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Quotations about
the End of the World
The time is swiftly approaching when the invincible Law of Absorption shall extinguish Earth as easily as we blow out the flame of a candle. ~Marie Corelli (Mary Mills Mackay), A Romance of Two Worlds, 1886
The only thing that's the end of the world is the end of the world. ~President Barack Obama, farewell press conference, January 2017
Why worry? It's not the end of the world. And if it is, why worry? ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily. ~William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, 1597
I don't know exactly what the zombie apocalypse will look like, but I have a strong feeling that it will resemble Walmart on a Friday night. ~Keith Wynn, 2017
This much scientists agree on: Five times in the history of the earth, most life has winked out. Five times, one species after the next disappeared, the chain collapsed, grazers died as the plants they depended on were lost, and predators disappeared shortly after, life on earth reaching as close to zero as you'd ever care to get... These are the really big ones... endings you would be glad not to witness. But you may not have a choice, because we appear to be in one now. ~Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Future of the Earth, 2012
And perhaps when God first launched our world in space, and saw the waters separating from the dry land, it looked not greatly different from the bubble world in which continents and seas of colour welter, change, and coalesce. And perhaps even as a child sees her bubble world shiver into a spud at a puff, so God shall as suddenly see this great world collapse and pass away at a breath. ~Coulson Kernahan, "Why I 'Wondered,'" Begging the Moon's Pardon, 1930
The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty... A soul touched by the scent of turned soil or sun-warmed grass, a spirit moved by crickets singing in the grass, will spend a lifetime surrounded by wonder even as songbirds drop one by one from the poisoned sky and crickets fall silent in the poisoned grass.
Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong. The tragedy is not the failed world's barren ugliness. The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails. ~Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, 2023, margaretrenkl.com
The end of days is an event I believe we're actually going to create for ourselves... The earth itself won't be destroyed. There's not a meteor shower out there with our name on it... From ancient civilizations to today's experts, we've been warned over and over and over again: if we don't take care of this sacred home we've been given, it won't be able to provide us with shelter, food, and comfort any longer, just as surely as a house we abuse and neglect will be condemned as unfit for human habitation sooner or later... Sometimes you'd think that we're all a bunch of teenagers, left unsupervised in the house while our parents are away. ~Sylvia Browne, End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World, 2008
Then this is the end; earth passes to its doom.
Let us prepare us for annihilation
Of mortal life;—to sink in the whirling gulf.
~Arthur Davison Ficke, The Breaking of Bonds: A Drama of the Social Unrest, 1910
I was tempted to spend the next three hours in lotus, chanting my beads. But I have a deep conviction that one should not attend even the End of the World without a good breakfast… ~Robert A. Heinlein, Friday, 1982
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. ~Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, 1977
Apocalypse by a thousand paper cuts. ~Lucifer, "Goodbye, Lucifer," 2021, written by Chris Rafferty
Certainly not quite oddly enough, a very great many prophets, cranks, busybodies, snobs, opportunists, simple folks (and other nonartists) do not know that they do not know precisely what the word Apocalypse means. By God, a good dictionary ought to get up on its hind legs and tell them, sometime. ~E.E. Cummings, 1935
The term "end of the world" is thrown around as if we know what it means. Apocalypse? What sort of apocalypse — one that destroys civilization, life, the entire planet? How does it work? Is there a way to stop it, or is it just going to steamroll us? And are we even asking the right questions?... Informed mainly by blockbuster films, the popular vision is that the end will be rather sudden and accompanied by a thrilling soundtrack as cities slide into the ocean and global climates swing overnight. ~Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Future of the Earth, 2012
Indoors, the news is second-hand, mostly bad, and even good people are drawn into a dreadful fascination with doom and demise; their faith in extinction gets stronger; they sit and tell stories that begin with
The end of the summer is not the end of the world. Here's to October... ~A.A. Milne (1882–1956), "A Word for Autumn," Not That It Matters
I have no need to remind so intelligent an audience as this that the prophetic words 'End of the world,' so often heard today, signify solely 'End of the earth,' which moment indeed, of all others, has the most interest for us. ~Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World, 1894
You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind...
~William Shakespeare, Tempest, 1611
Yet every year the girls are more beautiful, the athletes are better. So the dilemma remains. Is the curse on the world or on oneself? Does the world get better, no matter how, getting better and worse as part of the same process, or does the world get better in spite of the fact it is getting worse, and we are approaching the time when an apocalypse will pass through the night? ~Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians, 1966
The world was in torment. Hate and envy reigned supreme; and mistrust of man and indifference to God held universal sway...
