Crisis Quotes
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In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watch, with its rapid sequence of amusing incidents, each ball a potential crisis!
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More Crisis Quotes
In my life I had come to realize that when things were going very well indeed it was just the time to anticipate trouble. And, conversely, I learned from pleasant experience that at the most despairing crisis, when all looked sour beyond words, some delightful "break" was apt to lurk just around the corner.
amelia earhart— p. 70 (Last Flight (1937))
Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means what it bestows on us the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.
bill moyers— "The Power of Democracy", speech accepting the Public Intellectual Award of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (7 February 2007), as quoted in Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 92
This was the first time WND had found a major intellectual leader behind the push to integrate North America suggesting that a crisis of 9-11 proportions might be just what was needed to advance the process toward establishing a North American Union and the amero.
jerome corsi— "North American Union leader says merger just crisis away", WorldNetDaily (2006-12-15)
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
henry kissinger— As quoted in The New York Times Magazine (1 June 1969)
Daily life is a comprimised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism , and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence.
e. o. wilson— Wilson cites Goffman's Frame Analysis (1974) as a reference here
There is no doubt that many expensive national projects may add to our prestige or serve science. But none of them must take precedence over human needs. As long as Congress does not revise its priorities, our crisis is not just material, it is a crisis of the spirit.
— Nelson A. Rockefeller, letter to Mayor John V. Lindsay (April 24, 1971), reported in The New York Times (April 25, 1971), p. 69. The letter concerned New York City's financial problems.
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.
— 1982 Of the Falklands conflict. Speech to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference,14 May.
In a cruel irony, speculators - rather then elected politicians - are the shots on crisis management. In an absurd logic, those who foster financial turbulence have been invited by the G7 Finance ministers to identify policies which attenuate financial turbulence.
michel chossudovsky— Economic Warfare, Chapter 21, p. 327
“The EU is mired in deep structural crisis. Greece, Portugal and Ireland cannot survive inside the Euro.”
nigel farage— Segment from an article in the New York Times newspaper, 18 May 2012.
— Can Europe be saved? Should it?
Much of the securitization took the form of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) with senior credit tranches certified by rating agencies as AAA. It was the failure to properly price such risky assets that characterized the crisis.
Alan Greenspan— "Epilogue", p. 512
I am sometimes also asked whether the October crisis taught me anything about the art of governing, or about the means that were at my disposal for defusing the crisis. First of all, it taught me that you can be the prescient futurologist in the world, you can lay out the best-made plans and define your priorities with the utmost care, but if you show yourself to be incapable of managing a crisis when it arises, you will lose your right to govern and the whole thing will blow up in your face.
pierre trudeau— Part 2, 1968 - 1974 Power And Responsibility, p. 149-150
My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis, it's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act, that's a renewable resource, let's renew it.
al gore— Academy Award acceptance speech (21 February 2007)
Unfortunately, throughout the housing crisis we’ve seen innocent homeowners who have been victims of shady mortgage lenders and unscrupulous individuals who have used a down market to line their own pockets at the expense of others. This bill is designed to send a message by revising our laws to ensure criminals are brought to justice and that law enforcement has the tools to uncover these fraudulent schemes and go after the bad actors. Criminals should be put on notice that ripping off homeowners and taxpayers won’t be tolerated.
chuck grassley— Quoted in "Congress Targets Mortgage Fraud: Justice for Victims, Jail for the Guilty," Tri-State Defender (2009-02-12)
Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis. But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts... We have a subprime financial system, not a subprime mortgage market.
nouriel roubini— Quoted in Stephen Mihm, "Dr. Doom," The New York Times (2008-08-15)
In periods of economic upheaval, in periods of economic crisis, wealth is not destroyed, it is merely transferred.
— Larry Bates, in The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America (1998)
In times of crisis, the heart either breaks or boldens.
honoré de balzac— 1830 La Maison du chat-qui-pelote.
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.
— 1850 'ForAnnie'.
Having been informed of events by Vice-Chancellor von Papen, President Hindenburg summoned General Goering, in his capacity of Chief of Police, and myself to Neudeck. Our instructions are to consult with you on the measures to be taken to ensure internal peace. If a complete relaxation of tension does not immediately take place (and to this end we must avoid any ministerial crisis), martial law will be proclaimed.
werner von blomberg— Quoted in "Hitler and I" - Page 186 - by Otto Strasser, Gwenda David, Eric Mosbacher - Germany - 1940
Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant.
paulo coelho— p. 50 (Eleven Minutes (2003))
I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.
albert hofmann— Foreword (LSD : My Problem Child (1980))
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
ludwig von mises— Chapter XX: Interest, Credit Expansion, The Trade Cycle, § 8 : The Monetary or Circulation Theory of the Trade Cycle
“It is a mistake ,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort . We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century.”
Isaac Asimov— Section 1, Chapter 7, p. 56; the book is set in the year 2100.
I have a vague expectation of some crisis, I know not what. But it has long seemed, that, in the year 1850, I should stand on a plateau in the ascent of life, where I should be allowed to pause for a while, and take more clear and commanding views than ever before. Yet my life proceeds as regularly as the fates of a Greek tragedy, and I can but accept the pages as they turn.
margaret fuller— Letter (Spring 1850).
If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained?
david harvey— Chapter 10, Finance Capital And Its Contradictions, p. 316
The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.
alexis de tocqueville— Chapter XVIII
The great German poet, Goethe, who also lived through a crisis of freedom, said to his generation: "What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves or it will not be yours." We inherited freedom. We seem unaware that freedom has to be remade and re-earned in each generation of man.
— Adlai Stevenson, "Politics and Morality," Saturday Review (February 7, 1959), p. 12; quoting, in part, Goethe's Faust, act I, scene i, "Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen." In Randall Jarrell's translation, "That which you inherit from your fathers / You must earn in order to possess." Goethe's Faust (republished 1976), p. 35.
My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe .
— Alfred North Whitehead, in Max Harold Fisch Classic American Philosophers: Peirce, James, Royce, Santayana, Dewey, Whitehead : Selections from Their Writings, Fordham Univ Press, 1996, p.19
