Doomsday Quotes

When I was your age — about, ooh, a thousand years ago — I loved a good bedtime story. The Three Little Sontarans. The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes. Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday, eh? All the classics.

Rose:i love you Doctor:Quite right, and i guess if it's my last chance to say it... Rose Tyler... (the doctor fades, him in his TARDIS, with tear tracks and a tear running down his cheek)

Gentlemen,’ the professor said gravely. ‘You must stop this madman. If you do not, you are looking at a doomsday scenario of apocalyptic proportions.

If you’re listening to this, congratulations! You survived Doomsday. I’d like to apologize straightaway for any inconvenience the end of the world may have caused you. The earthquakes, rebellions, riots,tornadoes, floods, tsunamis, and of course the giant snake who swallowed the sun—I’m afraid most of that was our fault. Carter and I decided we should at least explain how it happened.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

She frowned. “I did nothing to arouse you.” He clenched his jaw, his stare growing more aggressive. “You breathed.

I'm burning up a sun to say goodbye

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.

Thank God for imminent doomsday.

Sometimes we want to believe something so badly that we allow ourselves to be taken advantage of.

A piece of advice: if you want to remain in control of a doomsday cult, don't give a date for the end of the world unless you're really, really sure it's going to happen. Being wrong tends to undermine your authority.

All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.” At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes. “The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So, there's a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression.” “Yeah but Maestra—” “Don't interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in tern, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing'll go wrong and it'll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it's playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That's why, Switters my dearest, every time you've shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I've played my blues records really loud or read to you from The Horse’s Mouth. And that’s why when you’ve exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I’ve reminded you that you and me— you and I: excuse me—may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let’s not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It’s preventive medicine.” “But what about self-esteem?” “Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace—and maybe even glory.

I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.

The world is a goddamned evil place, the strong prey on the weak, the rich on the poor; I’ve given up hope that there is a God that will save us all. How am I supposed to believe that there’s a heaven and a hell when all I see now is hell.

Sadie Kane here. If you're listening to this, congratulations, you survived doomsday.

I’m tired of the lies and the cheating, and the broken promises that were never meant to be kept.

If she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world.

The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.

Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.

Maybe it won’t come as too much of a surprise that a certain amount of alcohol was involved with this Darwin Award candidate of an idea, and though someone must have considered it ahead of time or the parachute and camera wouldn’t be there, it’s still pretty certain that the onset of this little adventure was preceded by something similar to the above mentioned collegiate death sentence: “Hey man, watch this!

Since I've moved here, you have shown up at my door eight times. I obey the laws, I pay my taxes, and I haven't even gotten a parking ticket in my entire time as a driver. Yet if anything at all happens in the neighborhood, you appear at my door. I bet if a meteorite fell somewhere in the subdivision, you would be here asking me if I personally launched it out of my doomsday cannon.

Chuck skipped through the rest of the preamble to the actual examples Spaceguard had chronicled: “On March 23rd, 1989, an asteroid designated Asteroid 1989FC missed hitting the Earth by six hours. This little jewel packed the energy of roughly a thousand of the most powerful nuclear bombs, and the human race became aware of it shortly after its closest approach. Had this celestial baseball been only six hours later most of the population of the Earth would have been eliminated with zero warning.” “In October of 1990, an asteroid that would have been considered very small, struck the Pacific Ocean. This little fellow only packed the energy of a small atomic bomb, about the same as the one that flattened Hiroshima, and if it had arrived a few hours later or earlier it could have easily struck a city rather than making a relatively harmless splash into the center of the ocean. Remember, relatively here, is just a comparative term.”   

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he know that every day is Doomsday.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you're at peace, you embrace the eternity. When you're confused, you be dazzled by doomsday.

That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.

We need to be fit and ready for anything that might come our way.

I learned the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die. Had Ragnarok happened yet? Was it still to happen? I did not know then. I am not certain now.

None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one's never thought of does.

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

Sometimes it's torturous to think of things we can't possibly have.

In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.

Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

Cats don't drink cocktails,' I said. 'Cats don't shoot lasers from their eyes, either, but here we are, Carl. Mama needs a night off.

That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.

The baby velociraptor settled into my lap. I suddenly felt uncomfortable having that many teeth so close to my crotch. If he bit me now, I didn’t know what would happen.

