally draws over 1,000 in Sarasota, but some prefer Rick Perry
St. Petersburg Times
2011-08-29
Adam C.
Smith
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/hundreds-turn-out-for-bachmann-rally-in-sarasota-but-some-prefer-perry/1188559
2011-09-03
2010s

God, People

“They are masters of the earthquake, and Atlantis rests on none too solid a foundation. Their power is sufficient to sink Atlantis forever beneath the sea.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Zend explaining the Spawn of Dagon to Elak
Short fiction, The Spawn Of Dagon (1938)
Context: "They dare'd not invade the palace while the globe shone, for the light-rays would have killed them. … This island-continent would have gone down beneath the sea long ago if I hadn't pitted my magic and my science against that of the children of Dagon. They are masters of the earthquake, and Atlantis rests on none too solid a foundation. Their power is sufficient to sink Atlantis forever beneath the sea. But within that room" — Zend nodded toward the curtain that hid the sea-bred horrors — "in that room there is power far stronger than theirs. I have drawn strength from the stars, and the cosmic sources beyond the universe. You know nothing of my power. It is enough — more than enough — to keep Atlantis steady on its foundation, impregnable against the attacks of Dagon's breed. They have destroyed other lands before Atlantis."

Sea

“In another place, this learned geographer (Strabo), in alluding to the tradition that Sicily had been separated by a convulsion from Italy, remarks, that at present the land near the sea in those parts was rarely shaken by earthquakes, since there were now open orifices whereby fire and ignited matters and waters escaped; but formerly, when the volcanoes of Etna, the Lipari Islands, Ischia, and others, were closed up, the imprisoned fire and wind might have produced far more vehement movements. The doctrine, therefore, that volcanoes are safety valves, and that the subterranean convulsions are probably most violent when first the volcanic energy shifts itself to a new quarter, is not modern.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Source: Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1, Chpt.2, p. 21

Learning, Water, Parting, Sea

“Even during the fifteen years of Alptigin’s reign Subuktigin is represented by Firishta in an untranslated passage to have made frequent attacks upon India, and even to have penetrated as far as Sodra on the Chinab, where he demolished idols in celebration of Mahmud’s birth, which, as it occurred on the date of the prophet’s birth, Subuktigin was anxious that it should be illustrated by an event similar to the destruction of idols in the palace of the Persian king by an earthquake, on the day of the prophet’s birth.”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

About Amîr Subuktigîn of Ghazni (AD 977-997) NWFP and Punjab
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Birth

“There is another passage from the Old Testament that comes nearer to my own sympathies—"And behold the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. …And behold there came a voice unto him, and said. What doest thou here, Elijah?"”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Mountain, Strong

“Is there fake news on Facebook? Of course there is. I could go right now on Facebook and say there’s an earthquake, Richter scale 7, in Washington, D. C. And should I be allowed to do that or should that be something that somehow Facebook has a way to control? I don’t know. I get how Facebook could control advertising. I don’t get how they’re a value proposition, which people – the world does like. I don’t understand how it works at all if you have no freedom of speech, even if you are saying things that are patently false.”

Steve Ballmer (1956) American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft

Yahoo Finance: "Ex-Microsoft CEO Ballmer: How Silicon Valley should handle some of its most vexing questions" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-microsoft-ceo-ballmer-silicon-valley-handle-vexing-questions-182046774.html (22 June 2018) 2010s

People, World, Way, Understanding

“Blizzards, floods, volcanos, hurricanes, earthquakes: They fascinate because they nakedly reveal that Mother Nature, afflicted with bipolar disorder, is as likely to snuff us as she is to succor us.”

Dean Koontz book The Taking

Part 1, Chapter 1
The Taking (2004)

Nature, Affliction

“Come to the bridal chamber, Death!
Come to the mother’s, when she feels
For the first time her first-born’s breath!
Come when the blessed seals
That close the pestilence are broke,
And crowded cities wail its stroke!
Come in consumption’s ghastly form,
The earthquake shock, the ocean storm!
Come when the heart beats high and warm,
With banquet song, and dance, and wine!
And thou art terrible!—the tear,
The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier,
And all we know or dream or fear
Of agony are thine.

