Like all my family and class I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.

Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that by creating a magnificent failure you plant the seed.

I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.

There's a difference between a failure and a fiasco... a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.

Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.

Experience taught me that working families are often just one pay check away from economic disaster. And it showed me first-hand the importance of every family having access to good health care.

There is no 'need' for us to eat meat dairy or eggs. Indeed these foods are increasingly linked to various human diseases and animal agriculture is an environmental disaster for the planet.

The environmental movement like all political processes reacts best to disasters. But these are very slow very gradual disasters in the making.

Environmental disaster is the gravest threat to China's continued development. That's according to me but it is not some wacko view.

My idea of an amusement park story is getting adventurers to go tour environmental disaster areas. After all if the entire Great Barrier Reef gets killed which seems like an extremely lively possibility what are you going to do with all that rotting limestone?

Realizing that the majority of kids that get molested feel that it is their fault along with shame those kids have no idea what to say or do to try to report anything and add that with the lack of education it is a complete recipe for disaster that leads to non-reporting of molestation.

I'm a wonderful disaster. So are you. We're all a mess. We're in this culture that says take this pill and you'll be happy go on this diet and you'll be thinner have your teeth whitened people will love you more.

The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.

Are you kidding? I'm a terrible cook but John is a really great one. Literally I never cook. The whole time we were dating I prepared two officially romantic meals. Both of them were such disasters that he begs me never to go into the kitchen again.

There are no greater treasures than the highest human qualities such as compassion courage and hope. Not even tragic accident or disaster can destroy such treasures of the heart.

I beg you take courage the brave soul can mend even disaster.

That is who Barack Obama is - a person of admirable character - and that is who he has remained for me over these last four years. I have not agreed with his every decision but never once have I seen him break his cool lose his composure or abandon his insightful perspective - even during the most serious and/or absurd national disasters.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster of danger and denial.

My heart is so light that it's amazing. I get to play all this grief all this loss all this disaster and chaos. It's hysterically funny. I am very light.

I jetset around and play these songs and get to hang with some pretty amazing people then I go home to a really great farm though actually it's a disaster area of a farm at the moment. But it's certainly a blast. I wouldn't trade lives with anyone right now.

France and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.

In the U.S. alone weather disasters caused $50 billion in economic damages in 2010.