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

Secular humanists of every type may ridicule the Bible, but they cannot escape it; and in their obsession with change, calls for reform, doomsday warnings, and utopian visions, they continue to steal from it.

A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is fixed.

It is the end of the world. Surely you could be allowed a few carnal thoughts.

When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off,” he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. “I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off.

A Home without Equity Is Just a Rental with Debt,

Doomsday, when it came, wouldn't be a physical phenomenon; it would be an all-inclusive erasure of simulectronic circuits.

Did you ever think one day you'd live through a global pandemic, with a doomsday virus, and the Joker is president? Sounds like a bad made-for-TV scifi movie.

Just thoughts of what I have to do. Homework. And it comes up to my brain and I look at it and think "I'm not going to be able to do that" and then it cycles back down and the next one comes up. And then things come up like "You should be doing more extracurricular activities" because I should, I don't do near enough, and that gets pushed down and it's replaced with the big one: "What college are you going into, Craig?" which is like the doomsday question.

The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care. I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.' I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research. Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be. Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit. So, I believed.

So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and air and topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can't come soon enough.

Save the world. What a thought. Was this asteroid really speeding toward Earth on a collision course? Would it really wipe out everything? Could humans really do anything to stop it? It was just too incredible. As she considered the circumstances of her life right now, she felt like she’d just stuck her face into the middle of a tornado. But Jeremy wasn’t the tornado. He was an anchor for her heart, and a piece of her she knew she had been missing all her life. He was the kind of guy little girls dream of when they wish to grow up and marry a wonderful prince— strong, sensitive, smart, kind, the list just went on. She smiled at herself. It seems that it’s difficult to focus on the end of the world when you’ve just found love.    

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?

Kivrin reached out for Dunworthy's hand and clasped it tightly in her own. "I knew you'd come," she said, and the net opened.

His pretty face could not make up for the fact that he had the IQ of a dead houseplant and the emotional range of a frozen pea.

So help me god,” I said. “I will abandon you right here and right now if you choose to take up the kazoo.

The global economy is a doomsday machine that must be stopped and reprogrammed.

don’t limit poetry to the word. Poetry can be found in music, a photograph, in the way a meal is prepared—anything with the stuff of revelation in it. It can exist in the most everyday things but it must never, never be ordinary. By all means, write about the sky or a girl’s smile, but when you do, let your poetry conjure up salvation day, doomsday, any day. I don’t care, as long as it enlightens us, thrills us and—if it’s inspired— makes us feel a bit immortal.

Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.

I wonder what the men in my family could do if the women didn't treat them simultaneously like kings and children.

The sky's gone blue: azure, the ocean bluer: cerulean, the trees are swirls of every hella freaking green on earth and bright thick eggy yellow is spilling over everything. Awesome. Doomsday's most definitely been cancelled. Landscape: When God Paints Outside The Lines

Explain! Perhaps you’d like to explain it to me, too. I’m not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can’t go.” And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, he thought.

When you are in a combat situation, you mustn’t let your mind be polluted by emotions like fear and anger. Simply accept the situation and react, even if you are facing impossible odds. Keep your head clear and you will be one step ahead of your attackers.

Wall Street investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: They set the odds. The customer who plays zero-sum games against them may win from time to time but never systematically, and never so spectacularly that he bankrupts the casino.

Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it.

The source of his unhappiness was, as usual, other people.

Louise: "How did you get here?" Johnny: "Well, basically, there was this little dot, right? And the dot went bang and the bang expanded. Energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish to fowl, to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey to man, amo amas amat, quid pro quo, memento mori, ad infinitum, sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese and leave under the grill till Doomsday.

A woman's touch?!' he repeated, 'What is he thinking hermano? Stukeley frowned. ''Captain doesn't know whether it's dinnertime or doomsday, mate. That's the state Lady Losckwood's got him in.We'be tried to talk some sense into him, but it just goes in one ear and out the other. IT's not as if he had much of an attention span to begin with, but since Lady Muck came on to the scene...

Yet what seems to me beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put a trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being—anyone, not just this man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons—is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.

I don’t know how it happened. Nobody does. There are only theories, empty rhetoric and doomsday prophecies. None of them are right, but none of them are completely wrong, either. They all have a grain of truth. All I know is where I was and what I was doing when it happened.

Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness. / At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays--especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare--or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them. / So he switched to opera--usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more. / Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. / And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

As I become a part of you, you become a part of me. I will be honest, good, and true. I heed your Call. 'Tis you I seek. From this moment on, there is no other for me but you.

This is what the beginning of the end of the world will look like

God created mankind in His image and likeness, remember? For some reason, you people always forget your divinity.

NecroBard This unusual class combines one of the most-loved occupations with one of the most reviled.

Charlie Ledley—curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley—was odd in his belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.

The James Bond movies and the comic books had it all wrong. You did not need elaborate contraptions, complicated plans, and futuristic doomsday weapons to wipe out of all of humankind. All you needed was a fully realized vision and an intense focus. All you needed to do is give a little push to what was already happening; what was inevitable. All you had to do is get one group of people who believe in an invisible man in the sky to get really pissed off at another group of people who believe in a slightly different version of the same invisible man in the sky.

They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, “It’s really hard to know when you’re lucky and when you’re smart.

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of “investing” is “gambling with the odds in your favor.

I despise child molesters!

That was the reason the casino bothered to list the wheel’s most recent spins: to help gamblers to delude themselves.

City burning, in other words, was becoming something of a science.

Become a part of me, as I become a part of you. And ever after, I promise myself to thee. Each day we share, I shall be honest, good, and true. If this you seek, heed my Call. From this moment on, there is no other for me but you

And don’t limit poetry to the word. Poetry can be found in music, a photograph, in the way a meal is prepared—anything with the stuff of revelation in it. It can exist in the most everyday things but it must never, never be ordinary. By all means, write about the sky or a girl’s smile, but when you do, let your poetry conjure up salvation day, doomsday, any day. I don’t care, as long as it enlightens us, thrills us and—if it’s inspired—makes us feel a bit immortal.

When banking stops, credit stops, and when credit stops, trade stops, and when trade stops—well, the city of Chicago had only eight days of chlorine on hand for its water supply. Hospitals ran out of medicine. The entire modern world was premised on the ability to buy now and pay later.

Humans are capable of so much more. Power mongers like you have stripped away what is most valuable to us, the importance of our heritage and family values. We have been robbed of this, blinded by your authority, while you encourage us to burry ourselves in debt and rely on our corrupt governments. Men and women around the world have been forced to work long hours to keep up with inflated debts, all the while abandoning the families they struggle to support. History repeats, and repeats. It’s time to break the cycle and start anew.

Some call them doomsday ships. These lightspeed ships have no destination at all. They turn their curvature engines to maximum and accelerate like crazy, infinitely approaching the speed of light. Their goal is to leap across time using relativity until they reach the heat death of the universe. By their calculations, ten years within their frame of reference would equal fifty billion years in ours. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to plan for it. If some malfunction occurs after a ship has accelerated to lightspeed, preventing the ship from decelerating, then you’d also reach the end of the universe within your lifetime.

It’s strange. When I couldn’t find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute.

You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you ever move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. 'Cessations from all hankerings.' It's this business of desiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why're you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line - in one damn incarnation or another, if you like - you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to - be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier?

There pass the careless people That call their souls their own: Here by the road I loiter, How idle and alone. Ah, past the plunge of plummet, In seas I cannot sound, My heart and soul and senses, World without end, are drowned. His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away. There flowers no balm to sain him From east of earth to west That's lost for everlasting The heart out of his breast. Here by the labouring highway With empty hands I stroll: Sea-deep, till doomsday morning, Lie lost my heart and soul.

Each of these men, philosophers taking ethical measure of an age in which machines think faster than humans but regularly prove at least as flawed, repeatedly smack into a phenomenon that never troubled their intellectual predecessors: although humans have obviously survived every pox and meteor that nature has tossed at it until now, technology is something we toss back at our own peril. "On the bright side, it hasn't killed us yet either," says Nick Bostrom, who, when not refining doomsday data, researches how to extend the human life span.

Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. “It was a fast-buck business,” says Jacobs. “Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.

