Sometimes societies die and putrefy long before they are pronounced dead, and sometimes men die of corruption long before they have taken to their deathbeds.

sometimes mistakes illuminate the path. Humanity breathes in mistakes..

Catastrophe is foolish and reckless word to use. No politician should use it. It's one thing for the Labour Party to say, it's quite another for Conservatives to say it. Catastrophe is a word which should be reserved for genuine massive loss of life, and for people to call leaving without a withdrawal agreement a catastrophe is an act of reckless harm to the United Kingdom.

...until the fear of catastrophe amends, or catastrophe itself destroys...

Mistakes are a part of being human. Precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.

Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made.

Although we all make mistakes in life, the problems occur when we try to hide our mistakes, to cover them up rather than to learn from them and allow other people to learn from them.

The end of life evokes the errors of it, and a fellow wishes he had known better.

Police, federal agency and military operations are fraught with the potential for catastrophic disaster. The nature of operations routinely conducted by counter narcotic agents, special weapons and tactics units, special response teams, and military special operations units leave no room for error. A drug bust in the wrong house or a botched hostage rescue situation will be on the evening news with some senior official hemming and hawing and wishing he'd planned better. Once that occurs there is no defense. The best that can happen is to convince everyone that it will not occur again because of all the "lessons learned, and hope that there is a crisis somewhere else that will take your place in the media's attention. THIS IS A LOSING STRATEGY.

It is a consolation to remember that corruption pushed beyond a certain point provides its own remedy, and that this sort of thing cannot indefinitely continue; but it is less consoling to remember another truth, to wit, that the correction of political and social evil may come in the form of irremediable catastrophe, and that the innocent, who are the greater number, would then suffer most. It is still less consoling to remember the universal human experience that when evil is redressed by the only partly conscious force of reaction, it is not succeeded by a corresponding good, but by some other new and unexpected evil.

autonomy without clarity is ultimately a disaster.

The onset of catastrophe is not signaled by the sense of falling through the dark to an accidental death: everything, including a catastrophe, has a moment-by-moment structure - a structure that is beyond measurement or comprehension, one that is maddeningly complex or must be conceived in quite another manner, in which the degree of complexity can be articulated only in terms of images that seem impossible to conjure - visible only if time has slowed down to the point that we see the world as indifferent owing to the available circumstances and having doomed preconditions that arrive at a perfect universal conclusion, if only because they are composed of individual intentions - because the moment is the result of unconscious choices, because a key doesn't automatically fit into the ignition, because we do not start into third gear and move down to second but we start in second and move into third, rolling down the hill then turning onto a highway above the village, because the distance before us is like looking down a tunnel, because the greenery on the boughs still smells of morning dew, because of the death of a dog and someone's badly executed maneuver when turning left, that is to say because of one choice or another, of more choices and still more choices ad infinitum, those maddening had-we-but-known choices impossible to conceptualize because the situation we find ourselves in is complicated, determined by something that is in the nature of neither God nor the devil, something whose ways are impenetrable to us and are doomed to remain so because chance is simply a matter of choosing, but the result of that which might have happened anyway.

All mankind’s institutions, of every sort,
have their own death, though in what long endures
it is hidden from you, your own lives being short.
[XVI:79-81]

"Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."