Crisis Quotes
More Crisis Quotes
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!
g. m. trevelyan— English Social History (1942), ch. 8.
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
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.
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
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— 1993 In the London Review of Books, 2 Dec.
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
Which would you like sitting in the oval office dealing with it (a major crisis)? Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Geraldine Ferraro, Jimmy Carter, ... or Sarah Palin? Personally, I would pick Palin.
— Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2008, interview with Kelsey Hubbard. [1]
This is a crisis that was caused by people, white with blue eyes. And before the crisis they looked as if they knew everything about economics.
luiz inácio lula da silva— At a 2009 G-20 London Summit in March 2009.
— Financial crisis 'caused by white men with blue eyes, by Andrew Grice, The Independent, 27 March 2009
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)
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.
— 1956 'Brave New World Revisited', in Esquire.
There can't be any crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
— 1977 In Time, Jan.
That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident; ...
bernard bailyn— Chapter IV, THE LOGIC OF REBELLION, p. 132
The immediate source of ecological crisis is capitalism... Capitalism is a cancer in the biosphere... I believe the color of radicalism today is not red, but green.
— Steve Chase, ed., Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman(Boston South End Press, 1991, p 57-59); O'Leary, Richard. Environmental mafia: the enemy is us. pp. 41
Hillary Clinton did what she did for the sake of her agenda of personal ambition, carefully planned and worked out over months in which she was using and abusing the state of New York — because she looked at several other states--as a platform for her personal ambition. I, on the other hand, have responded to the call of the people of Illinois who have asked me to come and help them with a crisis situation. It doesn't violate my principal understanding of federalism, because federalism has two parts: state sovereignty and national unity.
alan keyes— Alan Keyes on CNN's American Morning, August 11, 2004.[45]
But this (a listing of illustrations of how the genome can change other than by mutations) doesn’t constitute a crisis it’s a very interesting finding that shows that variation in a genome can arise by processes other than mutation of an organism’s own DNA. The disposition of that variation still must occur via either natural selection (it can be good or bad) or genetic drift (no effect on fitness). This hasn’t really changed the theory of evolution one iota, though it’s changed our view of where organisms can acquire new genes.
jerry coyne— "Another philosopher proclaims a nonexistent “crisis” in evolutionary biology" September 7, 2012
We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end.
camille paglia— p. ix (Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992))
The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra (2000) EWD 1305: Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering
With mortal crisis doth portend, My days to appropinque an end.
— Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1664), Part I, Canto III, line 589.
«No es una crisis, es una estafa»
— It's not a crisis, it's a con. [ ]