If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn’t get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked—until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones—until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. “Well, you can say, ‘Everybody knows that,’ ” said Munger. “I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little

Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system…Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. “The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found” in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [in 1985], Tremonti said yesterday at Milan’s Cattolica University. —Bloomberg News, November 20, 2008

He will not take her.” Sabelle turned toward the booming declaration. Ice. His protective gaze was as tangible as a caress. She swallowed. “Of course not,” Duke assured. “Sabelle is too important to our cause.” Ice stormed around the table until he hovered beside her, mere inches away, his body heat pouring over her. “If there is a breath left in my body, he will not take her.

He didn't disagree with me, but he seemed to feel that I have a perfection complex of some kind. Much talk from him, and quite intelligent, on the virtues of living the imperfect life, of accepting one's own and others' weaknesses. I agree with him, but only in theory. I'll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the grounds that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely it's the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry. That is, he couldn't possibly learn or drive himself to like bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with good poetry. He would have to drop poetry altogether. I said it would be no easy thing to do. Dr Sims said I was putting it too stringently – putting it, he said, as only a perfectionist would.

Our planet is a freak which we shall destroy by our own wicked senseless activities in the next century. Our history will very soon come to an end. Now that God is dead, we are at last presented with the truth, yes, the truth remains, but it is on a short lead. Anyway, we are nothing and it matters not what we do.

In the writings of many contemporary psychics and mystics (e.g., Gopi Krishna, Shri Rajneesh, Frannie Steiger, John White, Hal Lindsay, and several dozen others whose names I have mercifully forgotten) there is a repeated prediction that the Earth is about to be afflicted with unprecedented calamities, including every possible type of natural catastrophe from Earthquakes to pole shifts. Most of humanity will be destroyed, these seers inform us cheerfully. This cataclysm is referred to, by many of them, as "the Great Purification" or "the Great Cleansing," and is supposed to be a punishment for our sins. I find the morality and theology of this Doomsday Brigade highly questionable. A large part of the Native American population was exterminated in the 19th century; I cannot regard that as a "Great Cleansing" or believe that the Indians were being punished for their sins. Nor can I think of Hitler's death camps, or Hiroshima or Nagasaki, as "Great Purifications." And I can't make myself believe that the millions killed by plagues, cancers, natural catastrophes, etc., throughout history were all singled out by some Cosmic Intelligence for punishment, while the survivors were preserved due to their virtues. To accept the idea of "God" implicit in such views is logically to hold that everybody hit by a car deserved it, and we should not try to get him to a hospital and save his life, since "God" wants him dead. I don't know who are the worst sinners on this planet, but I am quite sure that if a Higher Intelligence wanted to exterminate them, It would find a very precise method of locating each one separately. After all, even Lee Harvey Oswald -- assuming the official version of the Kennedy assassination -- only hit one innocent bystander while aiming at JFK. To assume that Divinity would employ earthquakes and pole shifts to "get" (say) Richard Nixon, carelessly murdering millions of innocent children and harmless old ladies and dogs and cats in the process, is absolutely and ineluctably to state that your idea of God is of a cosmic imbecile.

I was also motivated by a strong sense of fear that we had still not begun to deal with, let alone solve, any of the fundamental issues arising from the gas attack. Specifically, for people who are outside the main system of Japanese society (the young in particular), there remains no effective alternative or safety net. As long as this crucial gap exists in our society, like a kind of black hole, even if Aum is suppressed, other magnetic force fields—"Aum-like" groups—will rise up again, and similar incidents are bound to take place.

