Great Throughts Treasury

"The advantages of having decisions made by groups are often lost because of powerful psychological pressures that arise when the members work closely together, share the same set of values and, above all, face a crisis situation that puts everyone under intense stress." - Irving L. Janis

"The man who is seeking comfort does not want truth; he only wants security, safety, a refuge in which he will not be disturbed. But a man who is seeking truth must invite disturbances, tribulations because it is only in moments of crisis that there is alertness, watchfulness, action. Then only that which is is discovered and understood." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Our country is in the middle of a profound crisis. This crisis has many causes, but much of it has been brought about by poor leadership decisions at every level of government. In addition, our electoral process is dominated by financial interests that are threatened by the very notion of reform." - Jim Webb, formally James Henry Webb, Jr.

"We have not reached the consensus that to eat is a basic human right. This is an ethical crisis. This is a crisis of faith." - Jean-Bertrand Aristide

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"If prayer were only the articulation of words, of nothing but psychological relevance and of no metaphysical resonance, nobody would in an hour of crisis waste his time by praying in self-delusion." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"This is not a legal or legislative issue alone… We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is a clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities… We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises

"Stand up to crises. Don't let them throw you! Fight to stay calm... even surmount the crisis completely and turn it into an opportunity. Refuse to renounce your self-image. No matter what happens, you must keep your good opinion of yourself. No matter what happens, you must hold your past successes in your imagination, ready for showing in the motion picture screen of your mind. No matter what happens, no matter what you lose, no matter what failures you must endure, you must keep faith in yourself. Then you can stand up to crises, with calm and courage, refusing to buckle; then you will not fall through the floor. You will be able to support yourself." - Maxwell Maltz

"In a moment of crisis we don't act out of reasoned judgment but on our conditioned reflexes. We may be able to send men to the moon, but we'd better remember we're still closely related to Pavlov's dog. Think about driving a car: only the beginning driver thinks as he performs each action; the seasoned driver's body works kinesthetically . . .A driver prevents an accident because of his conditioned reflexes; hands and feet respond more quickly than thought. I'm convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we've made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors, as our points of reference. If our slow and reasoned decisions are generally wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too. If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will be those of the sudden situation." - Madeleine L’Engle

"What happens in a strike happens not to one person alone.... It is a crisis with meaning and potency for all and prophetic of a future. The elements in crisis are the same, there is a fermentation that is identical. The elements are these: a body of men, women and children, hungry; an organization of feudal employers out to break the back of unionization; and the government Labor Board sent to "negotiate" between this hunger and this greed. " - Meridel Le Sueur, born Meridel Wharton

"Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. [The plutocrats] are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many. In other words, the struggle over environmentalism is part of the class struggle itself, a fact that seems to have escaped many environmentalists but is well understood by the plutocrats---which is why they are unsparing in their derision and denunciations of the 'eco-terrorists' and 'tree huggers.' " - Michael Parenti

"It is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation that they will be adopted promptly but for two other reasons. One is to construct an ideal goal, so that incremental changes can be judged by whether they move the institutional structure toward or away from that ideal. The other reason is very different. It is so that if a crisis requiring or facilitating radical change does arise, alternatives will be available that have been carefully developed and fully explored." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman

"The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. The history of religions can play an extremely important role in the crisis we are living through. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning." - Mircea Eliade

"Life itself is always a trial. In training, you must test and polish yourself in order to face the great challenges of life. Transcend the realm of life and death, and then you will be able to make your way calmly and safely through any crisis that confronts you. " - Morihei Ueshiba

"This privatization of the environmental crisis, like New Age cults that focus on personal problems rather than on social dislocations, has reduced many environmental movements to utter ineffectiveness and threatens to diminish their credibility with the public. If “simple living” and militant recycling are the main solutions to the environmental casts, the crisis will certainly continue and intensify." - Murray Bookchin

"Ironically, many ordinary people and their families cannot afford to live “simply.” It is a demanding enterprise when one considers the costliness of “simple” hand-crafted artifacts and the exorbitant price of organic and “recycled” goods. Moreover, what the “production end” of the environmental crisis cannot sell to the “consumption end,” it will certainly sell to the military. General Electric enjoys considerable eminence not only for its refrigerators but also for its Gatling guns. This shadowy side of the environmental problem — military production — can only be ignored by attaining an ecological airheadedness so vacuous as to defy description." - Murray Bookchin