But to the hero, when his sword
Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet’s word;
And in its hollow tones are heard
The thanks of millions yet to be.”

Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867) American writer

Marco Bozzaris.

Death, Fear, Dreams, Art

“This is an earthquake issue. This will change our state forever. Because the immediate consequence, if gay marriage goes through, is that K-12 little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal, natural and perhaps they should try it.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

2000s

Marriage, Children, Nature, Learning

“There are many marvellous stories told of Pherecydes. For it is said that he was walking along the seashore at Samos, and that seeing a ship sailing by with a fair wind, he said that it would soon sink; and presently it sank before his eyes. At another time he was drinking some water which had been drawn up out of a well, and he foretold that within three days there would be an earthquake; and there was one.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Pherecydes, 2.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers

Drink, Water, Time

“When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes — disease and death and the rotting of flesh.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

"Down the River", p. 147
Desert Solitaire (1968)

Death, Women, Disease, Tree

“We may compare this sum of the life forces, which we call heredity, to the character of a sensitive plate in the camera. Outside pictures impress themselves more or less distinctly on the sensitive plate… Stored within heredity are all joys, sorrows, loves, hates, music, art, temples, palaces, pyramids, hovels, kings, queens, paupers, bards, prophets and philosophers, oceans, caves, volcanoes, floods, earthquakes, wars, triumphs, defeats, reverence, courage, wisdom, virtue, love and beauty, time, space, and all the mysteries of the universe. The appropriate environments will bring out and intensify all these general human hereditary experiences and quicken them again into life and action, thus modifying for good or evil, character—heredity—destiny.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Love, Life, Wisdom, Hate

“What I have been talking about is knowledge. Knowledge, perhaps, is not a good word for this. Perhaps one would rather say my image of the world. Knowledge has an implication of validity, of truth. What I am talking about is what I believe to be true; my subjective knowledge. It is this Image that largely governs my behavior. In about an hour I shall rise, leave my office, go to a car, drive down to my home, play with the children, have supper, perhaps read a book, go to bed. I can predict this behavior with a fair degree to accuracy because of the knowledge which I have: the knowledge that I have a home not far away, to which I am accustomed to go. The prediction, of course, may not be fulfilled. There may be an earthquake, I may have an accident with the car on the way home, I may get home to find that my family has been suddenly called away. A hundred and one things may happen. As each event occurs, however, it alters my knowledge structure or my image. And as it alters my image, I behave accordingly. The first proposition of this work, therefore, is that behavior depends on the image.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 5

Children, Truth, Books, World

“There's a major pattern of energy in universe wherein the very large events, earthquakes, and so forth, occur in any one area of universe very much less frequently than do the small energy events. Around the Earth insects occur more often than do earthquakes. In the patterning of total evolutionary events, there comes a time, once in a while, amongst the myriad of low energy events, when a large energy event transpires and is so disturbing that with their general adaptability lost, the ultra-specialized creatures perish.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Universe, Time

“On one side was the pain of the victims of the earthquake, and on the other the pain of the victims of the riots. In decisively confronting this great turmoil, I had to single-mindedly focus all the strength given to me by the almighty, on the task of peace, justice and rehabilitation; burying the pain and agony I was personally wracked with.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2013, "Satyameva Jayate: Truth Alone Triumphs", 2013

Pain, Peace, Justice, Decision

“The difference between megaton and kiloton is very large, in some ways large than the difference between kiloton and ton. Megaton weapons are comparable to gross forces of nature, such as earthquakes and hurricanes.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Way, Nature

“Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead."”