Bliss?” I called. “Yeah?” “Check the drawers of the nightstand! She was playing with it in the middle of the night, and I think I remember taking it away and sticking it in there.” “Okay!” Through the open door, I watched her circle around the edge of the bed. I walked in place for a few seconds, letting my feet drop a little heavier than necessary, then opened and closed the door like I’d gone back inside the bathroom. Then I hid in the space between the back of the bedroom door and the wall where I could just see through the crack between the hinges. She pulled open the top drawer, and my heartbeat was like a bass drum. I don’t know when it had started beating so hard, but now it was all that I could hear. It wasn’t like I was asking her to marry me now. I just knew Bliss, and knew she tended to panic. I was giving her a very big, very obvious hint so that she’d have time to adjust before I actually asked her. Then in a few months, when I thought she’d gotten used to the idea, I’d ask her for real. That was the plan anyway. It was supposed to be simple, but this felt… complicated. Suddenly, I thought of all the thousands of ways this could go wrong. What if she freaked out? What if she ran like she did our first night together? If she ran, would she go back to Texas? Or would she go to Cade who lived in North Philly? He’d let her stay until she figured things out, and then what if something developed between them? What if she just flat out told me no? Everything was good right now. Perfect, actually. What if I was ruining it by pulling this stunt? I was so caught up in my doomsday predictions that I didn’t even see the moment that she found the box. I heard her open it though, and I heard her exhale and say, “Oh my God.” Where before my mouth had been dry, now I couldn’t swallow fast enough. My hands were shaking against the door. She was just standing there with her back to me. I couldn’t see her face. All I could see was her tense, straight spine. She swayed slightly. What if she passed out? What if I’d scared her so much that she actually lost consciousness? I started to think of ways to explain it away. I was keeping it for a friend? It was a prop for a show? It was… It was… shit, I didn’t know. I could just apologize. Tell her I knew it was too fast. I waited for her to do something—scream, run, cry, faint. Anything would be better than her stillness. I should have just been honest with her. I wasn’t good at things like this. I said what I was thinking—no plans, no manipulation. Finally, when I thought my body would crumble under the stress alone, she turned. She faced the bed, and I only got her profile, but she was biting her lip. What did that mean? Was she just thinking? Thinking of a way to get out of it? Then, slowly, like the sunrise peeking over the horizon, she smiled. She snapped the box closed. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She didn’t faint. There might have been a little crying. But mostly… she danced. She swayed and jumped and smiled the same way she had when the cast list was posted for Phaedra. She lost herself the same way she did after opening night, right before we made love for the first time. Maybe I didn’t have to wait a few months after all. She said she wanted my best line tomorrow after the show, and now I knew what it was going to be.

A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn’t really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term. For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a ten-year credit default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for ten years. The most you could make was $100 million, if General Electric defaulted on its debt any time in the next ten years and bondholders recovered nothing. It was a zero-sum bet: If you made $100 million, the guy who had sold you the credit default swap lost $100 million. It was also an asymmetric bet, like laying down money on a number in roulette. The most you could lose were the chips you put on the table; but if your number came up you made thirty, forty, even fifty times your money.

In fact, one of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies (as well as from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power. In that respect, the trajectories of the societies that we have discussed are unlike the usual courses of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources. On reflection, it's no surprise that declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks.

Familiar words chanted through his mind, demanding he speak them. He tried to bite his tongue. Now was hardly the time, and she'd likely laugh. Once spoken, the words would bind him to her for the rest of his life, even if she refused him, which was likely. And once she did, he could never touch another... not that he'd want to, since he hadn't almost from the moment he clapped eyes on her. Unless... what if she spoke the Binding? Whatever she decided, the Mating Call was forever. Despite that, he could not stop. "Become a part of me, as I become a part of you. And ever after—" "Oh my God." She gasped. "Ice, I—" "I promise myself to thee." Sabelle might not want him to finish this Call, and saying it might doom him, but the taste of her still rolled around on his tongue like ambrosia. Instinct reeled, roared. No way would she stop him from trying to stake his claim and make her his. "Ice," she implored. "My brother—" "Is not involved here." He felt his eyes burning into her. "This is between you and me." "But... I—I don't... He won't approve." Bram wouldn't. That went without question. And right now, he could give a shit. But he noticed that she hadn't said she didn't want him. "What do you want? Because I know I want you, princess. Any and every way you'll let me have you." God, her lips were right beneath his, and he needed another taste of her so badly, every cell in his body craved it. Damning caution, he layered his mouth over hers again. She was like sinking into sugar, sweet, light, tempting... addictive. He nibbled at her lips, then prowled deeper, engaging her tongue. Then deeper still, consuming as much of her as he could with a single taste. Again, the urge to claim, to mate, scraped down his instincts, clear, loud, strong. He lifted his mouth, panting over her lips. "Each day we share, I shall be honest, good and true. If this you seek, heed my call. From—" "Stop!" She grabbed him by the sleeves of his robe. "Ice, think. If you say the rest, it's done. Even if I refuse, as long as I live, you'll be bound to me." "I want nothing else." He stared deep into her eyes, as a feeling of rightness, inevitability settled into his gut. "From this moment on, there is no other for me but you.