Civilization had failed; failed because it was unnatural; failed because it was too material. The long years of scientific discovery had made mankind less dependent on himself; while the work he used to do gave way to an excess of pleasure for which he now had much time.
Religion had failed, for there was no unity; and a mass of wavering churchmen, in England, fought among themselves; swinging blindly from fantastic anarchy to superstitious tyranny, and back again.
There was a mass of sects, biting and slandering — sects who, intolerant of belief in the psychical world and doubtful of the accuracy of facts in modern history, had implicit faith in the reports of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the four great journalists.
Politicians strove for power. Aristocratic Ministers... had lied too much and broken too many promises. Their words were as air... Plebeian Ministers wasted their breath and broke in
It was an odd world. It was dancing mad, pleasure mad, arguing mad. Nobody paid attention to any one else, and nobody cared whether they did or not. Civilization was having its last fling; drunk with a
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. ~William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," 1790
The "End of the World" may be taken in two different senses, as meaning either the annihilation of our planet by sudden catastrophe, or by gradual decay, or else the disappearance of human life from the face of the globe, owing to some state of circumstances, possible, at any rate, if not probable. ~Herbert C. Fyfe, "How Will the World End?," Pearson's, July 1900
At these words the cardinal-archbishop rose from his seat and begged to be heard... "[I]f science announces that the drama of the end of the world is to be ushered in by the destruction of the heavens by fire, I cannot refrain from saying that this has always been the universal belief of the church. 'The heavens,' says St. Peter, 'shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall meet with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.' St Paul affirms also its renovation by fire, and we repeat daily at mass his words: 'Eum qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos et sæculum per ignem.'"
"Science," replied the astronomer, "has more than once been in accord with the prophecies of our ancestors..." ~Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World, 1894
Scientists revealed... that the "Doomsday Clock" has been moved up to 90 seconds before midnight — the closest humanity has ever been to armageddon... Launched in 1947, scientists wanted to highlight the possibility of catastrophe to the public... The clock indicates how much time remains until midnight, theoretical doomsday... Before 2020, the closest the hand was set to midnight was two minutes... The furthest the clock has ever been from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991 after then-President George H. W. Bush and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev both announced reductions in the nuclear arsenals of their respective countries. ~Teddy Grant and Bill Hutchinson, "2023 'Doomsday Clock': This is how close we are to the apocalypse, scientists say," 2023 January 24th, abcnews.go.com
our apocalypse
once in ultra slow motion
now on fast forward
~Terri Guillemets, "Accelerant," 2023
There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. ~Plato, Timaeus, translated by B. Jowett, 1873 [Critias]
...the blessed light of former days having been succeeded by the mournful and sickly gleamings of the glowing atmosphere, the whole earth will speedily resound with the funeral knell of universal doom... ~Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World, 1894
We went to a couples therapist. He told her that she had too much contempt. He said contempt is one of the four horsemen of the marital apocalypse. ~Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble, 2019, www.taffyakner.com
There is a superlative temperament which has no medium range, but swiftly oscillates from the freezing to the boiling point, and which affects the manners of those who share it with a certain desperation... They go tearing, convulsed through life, — wailing, praying, exclaiming, swearing. We talk, sometimes, with people whose conversation would lead you to suppose that they had lived in a museum, where all the objects were monsters and extremes... If the talker lose a tooth, he thinks the universal thaw and dissolution of things has come... ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Superlative," 1882
but the science bears out
my catastrophic thinking
~Terri Guillemets, "CBT," 2023
Mark's dream from which he woke to wonder if the end of the world was at hand had been a shadow cast by coming events. ~Compton Mackenzie, The Altar Steps, 1922
Mine eyes grow dizzy 'mid the cities' glooms.
What but complete destruction here shall save
The toiling millions?...
Hope flares and fades as do the death-white plumes
Of steam that from the hissing engines wave;
And in the hearts that should be happy, rave
The incessant voices of the terrible looms...
And what shall mend?...
Can any Spring call forth in wondrous flower
This buried life to all that life might be?
Or waits the world but for one whelming hour
When all shall perish in Time's soundless sea?
The world is chaos; and the Masses stream
Like beasts upon whose vision phantoms swarm.
Yet life from matter slowly moulds a form,
And far to-morrow holds some fairer gleam
For who can see...
Endure! Endure! It is no endless range
Of years that lead us where at last man's power
Shall mould his own salvation, in victorious change.
