emergency quotes

To watch a football game is to be in prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you're seeing. It's more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game.

-Jacques Barzun
Quoted in Colin  Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

'Faith' is a fine invention When Gentlemen can see But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency.

- Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
c.1860  Complete Poems, no.185 (first published1891).

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in historya plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. Those harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another, as wave follows upon wave; only one real fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations.Only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

- H(erbert) A(lbert) L(aurens) Fisher
  History of Europe, introduction.

: Bad language or abuse, I never, never use, Whatever the emergency; Though 'Bother it' I may Occasionally say, I never use a big, big D : What, never? : No, never! : What never? : Well, hardly ever! : Hardly ever swears a big, big D Then give three cheers, and one cheer more, For the well-bred Captain of the Pinafore!

- Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
  CAPTALLCAPTALLCAPTALL1878  HMS Pinafore, act1.

   A man's mind will very generally refuse to make itself up until it be driven and compelled by emergency.

- Anthony Trollope
Houston. Ayala's Angel, ch.41.