Disaster Fascination Quotes

As for earthquakes, though they were still formidable, they were so interesting that men of science could hardly regret them.

There will always been the prurient rubbernecking aspect to disasters: people who just can't get enough gore.

People love to watch a train wreck, I suppose.

There are men in the world who derive an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin, as other from success.

Some people dote on contemplating disasters.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios - the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about - was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. [...] That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.

"Look here," I said, "people like to collect disasters."