When arms speak, the laws are silent.

—Cicero, 52 BC

It would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading.

—Virginia Woolf, 1924

Is all our fire of shipwreck wood?

—Robert Browning, 1862

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

—Edmund Burke, 1796

Why listen to me? I can only predict epidemics and plagues.

—Larry Kramer, 1992

We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

—D.H. Lawrence, 1928

It’s the end of the world every day, for someone.

—Margaret Atwood, 2000

I think we are inexterminable, like flies and bedbugs.

—Robert Frost, 1959

Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

All the married heiresses I have known have shipwrecked.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880

To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat.

—Milan Kundera, 1978

It belongs to a nobleman to weep in an hour of disaster.

—Euripides, 412 BC

Once you hear the details of a victory it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1951

Pride and excess bring disaster for man.

—Xunzi, 250 BC