Quotes About Instability

I didn't have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire.

In a banana republic, one might slip on a banana peel but things do work - now and then for the people, albeit inefficiently and unreliably.

The hardest part of acting is not being guaranteed work. Every job could be your last.

We do not agree that hindsight is required. The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and al-Qaeda activity in Iraq, were each explicitly identified before the invasion.

Even the strongest bonds, flesh and blood, they can just evaporate in a second given the right conditions.

But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.

I've pretty much always lived paycheck to paycheck. I never considered it struggling, but it has always been a high-wire act.

As discomfiting as it is to both market optimists and policy activists, a certain amount of instability is inherent to the economy.

Paradoxically, resource-rich developing countries are often worse off than comparable countries that lack those resources. One reason for this is that large resource endowments provide a huge financial incentive for attempts to overthrow the government and seize power.

Things change all the time - abruptly, unpredictably, and often for no good reason. But knowing that didn't do you that much good, apparently.

The only thing worse than too much government is too little: in failed states, people suffer at least as much violence and injustice as under authoritarian rule, and in addition their trains do not run on time.

And it felt like every time I turned around, somebody was either dying or walking out.

Quite clearly. Also a few where you die tomorrow. Actually the next couple of months are quite perilous for you altogether.

It's a madhouse, of course. A complete, utter madhouse. I only hope to God it remains one.

He had long been her favorite, yet every eunuch knew that the favor of a ruler is less stable than sunlight in early spring. At any moment it can be withdrawn, and as soon can a eunuch's head tumble from his shoulders.

His anger is easily excited and appeased, and he changes from hour to hour.

It was frightening to realize how fast things could go wrong.

I think that's how life works. Just when you think you have it all set up and perfectly arranged, someone sneezes, or God blows on it, and all the building blocks come tumbling down.

The creative destruction that would be wrought by the process of industrialization would erode the leaders' trading profits and take resources and labor away from their lands. The aristocracies would be economic losers from industrialization. More important, they would also be political losers, as the process of industrialization would undoubtedly create instability and political challenges to their monopoly of political power.

The so-called ancien régime prided itself on its continuity and stability. Entry by entrepreneurs and talented individuals into new occupations would create instability and was not tolerated. If

The Maya experience illustrates not only the possibility of growth under extractive institutions but also another fundamental limit to this type of growth: the political instability that emerges and ultimately leads to collapse of both society and state as different groups and people fight to become the extractors.

Both feared that the mechanization of stocking production would be politically destabilizing. It would throw people out of work, create unemployment and political instability, and threaten royal power. The stocking frame was an innovation that promised huge productivity increases, but it also promised creative destruction. T

La Revolución francesa creó mucha violencia, sufrimiento, inestabilidad y guerra. No obstante, gracias a ella, los franceses no quedaron atrapados en instituciones extractivas que bloqueaban el crecimiento y la prosperidad económicos, como hicieron los regímenes absolutistas de Europa oriental como Austria-Hungría y Rusia.

Infighting and instability are thus inherent features of extractive institutions, and they not only create further inefficiencies but also often reverse any political centralization, sometimes even leading to the total breakdown of law and order and descent into chaos, as the Maya city-states experienced following their relative success during their Classical Era. Though