Claud Cockburn (1904–1981) Irish journalist

Page 139
No such headline has ever been found in The Times at the period in question (the spring and summer of 1929), though one paragraph reads "An earthquake was felt yesterday between Illapel, to the north, and Talca, to the south, in Chile. No damage was done." (August 6, 1929). Source: The Quote... Unquote Newsletter (October, 2000) pp. 2-3.
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

Game, Time, Dead

“It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Final line of the published script.
8 1/2 Women

“I say looking at the next 100 years that there are two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward what we call a type one civilization, a planetary civilization… The danger is the transition between type zero and type one and that’s where we are today. We are a type zero civilization. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But if you get a calculator you can calculate when we will attain type one status. The answer is: in about 100 years we will become planetary. We’ll be able to harness all the energy output of the planet earth. We’ll play with the weather, earthquakes, volcanoes. Anything planetary we will play with. The danger period is now, because we still have the savagery. We still have all the passions. We have all the sectarian, fundamentalist ideas circulating around, but we also have nuclear weapons. …capable of wiping out life on earth. So I see two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward a multicultural, scientific, tolerant society and everywhere I go I see aspects of that birth. For example, what is the Internet? Many people have written about the Internet. Billions and billions of words written about the Internet, but to me as a physicist the Internet is the beginning of a type one telephone system, a planetary telephone system. So we’re privileged to be alive to witness the birth of type one technology… And what is the European Union? The European Union is the beginning of a type one economy. And how come these European countries, which have slaughtered each other ever since the ice melted 10,000 years ago, how come they have banded together, put aside their differences to create the European Union? …so we’re beginning to see the beginning of a type one economy as well…”

Michio Kaku (1947) American theoretical physicist, futurist and author

"Will Mankind Destroy Itself?" http://bigthink.com/videos/will-mankind-destroy-itself (29 September 2010)

Life, People, World, Idea

“Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries, the offspring of the sun and sea.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 1: The Sierra Nevada

Flowers, Nature, Sun, Sea

“It is impossible for the mind which is not totally destitute of piety, to behold the sublime, the awful, the amazing works of creation and providence — the heavens with their luminaries, the mountains, the ocean, the storm, the earthquake, the volcano, the circuit of the seasons, and the revolutions of empires — without marking in them all the mighty hand of God, and feeling strong emotions of reverence toward the Author of these stupendous works.”

Timothy Dwight IV (1752–1817) American historian

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 273.

God, Feeling, Mountain, Strong

“People just have no criterion left to evaluate the importance of things. I think the only thing that would really affect people would be the announcement that the world was going to be blown up by the hydrogen bomb. I think that would really affect people. I think they would react to that. But outside of that, I don't think they would react to anything. "Peking has been wiped out by an earthquake, and the RTD — the bus strike is still on."”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

And some guy says, "Damnit! I'll have to walk to work!" Quoted in Daniel DePerez, "An Interview with Philip K. Dick," http://www.philipkdickfans.com/frank/sfrinter.htm Science Fiction Review, No. 19, Vol. 5, no. 3 (August 1976)

People, World, Guy, Thinking

“Every part of the earth's surface presents unequivocal proofs that the elevation of the bed of the ocean in some places, and the subsidence of the dry land in others, have been, and are still, going on; and that, in truth, the continual changes in the relative position of the land and water, are the effects of laws which the Divine Author of the Universe has impressed on matter, and thus rendered it capable of perpetual renovation:—
Art, Empire, Earth itself, to change are doomed;
Earthquakes have raised to heaven the humble vail,
And gulf's the mountain's mighty mass entombed,
And where the Atlantic rolls wide continents have bloomed.”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

Thoughts on a Pebble, or, A First Lesson in Geology (1849)

Truth, Law, Art, Mountain

“At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that looney text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"America First? America Last? America at Last?," Lowell Lecture, Harvard University (20 April 1992).
1990s

God, Hate, Quotes

“A war takes place; an earthquake occurs; a flood of a magnitude not seen in a hundred years washes over the land; a cartel falls apart; oil prices quadruple; tax laws change, and the market in which you had an open position, or even hedged, moves in a magnitude not only unforeseen, but totally outside past models. They always do. You are in trouble.”

Eugene Rotberg (1930)

"Testimony Before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs." http://www.generotberg.com/speeches/1990s/TESTIMONYCommitteeBanking100198.html, October 1 1998

War, Law, Change, Past

“[In-group exclusivism has] killed more human beings and destroyed more cities and villages than all the epidemics, hurricanes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions taken together. It has brought upon mankind more suffering than any other catastrophe.”

Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) American sociologist

Pitirim Sorokin (1954) http://books.google.nl/books?id=DGCleCxTkbIC The Ways and Power of Love http://what-when-how.com/love-in-world-religions/altruistic-love/. p. 461; As cited in: "[ Altruistic Love]" on what-when-how: In Depth Tutorials and Information

Suffering

“Yeah, I've got violence in me, but no negative violence. My violence is the violence of the free man who refuses to knuckle under. Creation is violent. Life is violent. Birth is a violent process. Tempests and earthquakes are violent movements of nature. My violence is the violence of life. It is not violence against nature, like the violence of the state, which sends your kids to the slaughterhouse, deadens your minds, and drives out your souls!”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

Source: Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 2

Life, Soul, Birth, Nature

“All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" Three Adventures in the Yosemite http://books.google.com/books?id=k8dZAAAAYAAJ&pg=P656", The Century Magazine volume LXXXIII, number 5 (March 1912) pages 656-661 (at page 661); modified slightly and reprinted in The Yosemite http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/ (1912), chapter 4: Snow Banners 1910s

Love, Making love, Beauty, Nature

“I conceive the essential relationship between God and the world to be not one of power and violence, as might think the primitive man, who worships physical strength and imagines that it is a superior power shaking the earth with earthquakes or hurling a thunderbolt through space; it is nearness, something which might seem insignificant but which brings spiritual awareness.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

God, World, Imagination, Thinking

“When they were busy molding the upper floor, it was discovered that the cellar had begun to crack. When the foreman joiner and the foreman mason were summoned, they announced that these cracks must have been caused by the earthquakes that had occurred that summer. Bjartur said that no one had noticed any earthquakes that particular summer, not on the upper surface of the earth at least. "There were earthquakes in Korea," said the foreman joiner.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part II: Years of Prosperity

Business, Summer

“Our hearts and prayers go out to the families of the victims. This isn't something that we take lightly. My comments were not meant to be ones that were taken lightly. What I was saying in a humorous vein is there are things happening that politicians need to pay attention to. It isn't everyday we have an earthquake in the United States.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Bachmann Plays Down Comments Linking Disasters and Deficits
The Caucus
The New York Times
2011-08-29
Sarah
Wheaton
Trip
Gabriel
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/bachmann-plays-down-comments-linking-disasters-and-deficits/
2011-09-03
asked about her "I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians" remarks after her rally
2010s

Family, Heart

“In a sense, all of Earth glows in the dark. The energy release from natural radioactivity, the lingering fluorescence of stellar explosions, keeps Earth dynamic. It melts the core and keeps it flowing, and heats the crust and mantle, with consequences ranging from the generation of earth's magnetic field to earthquakes and the motion of continents. By contrast, Luna and Mars, because they are smaller, derive less energy from radioactive decays. Geologically, they are dead.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.11 Explosions and Fluourescence (or, Entropy's Revenge)

Nature, Sense, Dead

“Wind, earthquake, fire—meteorology, seismology, physics—pass in review, as we have been reviewing the natural forces of evolution; the Lord was not in them. Afterwards, a stirring, an awakening in the organ of the brain, a voice which asks "What doest thou here?"”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Nature

“From behind the shadow of the still small voice — more awful than tempest or earthquake — more sure and persistent than day and night — is always sounding full of hope and strength to the weariest of us all, "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."”

Thomas Hughes (1822–1896) English lawyer, author and cricketer

Part VIII
The Manliness of Christ (1879)

World, Hope, Night

“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Hagakure (c. 1716)

Death, Disease, Peace, Dead

“If we were to ask which country is the most corrupt in the world, the first answer to come to mind would be dictated by the perceived level of corruption. Perhaps one might think of Mexico, of South American countries, of African countries, of the Middle East or Italy. But the most corrupt is the UK. It’s not a type of a corruption that concerns civil servants, policemen or mayors; it’s a type of a corruption that is consubstantial to economic system. The British economic system feeds itself on corruption. And in the midst of this, the British government and its citizens have not woken up to the plight that their country is going through. A plight greater than earthquakes, greater than terror attacks.”

