Catastrophism Quotes

“But I've just noticed that my mind is asleep.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer / Vers Nouveaux

“Hamm: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon?
Clov: (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, exasperated): What in God's name would there be on the horizon? (Pause.)
Hamm: The waves, how are the waves?
Clov: The waves? (He turns the telescope on the waves.) Lead.
Hamm: And the sun?
Clove: (Looking) Zero.
Hamm: But it should be sinking. Look again.
Clov: (Looking) Damn the sun.
Hamm: Is it night already then?
Clov: (Looking) No.
Hamm: Then what is it?
Clov: (Looking) Gray. (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, louder.) Gray! (Pause, still louder.) GRRAY!”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“The men of my race arrive on wingless, eyeless ships.”
― Andre Malraux

“Human history unfolds catastrophically, in a ceaselessly reiterated overturning of origin and end driven by the twin pulses of libidinal repetition and social reproduction.”
― Ray Brassier

“I'd like to issue a call to realism for those of us in so-called developed industrial nations, who indulge in great horror at the gradual collapse of our own pathologically unsustainable mode of existence while ignoring the reality of the majority of this planet’s residents, who do not in fact share the same dread or anxiety about losing what most of them, frankly, never had to squander in the first place.”
― Brian Awehali

“Now the “earth turns over” just as Immanuel Velikovsky predicted. A horrific 90-degrees tilt of the earth in which the weight of ice packs in
Greenland and Antarctica precipitates the 12,000-year cyclical catastrophe
foretold by so many from humanity’s past. T. S. Eliot stands avenged; the world
as we know it goes out with a whimper.”
― C. Elmon Meade, Adam & Eve's Ashes: Magnetic Pole Shift, Ancient Prophecy, and Catastrophism

“...the red skies over Europe, Africa, and the
Atlantic Ocean predict a penultimate doom. Is this the red horse, the second of the Four Horsemen from the Book of Revelation? Wars and rumors of war have preceded this cataclysm going back to Cain killing Abel. However, this episode of global bloodshed has just begun.”
― C. Elmon Meade, Adam & Eve's Ashes: Magnetic Pole Shift, Ancient Prophecy, and Catastrophism

“Without the more developed sense of history that only fully flourished in modernity - reflected in the notion of a future potentially utterly unlike the past - there is no room for thinking of perils or promises that outstrip present and past experience.”
― Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction