Quotes About Instability

Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they're not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.

since most countries undertook financial liberalisation in the 1970s and 1980s, there has been a marked increase in the frequency of banking crises (see Figure 1).10 Globally, in the period 1970 to 2007, the International Monetary Fund has recorded 124 systemic bank crises, 208 currency crises and 63 sovereign debt crises.11 For modern capitalism instability has become, not the exception, but a seemingly structural feature.

You haven't seen untidiness until you've seen a room where gravity has failed twice in different directions.

My meth lab tends to explode. I move to a new one like a hermit crab.

Her life is crumbling and she's holding it together like a child protecting a sandcastle from the waves.

Un coup de gel soudain pouvait à tout instant les anéantir.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

En el siglo XXI, el poder es más fácil de adquirir, más difícil de utilizar y más fácil de perder.

He believes the world has entered "an era of perpetual irregular warfare.

I walk on the surface of a shifting bog. I have to grab for whatever I can find that is solid.

Economics sets trends in philosophy, although it is extremely unstable due to inflation.

How fragile our lives are anyway. How quickly things can change forever.

It is manifest that the existence of unstable conditions renders impossible the prediction of future events, if our knowledge of the present state is only approximate and not accurate.3

It was not, Zelda wrote, prosperity or the softness of life, or any instability that marred the war generation; it was a great emotional disappointment resulting from the fact that life moved in poetic gestures when they were younger and had since settled back into buffoonery.

Nothing could be trusted in Chicago, especially the weather.

How are we to evaluate the truth claims of science when we know that these claims may in the future be overturned? Elsewhere I have called this problem the instability of scientific truth.16 In the 1980s, philosopher Larry Laudan called it the pessimistic meta-induction of the history of science.17 He observed (as have many others) that the history of science offers many examples of scientific "truths" that were later viewed as misconceptions

Never depend on the multitude, full of instability and whims; always take precautions against it.

Wszystko, co z?o?one, skazane jest na rozpad.

A prince may be seen happy today and ruined tomorrow without having shown any chance in his character. For the prince who relies entirely on fortune is lost when it changes...

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

There's a brittleness to life for about 150 million Americans, with a constant risk that sickness, layoffs or a car accident will cause everything to collapse. One in seven Americans lives below the poverty line, a substantially higher rate than in Canada or other OECD countries, and scholars estimate that half of all Americans will at some point slip below the line.

A movement made a hundred times before, a thousand times before, except this time, instead of muscle and nerve performing their everyday miracle of coordination, I tilted to the right and started to fall.

The sense of the world shifting was so strong she swayed in the saddle.

We totter now on a precipice, the ground shaking beneath us. Yet most of us still imagine that the future will resemble the past. That's a whopping mistake. New warning signs look clear and compelling.