Roberto Saviano (1979) Italian journalist, writer and essayist

Dirty Money in London event (2016)

World, Thinking, Country

“There is another earthquake in Kyoto. We appreciate it lyrically. A slide of dust slips along a roof gully. A large tree of golden petals shakes and the petals drift to the floor. Birds fly up. Bottles of clear liquid in a shop quiver on a shelf. The water in a puddle shimmers reflections up a wall. A collection of grey roof tiles shift and -- ever faster -- begin to slide down a roof slope.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Section 56
8 1/2 Women

Bird, Tree, Water, Flying

“After a large earthquake the earth "rings" like a bell; this motion can be observed on sensitive instruments up to a month after a large event. These oscillations have specific frequencies which are properties of the whole earth and which can be measured very accurately indeed. The lowest frequency oscillation has a period of about one hour. Any combination of seismic waves can be represented as an equivalent combination of normal modes. In practice the mode representation is most useful at low frequency — for seismic waves above about 40 s — since at higher frequencies the number of modes becomes prohibitively large.”

David Gubbins (1947) British university teacher

[Seismology and plate tectonics, 1990, http://books.google.com/books?id=tZRxPzwoChIC&pg=PA5] (p. 5)
Seismology and Plate Tectonics (1990)

“Always remember, as bad as it may be for you, it is worse for the lost. They may have it better for a while if they go along with the beast and take his mark, but that “better” will come to an end. Those who obeyed Hitler had it good, too—for a few years. The lost face some of the same problems of economic collapse, wars, earthquakes, PLUS, they will be here for the next 1,040 days of God's wrath being poured out after the rapture and THEN eternity in the Lake of Fire!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 235

God, War, Problem

“[…] there are many opportunities for development in Rajkot. There are numerous avenues for growth in the domain of education. After the Gujarat earthquake we have decided to develop earthquake management system in Gujarat. One of the departments connected with that work will be set up in Rajkot. I want that Rajkot should become a shiksha dham [centre of education] and a centre of hope for the people of this region. Rajkot has the distinction of being considered the foremost city of Saurashtra.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2002, Modi election campaign speech, 2002

People, Education, Hope

“After the war, Japan was occupied by the allied forces, and based on peace and democracy as values to be upheld, established the Constitution of Japan, undertook various reforms and built the foundation of Japan that we know today. I have profound gratitude for the efforts made by the Japanese people at the time who helped reconstruct and improve the country devastated by the war. I also feel that we must not forget the help extended to us in those days by Americans with an understanding of Japan and Japanese culture. Today, more than sixty years since the end of the war, we have seen that, in the face of major disasters such as the Great East Japan Earthquake [March 11, 2011], there are so many people in Japan who value the bonds between people, can deal with various situations calmly, and work hard towards reconstruction. I have found this most reassuring.”

Akihito (1933) Emperor of Japan

War, People, Peace, Feeling

“Storms of every sort, torrents, earthquakes, cataclysms, "convulsions of nature," etc., however mysterious and lawless at first sight they may seem, are only harmonious notes in the song of creation, varied expressions of God's love.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" The Fountains and Streams of the Yosemite National Park http://books.google.com/books?id=2CsRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA556", The Atlantic Monthly, volume LXXXVII, number 519 (January 1901) pages 556-565 (at page 565); reprinted in Our National Parks http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/our_national_parks/ (1901), chapter 8: The Fountains and Streams of the Yosemite National Park 1900s, Our National Parks (1901)

Love, God, Nature

“Comets, earthquakes, volcanoes, and northern lights (in the night,) with many other extraordinary phenomena or appearances intimidate weak minds, and are by them thought to be miraculous, although they undoubtedly have their proper natural causes, which have been in a great measure discovered. Jack-with-a-lantern is a frightful appearance to some people, but not so much as the imaginary specter. But of all the scarecrows which have made human nature tremble, the devil has been chief; his family is said to be very numerous, consisting of "legions," with which he has kept our world in a terrible uproar.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. VI Section III - Rare and Wonderful Phenomena no evidence of Miracles, nor are Diabolical Spirits able to effect them, or Superstitious Traditions to confirm them, nor can Ancient Miracles prove Recent Revelations

