Quotes About Crisis

Toen de bewoners van Paaseiland in de problemen kwamen, konden ze nergens heen, was er niemand bij wie ze hulp konden zoeken - en wij moderne aardbewoners zullen evenmin elders ons heil kunnen zoeken als onze problemen groter worden. Dat zijn de redenen waarom mensen de ondergang van Paaseiland zien als een metafoor, een doemscenario voor wat ons in onze eigen toekomst misschien te wachten staat.

shared among all of those types of crisis, whatever their cause, is the sense that something important about one's current approach to life isn't working, and that one has to find a new approach.

That was part of the reason why my 1959 crisis was so traumatic to me: it was my first acute life crisis. By comparison, my 1980 and 2000 professional crises were un-traumatic. I did eventually switch career directions from membrane physiology to evolutionary physiology around 1980, and from physiology to geography after 2000. But those decisions weren't painful, because I had come to assume from my previous experience that things would probably turn out OK.

Table 1.2. Factors related to the outcomes of national crises 1. National consensus that one's nation is in crisis 2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and financial help from other nations 5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems 6. National identity

Hence one can think of a crisis as a moment of truth: a turning point, when conditions before and after that "moment" are "much more" different from one another than before and after "most" other moments.

Something big and bad suddenly happening motivates us more than do slowly developing problems, and also more than the prospect of something big and bad happening in the future. I'm reminded of Samuel Johnson's saying: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

First, Germany's devastated condition at the time of its surrender of May 7 and 8, 1945 posed the worst crisis faced by any nation discussed in this book. The erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, and the student revolts peaking over several months of 1968, then represented two further crises. Conversely, Perry's arrival in Japan and Pinochet's coup in Chile actually weren't unexpected

its contribution depends on a new framework derived from personal crises, an explicitly comparative approach, and a perspective drawn from my own life experiences and those of my friends.

1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis.

Table 1.1. Factors related to the outcomes of personal crises 1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis 2. Acceptance of one's personal responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate one's individual problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and emotional help from other individuals and groups 5. Using other individuals as models of how to solve problems 6. Ego strength 7. Honest self-appraisal 8. Experience of previous personal crises 9. Patience

The key word here is "selective." It's neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don't need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.

The "crisis" is a sudden realization of, or a sudden acting on, pressures that have been building up for a long time. This truth was acknowledged explicitly by Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who (as we'll see in Chapter 7) devised a whirlwind program of apparently major changes in 19 days of December 1972, but who downplayed his own reforms as a "recognition of what has already happened.

José Antonio Primo de Rivera repetía como si fuera suya: «A última hora siempre ha sido un pelotón de soldados el que ha salvado la civilización».

With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, Are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?

Europe's} is a crisis of historical ideals facing up to the impossibility of their realization. (The US'} is the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence.

The West is seized with panic at the thought of not being able to save what the symbolic order had been able to conserve for forty centuries, but out of sight

les 8 900 milliards de dollars que les gouvernements des États industriels ont versés en 2008-2009 à leurs banques respectives correspondent à soixante-quinze ans d'aide publique au développement... (p. 87)

Does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature?

My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o'clock. Perhaps that's why I try and have my crises in the evening.

Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said '27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS'. It might as well have said '27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON'.

Nuclear, ecological, chemical, economic — our arsenal of Death by Stupidity is impressive for a species as smart as Homo sapiens [Strange New World, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/boo... ].

We're going to wake up one morning and the world won't be the same. That morning could be any morning, I say. It could be climate breakdown. It could be nuclear. It could be Trump or Bolsonaro. It could be The Handmaid's Tale.

In any case, could it be worse than human? I read today that humans have wiped out sixty per cent of animal wildlife since 1970. In Brazil we have a dictator posting as a democratically elected president who is opening up the Amazon to commercial interests. Human beings really don't have a better chance than AI. We are too late for anything else.

Think about last time you were broke ... now how well did it go with spending your way out of it? Did that work?