~Arthur Davison Ficke, The Breaking of Bonds: A Drama of the Social Unrest, 1910
This... will shake the world, both physically and politically... not immediately, for nature works slowly and surely, and mother earth and her sons and daughters will have to pass through throes of pain and terrific convulsions... Its effects on mankind will be astounding, issuing in, as it were... a new era. It will pave the way for the grossest superstition and priestcraft... and... the basest materialism... The mind of the... government will be harassed by a succession of untoward occurrences. Death will deal a heavy blow... the outbreak of a maximum of virulent epidemic diseases... unheard-of crimes, wars, earthquakes, and the desolation of whole tracks of land. These are what we may expect... ~"Dire Predictions: Two Famous Astrologers — Zadkiel and Raphael — Cast the World's Horoscope and Point to the Coming of a New Era," The Flaming Sword, December 1899
Grandpa says mankind's took over too much lately. Says folks used to leave the Last Day and the end of the world in the Lord's hands, but now they've took it over themselves, with the atom bomb. That's how-come everyone's so uneasy. They don't trust each other like they used to trust the Lord. ~Cid Ricketts Sumner, Tammy Out of Time, 1958
...global warming... how dare any of us ignore it or trivialize it, when it's literally the difference between life and death for humankind. ~Sylvia Browne, End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World, 2008
When God is thundering the last world into oblivion,
And quenching the farthest star,
And putting blackness around,
We two will cling to each other.
~Mary Carolyn Davies, "Love-songs," 1915
...we do fear the end of the world as we know it... We are as children dreading the perils of the unknown... And the problems that puzzled the philosophers of the older civilizations are puzzling the philosophers of our own time. ~Newspaper World, c.1945
The world was on fire... Terror spread among the... peoples... overcome by... the scorching heat... "The world is coming to an end!... O my poor children!" were the last words.
Only a few glowing embers in a mound of ashes were left to tell where the world had been. Alone in the silence, Destiny stood and gazed upon the ruin. "'Tis done!" quoth he. ~Stanton Davis Kirkham, "The End of the World," Half-True Stories, 1916
Hear you not the rushing sound of the coming tempest? Do you not behold the clouds open, and destruction lurid and dire pour down on the blasted earth? See you not the thunderbolt fall, and are deafened by the shout of heaven that follows its descent? Feel you not the earth quake and open with agonizing groans... all announcing the last days of man?...
It was too late now.... the end of time was come... the swift-approaching end of things... Even as we spend ourselves in struggles for her recovery, she dies... Hope is dead!... With the nearly extinct race of man all our toils grew near a conclusion.... this state of wretchedness became more confirmed, and... more apparent... prey of the vast calamity... the impalpable, invisible foe, who had so long besieged us...
Alas for these latter days! The world had grown old, and all its inmates partook of the decrepitude. Why talk of infancy, manhood, and old age? We all stood equal sharers of the last throes of time-worn nature... The heart sickened at the variety of misery... the sad end of the world.
Man... the queller of the elements, the lord of created nature, the peer of demi-gods, existed no longer. ~Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man, 1826
With horror he apprehended that what he had so often feared had finally come to pass. An earthquake had swallowed up London in spite of everybody's assurance that London could not be swallowed up by earthquakes. He was going down to smoke and fire… or was it the end of the world? The quick and the dead… skeletons… thousands and thousands of skeletons… "Guardian Angel!" he shrieked. ~Compton Mackenzie, The Altar Steps, 1922
He answered with a cry of exultation and relief. "Oh, Mother," he sighed... "I thought it was being the end of the world.... first I thought it was an earthquake, and then I thought it was the Day of Judgment... How silly of me... Of course it couldn't be the Day of Judgment, because it's night, isn't it? It couldn't ever be the Day of Judgment in the night, could it?" ~Compton Mackenzie, The Altar Steps, 1922
Winter is a long, open time. The nights are as dark as the end of the world. ~Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, 2007
War and Disaster, Famine and Pestilence,
Vaunt-couriers of the Century that comes,
Behold them shaking their tremendous plumes
Above the world! Lo, all the air grows dense
With rumors of destruction and a sense,
Cadaverous, of corpses and of tombs
Predestined; while,—like monsters in the glooms,—
Bristling with battle, shadowy and immense,
The Nations rise in dread apocalypse.—
Where now the boast Earth makes of civilization?
Its brag of Christianity?—In vain
We seek to see them in the wild eclipse
Of hell and horror and the devastation
Of Death triumphant on his hills of slain.