People, World, Family, Nature

“But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Forgetting

“What you won't hear, except from me, is that 'Let the good times roll' is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society. … In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan — because, when you get down to it, [the] Japanese aren't blacks.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

Racial Reality And The New Orleans Nightmare https://archive.is/20121211061614/www.vdare.com/sailer/050903_new_orleans.htm, VDARE, September 3, 2005

Education, Time

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 2
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo

War

“Had we seen an earthquake, or the results of a powerful storm, the devastation and loss would have been awful — but our country has seen terrible tragedies before: fires, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. We prayed for the lost, rebuilt for the survivors, and strengthened our laws, dikes, weather warnings and earthquake predictors. We prepare for an eventual recurrence of acts of nature…
But 9-11 was not a natural catastrophe: these events were deliberate, conceived, organized and ruthlessly executed by human beings. And so, their significance must be assessed differently — and the actions to prepare for “next time” must be different, also.”

Wesley Clark (1944) American general and former Democratic Party presidential candidate

Seton Hall Address (2002)

Law, Nature, Loss, Time

“In the account given to Solon by the Egyptian priests, of the submersion of the island of Atlantis under the waters of the ocean, after repeated shocks of an earthquake, we find that the event happened when Jupiter had seen the moral depravity of the inhabitants.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 11
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Water

“From my experience dealing with Sichuan [after the 2008 earthquake] I started to understand very clearly the character of local government. They will do anything. You will never really wrongly accuse them of anything because they do everything.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Branigan, Tania. “ Accounts Invaded, Computers Infected—Human Rights Activists Tell of Cyber Attacks http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/14/china-human-rights-activists-cyber-attack.” Guardian, January 14, 2010. 2010-, 2010

Understanding

“My philosophy is I'm gonna fight as hard as I can to keep all the bad things from happening. But if they are gonna happen and I happen to be in the city where they are happening — like in the song, "California Earthquake" — then there's not much I can do about it. I can't uproot my whole life, just because I have a feeling that things may not work out all right. There's also always the chance that everything is going to be just swell, guys. Just hang in there. But I don't think it can happen on it's own.”

Cass Elliot (1941–1974) American singer

Rolling Stone interview (1968)

Life, Guy, Feeling, Thinking

“Transhumanists would invest in better infrastructure that can withstand hurricane, earthquakes, and natural or manmade disasters.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Nature

“Everyone agrees that world events are FRIGHTENING! There are wars, famines, plagues, wild weather, diseases, earthquakes, and financial woes everywhere! The world is in a MESS! Everyone seems to be watching, waiting and praying for someone-ANYONE to come and FIX THE WORLD'S PROBLEMS and “take over the world!” WHO can possibly fix this CHAOS? The Bible has the ONLY real answer. God created the world, He knows how it is SUPPOSED to run and HE alone can fix it!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 112-113

God, War, World, Disease

“What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer-bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out—not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in "natural" accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U. S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

"Psychology and Religion: What Is the Heroic Individual?", pp. 282–283
The Denial of Death (1973)

Hope, Nature, Tear, Bee

“The form of a coast, the configuration of the interior of a country, the existence and extent of lakes, valleys, and mountains, can often be traced to the former prevalence of earthquakes and volcanoes in regions which have long been undisturbed. To these remote convulsions the present fertility of some districts the sterile character of others, the elevation of land above the sea, the climate, and various peculiarities, may be distinctly referred.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.1, p. 2
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Mountain, Sea, Country

