While natural disasters capture headlines and national attention short-term, the work of recovery and rebuilding is long-term.

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.

We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling into greater disasters.

I am usually part of any disaster at a wedding if I'm a bridesmaid, which I've been lucky enough to be several times.

I only did karaoke once in my life. It was with Courtney Love and it was a total disaster. She pulled me on stage in front of 500 people at a wedding. I'd never done karaoke before.

In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is.

Everything that happens is meant to be. It's meant to happen like that. But sometimes you don't know at the time that it's meant to be disaster.

An asteroid impact is a preventable natural disaster. It's in part preventable because we have the technology, and it's in part preventable because it's predictable.

Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster.

Technology is always a two-edged sword. It will bring in many benefits, but also many disasters.

Having a baby is a disaster for your career. I don't think there's any sympathy.

There is a huge responsibility on all of us to get England through. It would be one of the biggest disasters in sports history if we blew it and we must make sure it does not happen.

In the 1990s, it's OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the Space Shuttle blowing up. It's acceptable to ridicule the Pope or the President of the United States, but God forbid you do a joke... about gays. The gay community is the last sacred cow in this society.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.

He taught me never to smile, which helps me when I visit disaster sites.

For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

I think sports and bodybuilding were the only things that saved me from getting beat up. People are not pleased, for whatever reason, when you can answer all the questions in class. If not for the respect I got from track, cross-country, wrestling and bodybuilding, it would have been a disaster.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

All company bosses want a policy on corporate social responsibility. The positive effect is hard to quantify, but the negative consequences of a disaster are enormous.

Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature.

My life had become a catastrophe. I had no idea how to turn it around. My band had broken up. I had almost lost my family. My whole life had devolved into a disaster. I believe that the police officer who stopped me at three a.m. that morning saved my life.

We are viewed by the world as a quasi-racist state in which we allow natural disasters to obliterate our minority community, in which our penal system is designed to treat blacks unfairly, and in which we let the medical and educational systems in our ghettos fester to the level of some third-world countries.