~Madison Cawein, "A. D. Nineteen Hundred," Weeds by the Wall, 1901
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. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
The planet's survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble. ~Elias Canetti (1905–1994), translated from the German by Joel Agee
From all the rest of the globe the human race had slowly but inexorably disappeared, in face of a thousand hardships which yearly became more insupportable — dried up, exhausted, degenerated... through the lack of an assimilable atmosphere and sufficient food.... [T]he surface of the earth was a ruin, and... only the last vestiges of a vanished greatness were to be seen. ~Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World, 1894
The course of human life seemed arrested, and anxiety was depicted upon every face... A few, less dismayed, wished to appear more confident, and sounded now and then a note of doubt, even of hope, as: "It may prove a mistake;" or, "It will pass..." or, again: "It will amount to nothing; we shall get off with a fright," and other like assurances.
But expectation and uncertainty are often more terrible than the catastrophe itself... One was to die, without doubt, but how? By the sudden shock of collision, crushed to death? By fire, the conflagration of a world? By suffocation, the poisoning of the atmosphere? What torture awaited humanity?...
For more than a month the business of the world was suspended... What was the use of occupying oneself with business affairs... if the end of the world was at hand?... Humanity no longer attached importance to anything... ~Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World, 1894
"In that case, gentlemen," resumed the president of the geological society of France, "I shall explain to you... The destruction of the globe by some great catastrophe is a dramatic conception... Does not the stability of our continent seem permanent? Except through the intervention of some new agency, how is it possible to doubt the durability of this earth which has supported so many generations before our own, and whose monuments, of the greatest antiquity, prove that if they have come down to us in a state of ruin, it is not because the soil has refused to support them, but because they have suffered from the ravages of time and especially from the hand of man?... [I]t seems gratuitous indeed to seek here the omens of a final catastrophe.
"Such might be the reasoning of one who casts a superficial and indifferent glance upon the external world. But the conclusions of one accustomed to scrutinize closely the apparently insignificant changes taking place about him would be quite different..." ~Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World, 1894
As the habitable zone became more and more restricted... the population had still further diminished, as had also the mean length of human life... ~Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World, 1894
This world cannot endure a new war fought on the atomic plane — such a war would be the end of the world as we know it. ~Andrew Southorn, "The Spirit of Progress: Science Has Outpaced Man," 1945
But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.
I don't believe it's possible to live the lives we came here to live while being perpetually braced to die. ~Sylvia Browne, End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World, 2008
[T]he editors of Pearson's Magazine present... a summary of scientific conjectures under the interesting title "How Will the World End?"...
When the vertical rays beat down so fiercely that all nature is gasping for breath, some persons may be glad to know that so many learned men think the sun is losing heat so fast it is only a question of a few million years, more or less, before it will be hanging a pale, ash-colored ball in a weird, gray sky, while a steady snow-storm settles down over the earth, and the ice trust has collapsed through a surplus of material on hand; when loathsome animals of Mesozoic size brought into being by the new conditions, crawl over frozen lakes and seas; when the last leaf flutters from the dying tree, and the last man lies a stiffened corpse.
This picture appeals to the imagination on a dog-day morning, but there are theories less adapted to the season — for instance that of M. Stanier, Prof. of Geology at the Agriculturist Institute of Gembloux, who predicts that mankind en masse, will die of thirst. M. Stanier admits that this idea seems paradoxical in view of the vast oceans and seas which cover three quarters of the earth, but he calculates that the surface water will penetrate more and more into the crust, and will enter into combination with the recently solidified rocks at the center as the interior of the globe goes on cooling; thus "The oceans will grow smaller and smaller, the rains which nourish the continents will become rarer and rarer, while the deserts will enlarge their boundaries and gradually absorb the fertile plains.
This appalling prospect is eclipsed by Lord Kelvin's recent announcement that there is only oxygen enough in the atmosphere to last mankind for three hundred years, and humanity is doomed to suffocation: while Professor Ries, an American scientist, looks forward to the time when air will be manufactured and sold like any other commodity. Some excitable persons who are apt to lose control of the nerve centers, may be disturbed by Tesla's fear least we unwittingly set fire to the atmosphere by electric discharges of a few million volts; if this happens, the world will vanish in a terrific explosion...
Mr. H. G. Wells has drawn a vivid picture of a world devoured by ants... Then again, he imagines that changes of climate and other modifications might develop new species of a dangerous type, like the sudden appearance out of the sea of a race of amphibious monsters, capable of sweeping man and all his works out of existence...
In the list of hypothetical disasters, there are theories to suit everybody... Nature uses the atom for an object lesson, to show the children in the great world-garden what the end of man will be. Strangely enough, her testimony agrees with that of the Bible — man is going to be burned up some day...