“Steno conceded, as Fabio Colonna had done before him, that all marine fossils might have been transported into their present situation at the time of the Noachian deluge. He maintained that fossil vegetables had been once living plants, and he hinted that they might, in some instances, indicate the distinction between fluvial and marine deposits. He also inferred that the present mountains had not existed ever since the origin of things, suggesting that many strata of submarine origin had been accumulated in the interval between the creation and deluge. Here he displayed his great anxiety to reconcile his theory with the Scriptures; for he at the same time advanced an opinion, which does not seem very consistent with such a doctrine, viz., that there was a wide distinction between the shelly, and nearly horizontal beds at the foot of the Apennines, and the older mountains of highly inclined stratification. Both, he observed, were of sedimentary origin; and a considerable interval of time must have separated their formation. Tuscany, according to him, had successively passed through six different states; and to explain these mighty changes, he called in the agency of inundations, earthquakes, and subterranean fires.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 32
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Mountain, Change, Time, Success

“Now look, I'm not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes. Well—I'm not saying that he—I'm not not saying that either. God — what God does is God's business, I have no idea. But I'll tell you this: whether you call it Gaia or whether you call it Jesus — there's a message being sent. And that is, "Hey, you know that stuff we're doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it."”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

I'm just sayin'.
The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2011-03-14
Ben
Dimiero
Beck: "I'm Not Not Saying" God Is Causing Earthquakes
Media Matters for America
2011-03-14
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201103140010
2011-03-19
2010s, 2011

God, Idea, Business

“The market can quickly seize up. Prices don't adjust in a smooth continuous fashion, but instead abruptly reconfigure themselves, like the earth's crust during an earthquake.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 6, At Rest Versus In Motion, p. 195

Fashion

“How terribly downright must seem the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" Flood-Storm in the Sierra http://books.google.com/books?id=Iy0GAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA489", Overland Monthly, volume 14, number 6 (June 1875) pages 489-496 (at page 494) 1870s

“Defiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy giins and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves on to the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam on to the uncircumcized, they wheeled and swung towards their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for. action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Men, War, Faith, Way

“There are many things in this world I do not know. I do not know how butterflies get out of their cocoons without damaging their wings. I do not know why anyone would boil vegetables when roasting them is much tastier. I do not know how to make olive oil, and I do not know why dogs bark before an earthquake, and I do not know why some people voluntarily choose to climb mountains where it is freezing and difficult to breathe, or live in the suburbs, where the coffee is watery and all of the houses look alike.”

Daniel Handler book The Hostile Hospital

Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital (2001)

People, World, Dogs, Mountain

“Earthquakes generate elastic waves when one block of material slides against another; the break between the two blocks being called a fault. Explosions generate elastic waves by an impulsive change in volume in the material. Small explosive charges are used in controlled-source seismic experiments in which the waves penetrate only a few kilometres into the earth.”

David Gubbins (1947) British university teacher

(p. 12)
Seismology and Plate Tectonics (1990)

Change

Sabuktigin (942–997) Founder of the Ghaznavid Empire

Tarikh-i-Firishta: Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson's History of India as told by its own Historians p. 435-36.

Birth

“Doctors is all swabs…and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes — what do the doctor know of lands like that?”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Treasure Island

and I lived on rum, I tell you.
Source: Treasure Island (1883), Ch. 3, The Black Spot.

Men, Sea

“Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter I, Introduction, p. 1

War, Victory

“The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke M. D.,'… appeared in 1705, containing 'A Discourse of Earthquakes'… His treatise… is the most philosophical production of that age, in regard to the causes of former changes in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature. 'However trivial a thing,' he says, 'a rotten shell may appear to some, yet these monuments of nature are more certain tokens of antiquity than coins or medals, since the best of those may be counterfeited or made by art and design, as may also books, manuscripts, and inscriptions, as all the learned are now sufficiently satisfied has often been actually practised,' &c.; 'and though it must be granted that it is very difficult to read them and to raise a chronology out of them, and to state the intervals of the time wherein such or such catastrophes and mutations have happened, yet it is not impossible.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 36
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Books, Age, Art, Nature

“People must ask themselves why this earthquake occurred in this area and not in others…. These areas were notorious because of this type of modern tourism, which has become known as "sex tourism"…. Don't they deserve punishment from Allah?!”

Yusuf Qaradawi (1926) Egyptian imam

Tsunami Reactions (9) - Sheik Al-Qaradhawi: Disaster a Punishment for Sex Tourism http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/470.htm January 2005. 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake

People, Sex