"In the context of this more mature discourse, the Valdez oil spill is no longer seen as an Alaskan matter, an “episode” in the geography of pollution. Rather it is recognized as a social act that raises such “accidents” to the level of systemic problems-rooted not in consumerism, technological advance, and population growth but in an irrational system of production, an abuse of technology by a grow-or-die economy, and the demographics of poverty and wealth. Ecological dislocation cannot be separated from social dislocations. The social roots of our environmental problems cannot remain hidden without trivializing the crisis itself and thwarting its resolution." - Murray Bookchin

"There is no doubt that many expensive national projects may add to our prestige or serve science. But none of them must take precedence over human needs. As long as Congress does not revise its priorities, our crisis is not just material, it is a crisis of the spirit." - Nelson Rockefeller, fully Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller

"Not any Iranian weapon of mass destruction but demography is the existential crisis Israel faces….By mid-century…Palestinians west of the Jordan river will out-number Jews 2-1. Add Palestinians in Jordan, it is 3-1." - Pat Buchanan, fully Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan

"What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much." - Paul Samuelson, fully Paul Anthony Samuelson

"A shared set of ethical values is the glue that can hold us together during an intense crisis. A key lesson from the SARS outbreak is that fairness becomes more important during a time of crisis and confusion. And the time to consider these questions and processes in relation to a threatened major pandemic is now." - Peter Singer

"The organism of the Western society and culture seems to be undergoing one of the deepest and most significant crises of its life. The crisis is far greater than the ordinary; its depth is unfathomable, its end not yet in sight, and the whole of the Western society is involved in it. It is the crisis of a Sensate culture, now in its overripe stage, the culture that has dominated the Western World during the last five centuries. It is also the crisis of a contractual (capitalistic) society associated with it. In this sense we are experiencing one of the sharpest turns in the historical road…. The diagnosis of the crisis of our age which is given in this chapter was written…. Gigantic catastrophes that have occurred since that year…strikingly confirm and develop the diagnosis…. Not a single compartment of our culture, or of the mind of contemporary man, shows itself to be free from the unmistakable symptoms" - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"The great crisis of Sensate culture is here in all its stark reality. Before our very eyes this culture is committing suicide. If it does not die in our lifetime, it can hardly recover from the exhaustion of its creative forces and from the wounds of self-destruction. Half-alive and half-dead, it may linger in its agony for decades; but its spring and summer are definitely over….I hear distinctly the requiem that the symphony of history is playing in its memory." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"At this time - we're in a dramatic crisis - euro bonds are precisely the wrong answer. They lead us into a debt union, not a stability union. Each country has to take its own steps to reduce its debt." - Angela Merkel, fully Angela Dorothea Merkel, née Kasner

"I will not let anyone tell me we must spend more money. This crisis did not come about because we issued too little money but because we created economic growth with too much money and it was not sustainable growth" - Angela Merkel, fully Angela Dorothea Merkel, née Kasner

"There is no energy crisis, food crisis or environmental crisis. There is only a crisis of ignorance." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"A true friend is distinguished in the crisis of hazard and necessity; when the gallantry of his aid may show the worth of his soul and the loyalty of his heart." - Ennius, fully Quintus Ennius NULL

"True counsel springs from the depths of the heart. When the crisis of faith is so great that even wordless cries cannot help, one has to cry from the heart alone: "Their heart cried out to God" (Lamentations 2:18). The heart alone cries without our letting out a sound. "From the depths I call out to God" (Psalms 130:1) - from the depths of the heart. And from the depths of the heart comes guidance, for "like deep waters, so is counsel in the heart of man" (Proverbs 20:5) . When shouts and screams no longer help because faith has collapsed, one must cry from the depths of the heart without letting out a sound. This is how true counsel is revealed, for "like deep waters, so is counsel in the heart of man."" - Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav or Breslov, aka Reb Nachman Breslover or Nachman from Uman NULL

"When a person is experiencing a crisis of faith, or even passing doubts, it is very beneficial to say aloud: "I believe!" Simply giving expression to your faith in words is itself an act of faith and this can bring you to true faith." - Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav or Breslov, aka Reb Nachman Breslover or Nachman from Uman NULL