The end of the world... All the old science can offer is the bitter curse of annihilation in some frightful form. ~L. E. Borden, "The Prophetic Atom," in The Flaming Sword, 1900
At any rate, I remain cheerful — if only through some inner necessity. Cheerfulness will prevail. I believe it in my bones... While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he was sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful. ~H. G. Wells, Apropos of Dolores, 1938
The writer finds... If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded...
His renascent intelligence finds now that we are confronted with strange convincing realities so overwhelming that, were he indeed one of those logical consistent creatures we incline to claim we are, he would think day and night in a passion of concentration, dismay and mental struggle upon the ultimate disaster that confronts our species...
It requires an immense and concentrated effort of realisation, demanding constant reminders and refreshment, on the part of a normal intelligence, to perceive that the cosmic movement of events is increasingly adverse to the mental make-up of our everyday life. It is a realisation the writer finds extremely difficult to sustain...
The reality glares coldly and harshly upon any of those who can wrench their minds from the comforting delusions of normality to face the unsparing question that has overwhelmed the writer. They discover a frightful queerness has come into life. Even quite unobservant people now are betraying, by fits and starts, a certain wonder, a shrinking and fugitive sense that something is happening so that life will never be quite the same again...
Spread out and examine the pattern of events, and you will find yourself face to face with a new scheme of being, hitherto unimaginable by the human mind. This new cold glare mocks and dazzles the human intelligence, and yet, such is the obstinate vitality of the philosophical urge in minds of that insatiable quality, that they can still, under its cold urgency, seek some way out or round or through the impasse.
The writer is convinced that there is no way our or round or through the impasse. It is the end...
[I]n the present vast confusion of our world, there was always the assumption of an ultimate restoration of rationality, an adaptation and a resumption. It was merely a question, the fascinating question, of what forms the new rational phase would assume, what
He did his utmost to pursue the trends, that upward spiral, towards their convergence in a new phase in the story of life, and the more he weighed the realities before him the less was he able to detect any convergence whatever. Changes had ceased to be systematic, and the further he estimated the course they were taking, the greater their divergence. Hitherto events had been held together by a certain logical consistency, as the heavenly bodies as we know them have been held together by the pull, the golden cord, of Gravitation. Now it is as if that cord had vanished and everything was driving anyhow to anywhere at a steadily increasing velocity.
The limit to the orderly secular — "secular" in the sense of the phrase "in sæcula sæculorum", that is to say, Eternity — development of life had seemed to be a definitely fixed one, so that it was possible to sketch out the pattern of things to come. But that limit was reached and passed into a hitherto incredible chaos...
To a watcher in some remote entirely alien cosmos, if we may assume that impossibility, it might well seem that extinction is coming to man like a brutal thunderclap of Halt!
It never comes like a thunderclap. That Halt! comes to this one
Our world of self-delusion will... perish amidst its evasions and fatuities. It is like a convoy lost in darkness on an unknown rocky coast, with quarrelling pirates in the chart-room and savages clambering up the sides of the ships to plunder and do evil as the whim may take them. That is the rough outline of the more and more jumbled movie on the screen before us...
What does appear now, is this fact of the slowing down of terrestrial vitality... The writer sees the world as a jaded world devoid of recuperative power. In the past he has liked to think that Man could pull out of his entanglements and start a new creative phase of human living. In the face of our universal inadequacy, that optimism has given place to a stoical cynicism... Man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favour of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. Only a small, highly adaptable minority of the species can possibly survive. The rest will not trouble about it, finding such opiates and consolations as they have a mind for... ~H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether, 1945
Thus the destruction of the world will result from the combustion of the atmosphere... The temperature of the air will be raised several hundred degrees; woods, gardens, plants, forests, habitations, edifices, cities, villages, will all be rapidly consumed; the sea, the lakes and the rivers will begin to boil; men and animals, enveloped in the hot breath of the comet, will die asphyxiated before they are burned, their gasping lungs inhaling only flame. Every corpse will be almost immediately carbonized, reduced to ashes, and in this vast celestial furnace only the heart-rending voice of the trumpet of the indestructible angel of the Apocalypse will be heard, proclaiming from the sky, like a funeral knell, the antique death-song: "Solvet sæculum in favilla." ~Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World, 1894
These, then, are some of the predictions as to the end of the world. Whichever of these may come true, man seems doomed to destruction. ~Herbert C. Fyfe, "How Will the World End?," Pearson's, July 1900
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published 2020 Mar 16
revised Jul 2023, Nov 2024
last saved 2024 Nov 21
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