Identify Crisis Quotes & Sayings

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides adduces a change in language as a major factor in Athens's descent from dysfunctional democracy through demagoguery into tyranny and anarchy: people began to define things in any way they pleased, he says, and the "normally accepted meaning of words" broke down. In his account of the Catiline crisis in republican Rome, Sallust has Cato the Younger identify the misuse of language - specifically the scission of word and meaning - as the underlying cause of the threat to the state. Society, Cato says, has lost the "vera vocabula rerum," literally, the "true names of things."18 In seventeenth-century England, Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war he believed had been caused in significant measure by a war of words about religion - spread through the pervasive pamphleteering that printing had made possible - that had fatally weakened the linguistic common ground on which an ordered state depends. — Mark John Thompson

There was something satisfying about swinging the hammer, hitting the nails, and fixing the porch. It made me feel strong. It made me feel powerful. — Shannon Wiersbitzky

I like working closely with artists. I think that's very important in fantasy and science fiction - the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters. — Margaret Weis

Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along? — Scott Anderson

I didn't want to hear the usual answers about what's wrong because I believe these are symptoms: global warming, genocide, hunger, poverty, war, environmental crisis. If we can identify the root cause, we can change our ways. — Tom Shadyac

We trifle with France and labour with Germany, we sentimentalize over Italy and ecstacise over Spain- but England we love. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

I think maybe, if I could be a Canadian super hero, I'd have some kind of freezing power and some sort of maple syrup weapon. Could be a little sticky. — Nathan Fillion

I want a shot for people like me to grow up and do something with themselves. — Robert Reich

You know the John Lennon song 'Imagine'? 'Imagine no possessions, no religion'? That's what it was like in Cambodia. The only thing people had was a spoon, for eating the daily pourridge. And that pourridge was grossly insufficient for the work they were made to do in the fields. — Sophal Ear

So how does it happen that -- while most people instinctively try to save themselves and their families from a catastrophe -- a few slow down, look back, and suddenly reach out to strangers? Instead of fleeing in the opposite direction, a few wade into the rising waters to try to yank the drowning onto higher land. ... In the coming months and years, I would learn that -- just as there is no blood test to identify who will jump into the fray -- there is no simple biographical arc either. No resume can predict why this man or woman, at a safe remove from crisis, suddenly announces, "This is my fight. — Melissa Fay Greene

What we set out to do was to ensure that this system of fair shares and the planning and controls continued after the war, and when we won, that's what we did. — Barbara Castle

She says the lesson to learn is that the world is round, which means that if I run too fast I might end up chasing the very homeland I am running from. — Sefi Atta

You can't relate to a superhero, to a superman, but you can identify with a real man who in times of crisis draws forth some extraordinary quality from within himself and triumphs but only after a struggle. — John F. Kennedy