Quotes About Crisis

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America's inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country's inability to govern itself.

And as things fell apart, nobody paid any attention.

A device that sits somewhere between the categories of "possible general method" and "for emergency use only / you're going to die method" is the Reverso.

one of the leader's most valuable but least valued contributions is avoiding trouble, not addressing it once it's occurred).

As in all pre-industrial mortality crises, it would have been quite normal for large numbers to flee the towns at the onset of an epidemic, and on this occasion such a response would have been entirely rational, for the impact of the plague was far more severe in confined and congested environments where rats (or whatever actually was the vector of the deadly bacterium Yersinia pestis) could breed and move freely around.

The impending teacher shortage is the most critical education issue we will face in the next decade.

If God says homosexuality is a sin, why didn't he answer my child's many prayers pleading to be changed? Why does God apparently condemn people for something they were born with and that he won't change for them? For both child and parent, these questions can lead to a crisis of faith.

I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn't augur well for my longevity

The first decade of the twenty-first century was a crazy bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression.

was glaringly obvious that a new currency at Facebook scale would be a systemic risk — it would be big enough to break everything. Regulators and legislators had Libra's number immediately — they knew this kind of foolishness, and they knew that these Bitcoin venture capital bros were absolutely stupid and arrogant enough to do another 2008 financial crisis all by themselves.

About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

The difference, though, was that this time, the bankers were doing it on an inconceivable scale: the total amount of debt they had run up was larger than the combined Gross Domestic Products of every country in the world—and it threw the world into a tailspin and almost destroyed the system itself.

We are already behaving differently from that bacterial colony in a petri dish, deviating from the fatal S-curve, using our limited but growing global cognitive capacities to anticipate and soften or avoid the crash. We are waking up, and we can see the trends starting to turn. We are slowly rounding the corner on the related problems of poverty and overpopulation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,

Remixing Our Metaphors We're not a cancer or a disease. We are organisms doing what all organisms do, surviving and reproducing as best we can. We are, however, a kind of organism that has never existed before, and we've gotten ourselves in a situation. Fortunately, we may be equipped to get ourselves out of it. A plague does not think. A cancer does not decide to change course. A weed does not weed itself. We could.

The Chinese represent crisis with two pictographs: danger and opportunity. The

The crisis of liberalism (and of American political reflection) is due to liberalism's success in becoming the official language for all public statement.

The facts of the Great Depression made a dominant economic theory that denied the possibility of generalized crisis untenable.

If everybody in the world suddenly decided not to use their credit cards for three days, the whole global economy would be in serious trouble. (Recall how we were all urged to get out our credit cards after 9/11 and get back to shopping.) Which is why so much effort is put toward getting money out of our pockets and keeping it circulating.

Three rules for when you are under fire: 1) Always have a plan for what to do if something bad happens. 2) Always be the first to move; don't wait until the situation is clear, because by then it may be too late. 3) Keep moving until you find cover or your out of the fire zone.

Three Rules for When You Are Under Fire: 1) Always have a plan for what to do if something bad happens.

I'd taken a big fat crisis off my shoulders and loaded it all on Jesus, which seemed unfair in a way, but was exactly what the Bible recommended.

Fue como cuando en un avión, de repente, a la azafata le empieza a temblar la mano durante el vuelo, ese momento en el que comienzas a pensar que te vas a estrellar.

I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.

I splashed some water on my face again because I thought that's what you do in a crisis. You wash your face. Did it really help, or was it a myth circulated by the soap industry?