Nathaniel Rich > Quotes

“The relationship between those who have burned the most fossil fuels and those who will suffer the most from a warming climate is perversely inverted. The inversion is both chronological (younger generations pay for their elders’ emissions) and socioeconomic (the poor suffer what the rich deserve).”
― Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth: A Recent History

“The way other people fantasize about surprise inheritances, firts-glance love, and endless white empyreal pastures, Mitchell dreamed of an erupting supervolcano that would bury North America under a foot of hot ash.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth: A Recent History

“For human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life—these are sins.” For “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth: A Recent History

“You know, in the Soviet Union they used to have a tradition of ordering scientists to change their studies to conform with the ideology then acceptable to the state. And scientists in the rest of the world found that laughable as well as tragic.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth: A Recent History

“The message was: disorder always won in the end. The idea that man could order the world to his own design was the most pitiful fairy tale ever told.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“If you devoted your life to the contemplation of disaster, then wasn't an incident-free existence an empty one?”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“Awfulness can happen at any time. That's what's so awful.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“In the United States there were 900,000 elevators, each serving an average of 20,000 people per year. That meant eighteen billion passenger trips per year. These trips resulted in twenty-seven deaths. The chance of dying in an elevator accident was therefore one in 10.44 (repeating) million—about equivalent to the odds of dying from a dog bite, according to the National Safety Council odds-of-death chart he kept in his wallet. This made him feel easier about entering the metal box every morning but he did find himself crossing the street whenever he saw a dog.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“There was no escaping math, after all. It was everywhere, especially in nature. You could go as far to say that math was nature. Pi describe the arc of a rainbow, the way ripples spread in a body of water, the dimensions of the moon and sun. Fractals could be observed in halved sections of red cabbage, the topography of deserts, the branching of lightning bolts. And take the old man glaring out from his shirt, Leonardo Fibonacci, who discovered that a basic number sequence predicted the arrangement of scales on a pinecone, the distribution of petals on flowers, the spiral of a snail shell, the furcation of veins in the human body, even the structure of DNA. When all the people were gone, the numbers would persist.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“He had no great advice to offer to his clients about this fact. He just wanted them to understand the likelihood that they would be incinerated shortly.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“The state sought his life, all for the crime of being poor, black, and desperate. And, to be fair, for killing a police detective.”
― Nathaniel Rich, King Zeno

“We've been calling your phone every second the last two days."
"I'm OK, Dad."
"We were worried. But then I thought to myself, you know what the Lion King says."
"'I laugh in the face of danger.'"
"That's my son!”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“We’ve had a number of applications but there was no one with the right mix of technical knowledge and personal despair.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“He could buy the Psycho Canoe with just the cash stacked in his kitchen freezer. He had $38,140 at last count, eleven green-gray bars, like dull chips of limestone, each individually sealed in plastic Baggies. When he reached $20,000 he had removed the ice trays to make more room. At $30,000 he had thrown out the rest of the frozen burritos.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“They must have been going nearly twenty-five miles an hour.”
― Nathaniel Rich, King Zeno