The timing was terrible, and having one disaster after another didn't help. I think the pictures on television of the way in which the disaster was handled also helped to turn off the public and Congress.
Soon after a disaster passes, we tend to turn our eyes away and focus our resources on the day-to-day, rather than on preparing for the rare, but foreseeable and potentially catastrophic disaster. It's another form of triage, how much we invest in preparing for that, a very important question for public policy. We are a short-sighted species.
President Obama said he is going to use the Gulf disaster to push a new energy bill through Congress. How about using the Gulf disaster to fix the Gulf disaster?
Having said that, I believe we must not compound the natural disaster of Katrina by creating a fiscal disaster in Congress - it is our duty to ensure that we reign in other government spending in any event, and especially in this time of national emergency.
I knew about my grandmother's husband who died in the Albion coal disaster. But I didn't know a brother died in the same disaster because of the health and safety, which was terrible.
The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.
It's no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television - or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else.
When you study, as I did, every theatrical beginning in this country, none of them have been greeted well. The Royal Shakespeare Company was a disaster, Peter Hall was a disaster, Richard Eyre was a disaster, Trevor Nunn was always a disaster.
I'm really glad that I spent my twenties messing around and having disaster after disaster - with people who were doing likewise - because it's really my greatest treasure now.
The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.
If you ever face a significant disaster, do your best to keep up the spirits of those around you, act flexibly and creatively to help, try to sort rumors from truth, and remember that the decisions you make will have repercussions after the disaster has passed.
We in Los Angeles, who have ourselves been helped to stand up - to recover and rebuild after a disaster - want to help the families and communities of the Gulf Coast,.
I think it would be a disaster if Donald Trump is elected. It will also be a disaster if Hillary Clinton is elected.
Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody.
It is some disaster for any mind to hold any one thing for truth that is untrue, however insignificant it be, or however honestly it be held. It is a greater disaster when the false prejudice bars the way to some truth behind it, which, but for it, would find an entrance to the soul; and the greatness of the disaster will in this case be measured by the importance of the excluded truth.
It will be another disaster, after Irangate. Not only that, not only this longest Arab - Israeli confrontation: but also the most important and successful war of attrition which still continues in the south of Lebanon.
Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster.