crisis quotes

   When a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience.

- Mary Hunter Austin
  The Land of Little Rain,'The Basket Maker'.

Dans ces grandes crises, le coeur se brise ou se bronze. In times of crisis, the heart either breaks or boldens.

- Honore   de Balzac
  La Maison du chat-qui-pelote.

Crisis? What crisis?

-Baron
  Headline in The Sun,11  Jan, alluding to his remark on returning from the Guadaloupe summit to be confronted by widespread strikes. His actual words were,'I don't think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.'

If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.

-Terry Eagleton
  In the London Review of Books, 2 Dec.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

-T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
  'The Love Song of  J  Alfred Prufrock' (first published in Poetry magazine, collected in Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917).

After all the doors were shut, our region is facing a deep abyss after the turning of the Gulf crisis into an imminent catastrophe.We have not left a door that we did not knockon, ora road that we did not taketofind a political settlement of this crisis.

- ibnTalal Hussein
  On his attempts to intercede for peace in the Gulf  War, Jan.

But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.

- Aldous Leonard Huxley
  'Brave New World Revisited', in Esquire.

There can't be any crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

- HenryAlfred Kissinger
  In Time,  Jan.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink fromtheservice of his country; but hethat standsit now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

-Thomas Paine
  The Crisis, introduction, Dec.

   The healthy life is hardly one marked by an absence of crises. In fact, an individual's psychological health is distinguished by how early he or she can meet crisis.

- M(organ) Scott Peck
  The Different Drum.

Thank Heaven! the crisis The danger is past, And the lingering illness Is over at last And the fever called 'Living' Is conquered at last.

- EdgarAllan Poe
  'ForAnnie'.

Poetry, surely, is a crisis, perhaps the onlyactionable one we can call our own.

-J(erome) D(avid) Salinger
  'Seymour: An Introduction'.

It is exciting to have a real crisis onyour hands, when you have spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment.

- Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness Thatcher
  Of the Falklands conflict. Speech to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference,14 May.

Village cricket spread fast through the land.In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watcheach ball a potential crisis.

- George Macaulay Trevelyan
Quoted in Helen Exley Cricket Quotations (1992).

   The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do.

- Raymond Williams
  Culture and Society, ch.3.