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Crises Quotes

Browse 29 quotes about Crises.

Crises Quotes

“So far I’ve been describing a process of getting to know someone as if we live in normal times. I’ve been writing as if we live in a healthy cultural environment, in a society in which people are enmeshed in thick communities and webs of friendship, trust, and belonging. We don’t live in such a society. We live in an environment in which political animosities, technological dehumanization, and social breakdown undermine connection, strain friendships, erase intimacy, and foster distrust. We’re living in the middle of some sort of vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis. It is as if people across society have lost the ability to see and understand one another, thus producing a culture that can be brutalizing and isolating.”

CommunityTrustIsolationConnectionBelongingDistrustAnimosityDehumanizationCrisesSocial Breakdown
Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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“I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.”

EducationPovertyClimate ChangeHungerIllnessProblemsEnvironmental DegradationCrises
Book:Parable of the Talents
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“Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular and we prefer the “out of sight, out of mind” escape. But there comes a time when issues must be recognized as issues — and resolved. The democratic way of life is at stake. You cannot meet today’s crisis tomorrow. You cannot pick and choose when and what you will do at your personal convenience. You cannot dawdle with history. We must face the bitter fact that we have forsaken our great dream of a life of, for, and by the people; that the burning passions and ideals of the American dream lie congealed by cold cynicism. Great parts of the masses of our people no longer believe that they have a voice or a hand in shaping the destiny of this nation. They have not forsaken democracy because of any desire or positive action of their own; they have been driven down into the depths of a great despair born of frustration, hopelessness, and apathy. A democracy lacking in popular participation dies of paralysis.”

HistoryDemocracyIgnoranceOptimismTragedyCrisesOut Of Sight Out Of Mind
Book:Reveille for Radicals
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“This malignant persistence since September 11th is the biggest surprise of all. In previous decades, sneak attacks, stock-market crashes, and other great crises became hinges on which American history swung in dramatically new directions. But events on the same scale, or nearly so, no longer seem to have that power; moneyed interests may have become too entrenched, elites too self-seeking, institutions too feeble, and the public too polarized and passive for the country to be shocked into fundamental change.”

ChangeUnited StatesStagnation9 11RecessionCrises9 11 10th Anniversary
Author:George Packer
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“What stops people from thinking ahead and getting ready for the possibility of crisis? The majority of people surely understand the importance of preparation…”

CrisisPreparedPreparationPreparednessPreparePreparation QuotesCrisis ManagementCrisesCrisis Theory
Book:The Prepared Investor: How to Prevent the Next Crisis from Affecting Your Financial Independence
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“By keeping enough cash to cover at least one month of your typical spending, you’ve created enough liquidity to weather every crisis situation that has occurred so far in modern history.”

CrisisPreparationPrepareBudgetingCrisis ManagementBudgetCrisesRainy DaysEmergency Survival Kit
Book:The Prepared Investor: How to Prevent the Next Crisis from Affecting Your Financial Independence
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“Shall I make you a cup of tea? He asked. It was the classic response to crisis practiced throughout these islands—in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. Emotional turmoil, danger, even disaster could be faced with far greater equanimity if the kettle was switched on. War has been declared! There’s been a major earthquake! The stock market has collapsed! Oh really? Let me put the kettle on….”

ComfortCrisisTeaCrisesCrises Solution
Book:The Revolving Door of Life
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“The issue of race, however, has been with us since our earliest beginnings as a nation. I believe it is even deeper and sharper than the other points of contention. It has bred fears, myths, and violence over centuries. It is the source of dark and dangerous irrationality, a current of social pathology running through our history and dimming our brighter achievements. Most of the time the reservoir of racism remains stagnant. But--and this has been true historically for most societies--when major economic, social, or political crises arise, the backwaters are stirred and latent racial hostility comes to the surface. Scapegoats must be found, simple targets substituted for complex problems. The frustration and insecurity generated by these problems find an outlet in notions of racial superiority and inferiority.”

RaceRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksCrisesScapegoats
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“There is no longer any denying that this country is in the throes of a historic national crisis. Its ramifications are so vast and frightening that even now, shocked into numbness and disbelief, the American people have not yet fully grasped what is happening to them. The grim data are clear enough and still coming in. Since this summer began, thirty of our cities, big and small, have been wracked by racial dis-order; scores of citizens, almost all of them black, have been killed, thousands injured, and even more arrested. Property damage has exceeded a billion dollars; total income loss is incalculable. As a people, we are not unaccustomed to violence. Frontier lawlessness, Southern vigilante-ism, Chicago gangsterism : these are images and themes embedded in the American tradition. We have only just lost a President to an assassin's bullet. But, having escaped the bombs of two world wars, we are not familiar with the horror of burned-out buildings, smoking rubble, tanks in our streets, the blasts of Molotov cocktails, the ring of snipers' bullets from rooftops. Today we look at sections of Detroit and think of war-torn Berlin. We see rampaging, looting mobs and think of the unstable politics of underdeveloped countries. A nation's identity has been overturned. In our own history we can find no precedent in this century for the massive destruction the past three years have brought to our cities—no precedent since the Civil War. But the greatest toll is not in property damage or even in lives lost. Nor is the greatest danger that the violence will go on in-definitely, any more than the Civil War did. It is that the aftermath of that war will be repeated, that as in the Compromise of 1877 the country will turn its back on the Negro, on the root causes of his discontent, on its own democratic future.”

AmericaRaceDemocracyRacismCivil RightsAfrican AmericansBlacksRiotsCrisesCivil Unrest
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“Beyond the speculative and often fraudulent froth that characterizes much of neoliberal financial manipulation, there lies a deeper process that entails the springing of ‘the debt trap’ as a primary means of accumulation by dispossession. Crisis creation, management, and manipulation on the world stage has evolved into the fine art of deliberative redistribution of wealth from poor countries to the rich. I documented the impact of Volcker’s interest rate increase on Mexico earlier. While proclaiming its role as a noble leader organizing ‘bail-outs’ to keep global capital accumulation on track, the US paved the way to pillage the Mexican economy. This was what the US Treasury–Wall Street–IMF complex became expert at doing everywhere. Greenspan at the Federal Reserve deployed the same Volcker tactic several times in the 1990s. Debt crises in individual countries, uncommon during the 1960s, became very frequent during the 1980s and 1990s. Hardly any developing country remained untouched, and in some cases, as in Latin America, such crises became endemic. These debt crises were orchestrated, managed, and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets. Since 1980, it has been calculated, ‘over fifty Marshall Plans (over $4.6 trillion) have been sent by the peoples at the Periphery to their creditors in the Center’. ‘What a peculiar world’, sighs Stiglitz, ‘in which the poor countries are in effect subsidizing the richest.”

CapitalismDebtNeoliberalismHarveyCrisesShock TherapyCapital AccumulationDebt CrisesThe Shock Doctrine
Book:A Brief History of Neoliberalism
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“I've always been proud of how much my daughter cared about the world. After school she’d study the news, comb the internet for disasters, wars and hate and injustice, write it all down in these color-coded journals. Once, I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was just trying to keep track of it all because it didn’t seem like anybody else noticed or cared that we kept making the same mistakes, that hate in a neighborhood or injustice in a state ran like poison through veins, until another ice shelf collapsed or another animal went extinct. Everything is connected, she’d say. And I’d tell her, You’re only one person and you only have one life.”

WorldHateFamilyEnvironmentNewsConnectionsInjusticeActivismDisastersCrises
Book:How High We Go in the Dark
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“To face the days ahead we must ask two questions: first, "Where are we?" and second, "Where do we go from here?" We Americans seem to have forgotten where we came from, we don't know where we are, and we fear where we may be going. We are a scene of frenetic fears, confusion, and madness. Scared New World. Life has become a catalogue of crises: the Urban Crisis, the Race Crisis, the Campus Crisis, the Poverty Crisis, the World Crisis, the Crisis of a Free and Open Society, and underneath it all our personal crises of whether to live or drop out. We are bombarded with so-called studies and reports on the consequences of urbanization, the population explosion, the changing character of our educational system, our values, our family life, our relationships with one another, or rather our lack of relationships, the ever increasing alienation of the individual from his society, his inability to act on those issues that are vital to him, his family, and his community.”

AmericaActivismModern LifeAmericansModern TimesActivistsDirectionsCrises
Book:Reveille for Radicals
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