Quotes About Crisis

Even among Goldman alumni, Steven Mnuchin has distinguished himself by his willingness to profit off misery. After the 2008 Wall Street collapse, and in the midst of the foreclosure crisis, Mnuchin purchased a California bank. The renamed company, OneWest, earned Mnuchin the nickname "Foreclosure King," reportedly collecting $1.2 billion from the government to help cover the losses for foreclosed homes and evicting tens of thousands of people between 2009 and 2014.

And it most certainly doesn't help that we are trying to navigate this civilizational crisis at a moment when some of the most brilliant minds of our time are devoting vast energies to figuring out ever-more-ingenious tools to keep us running around in digital circles in search of the next dopamine hit.

This Gulf Coast crisis is about many things: corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and reengineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.

The fact that the earth's atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out, it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract.

Indeed, the climate crisis, by presenting our species with an existential threat and putting us on a firm and unyielding science-based deadline, might just be the catalyst we need to knit together a great many powerful movements bound together by a belief in the inherent worth and value of all people and united by a rejection of the sacrifice zone mentality, whether it applies to peoples or to places.

After paying for the crisis of the bankers with cuts to education, health care, and social safety nets, is it any wonder that a beleaguered public is in no mood to bail out the fossil fuel companies from the crisis that they not only created but continue to actively worsen?

The kind of transformation that is now required [to address the climate crisis] will happen only if it is treated as a civilizational mission, in our country and in every major economy on earth.

Global reinsurance companies are making billions in profits, in part by selling new kinds of protection schemes to developing countries that have done almost nothing to create the climate crisis, but whose infrastructure is intensely vulnerable to its impacts.8

Hands are wrung about the "migrant crisis"—but not nearly so much about the crises driving the migrations. Since 2014, an estimated thirteen thousand people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores.

if we chart the locations of the most intense conflict spots in the world right now—from the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq—what becomes clear is that these also happen to be some of the hottest and driest places on earth.

Droughts and floods create all kinds of business opportunities besides a growing demand for men with guns.

just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought—so, now, boats follow both. Boats filled with refugees fleeing homes ravaged by war and drought in the driest parts of the planet.

By this point in history—after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises—free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in obscurity.

Indeed, the failure of our political leaders to even attempt to ensure a safe future for us represents a crisis of legitimacy of almost unfathomable proportions.

They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species.

Mum always told me that you couldn't know what people would do in a crisis, but I'd thought she just meant you should forgive people for behaving like weasels under bad circumstances, not that a stale biscuit like Khamis might suddenly come over all heroic in a tight corner.

Ilove having existential crises at bedtime, it's so restful. I lay awake for at least an hour after the final bell, staring furiously at the blue flicker of the gaslight by the door.

Ik vind het heerlijk om vlak voor ik naar bed ga een existentiële crisis te hebben, het is zo rustgevend.

our elites used the "crisis" to shut down Western norms of liberty, the human-centered world, and civilization itself.

But my husband and I were not reassured by the Nurse Ratched–type comforting language, and we were astonished at Governor Cuomo's dicta. Since we had both lived in war zones and conflict areas, we knew that commerce was never closed, even in the worst crises. People needed to keep making their livings in order to survive the crisis, and the economy needed to be sustained in order for the community to survive the crisis.

He replied with something like, "I will keep going until we either win our freedoms back, or I am in a Gulag." I understood. This is truly a time in history for the hammering out of heroes and heroines in the forge of crisis. And so it is also a time of cowardice, when those who choose collusion, when they know better, are allowing their souls to shrivel in that same heat.

The virus and the vaccine were just the stimuli. What had really been accomplished was the breaking of America.

I am often called a "conspiracy theorist." The reason is simple. Unlike all but a very few other journalists or nonfiction writers, I've been a political consultant to a presidential campaign and advisor to a vice president. And as a result of those experiences, I know how the powerful react in a crisis — especially when their self-interest is involved.

Remember,too,that all who succeed in life get off to a bad start,and pass through many heartbreaking struggles before they arrive. The turning point in the lives of those who succeed usually comes at some moment of crisis,through which they are introduced to their other selves.