"People are intelligent beings capable of responding rationally to new knowledge particularly if it can be shown to be directly relevant to their own circumstances. For this reason, the eco-footprint concept resonates better with the public than do more abstract and impersonal sustainability indicators. In particular, people appreciate the way EFA draws them into reflecting on their personal consumption habits as illustrated by the popularity of EFA-oriented web-sites that offer simple calculators that visitors can use to estimate their personal eco-footprints. Attributes of EFA that help to communicate biophysical reality to the public include the following: The method is conceptually simple and intuitively appealing. Even sceptics recognize that that they have a positive ecological footprint. EFA personalizes sustainability by focusing on consumption—everyone is a consumer and must ultimately take responsibility for his/her own ‘load’ on the planet. EFA consolidates measurable energy and material flows into a single concrete variable, the corresponding appropriated land/water (ecosystem) area. Land itself is a powerful indicator. Everyone understands ‘land.’ (Popular understanding of the ecological crisis is prerequisite to any politically viable solutions.) Eco-footprint estimates can be compared to finite local and global ‘supplies’ of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems (i.e., people and populations can compare their demands to available bio-capacity). The ‘ecological deficit’—the difference between domestic bio-capacity and a larger eco-footprint—requires little explanation and many people see it as more important than the fiscal deficits with which their governments are often preoccupied! EFA appeals to both the ecologically and socially conscious. For example, it reflects gross material inequity but also shows that growth is not a sustainable option to relieve it. Perhaps as important as any other factor, ‘ecological footprint’ is a powerfully evocative metaphor—would people be as quickly captivated by the concept had it been called the ‘human impact index’ instead?" - William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel

"It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life." - René Dubos, fully René Jules Dubos

"Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life." - René Dubos, fully René Jules Dubos

"The world, and everyone in it is subject to environmental limits. Conventional economics believes that these limits are not there and anything can be substituted if the price is right. Acclaimed environmentalist Richard Heinberg disagrees. He thinks we have reached the end of two centuries of frenetic growth powered by fossil fuels. The current financial crisis is one of the symptoms of a system that is being wrecked, not just by debt but resource depletion and environmental devastation. [Central assertion of his book, "The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality"" - Richard Heinberg

"Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field" - Richard Heinberg

"The economic crisis that began in 2007" - Richard Heinberg

"Having appropriated to itself all conscious intelligence in the universe ...Man faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe ...and the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view" - Richard Tarnas, fully Richard Theodore Tarnas

"Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top--or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"Why can't peace be a single overriding common purpose: why do we wait for a crisis to pull us together? Let's pull together for peace." - Rita Mae Brown

"How about the complex of affinities that bring you to a bank just as a robber comes in? Are you responsible for this situation? Lots of incidents led up to it, and once their results are in train, you might have no control. There is such a thing as world karma. I as the world am responsible, but there might be no way for me as an individual to help once the crisis has become acute." - Robert Aitken, fully Robert Baker Aitken

"Sooner or later comes a crisis in our affairs, and how we meet it determines our future happiness and success. Since the beginning of time, every form of life has been called upon to meet such crisis." - Robert Collier

"I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"The taxpayer -- that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"Because making progress on adaptive problems requires learning, the task of leadership consists of choreographing and directing learning processes in an organization or community." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"You don't get hit in the nose by asking questions." - Russian Proverbs

"Everything evolved during those three-plus years that we were traveling the country together. He became a much better speaker. I became much more equipped to write speeches for him. Day after day after day after day, he's up there on the platform speaking, and I'm sitting in the audience listening, and I find out what works and what doesn't, what fits his style." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen

"For the emergent process, as noted by the geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, is neither random nor determined but creative. Just as in human order, creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth." - Thomas Berry

"The excitement of life is in the numinous experience wherein we are given to each other in that larger celebration of existence in which all things attain their highest expression, for the universe, by definition, is a single gorgeous celebratory event." - Thomas Berry

"I own it to be my opinion, that good will arise from the destruction of our credit. I see nothing else which can restrain our disposition to luxury, and to the change of those manners which alone can preserve republican government. As it is impossible to prevent credit, the best way would be to cure its ill effects by giving an instantaneous recovery to the creditor. This would be reducing purchases on credit to purchases for ready money. A man would then see a prison painted on everything he wished, but had not ready money to pay for." - Thomas Jefferson