Quotes about Crisis

You may well ask: Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path? You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

So also in a marriage or in helping a teenager through a difficult identity crisis—there is no quick fix, where you can just move in and make everything right with a positive mental attitude and a bunch of success formulas.

In 2010, computerised trading systems created the stock-market Flash Crash; what would a computer-triggered crash look like in the defence arena?

Every crisis offers an opportunity to grow stronger and wiser; to reach deep within and discover a better you that will create a better outcome. So while this is your crisis, what matters most is what you do with it.

Americans are terrified because so many of them have been laid off in recent years and months and they fear that they may be next. Even if they have not been laid off or have not known anyone laid off, they definitely know someone who has lost his home.

I want readers to rehearse that day when everything shatters and think through what they'll hang onto when that happens.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

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.

Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. 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.

Religion is an answer to man's ultimate questions. The moment we become oblivious to ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in.

The self-control of passion, the reshaping of his image of the world, the elimination of the sense of merit, the change of language, the effect of his profession on the structure of his life, all hint at the depth of this crisis.

In moments of great crisis they all fail—priests, philosophers, scientists—the prophets alone prevail.