Brink Of Collapse Quotes

By the dawn of the seventeenth century, the order of Stormsongs had grown both darker and more powerful, while the Holy Roman Empire they allegedly still served found itself surrounded by powerful enemies – and on the brink of collapse.


…Abe didn’t say a word. He made straight for his journal and wrote down a single sentence. One that would radically alter the course of his life, and bring a fledgeling nation to the brink of collapse.
I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America.

Guido raised his hand to his head and moved his index finger around in a circle near his temple indicating Smalley Pauley had some mental issues.

I’ve been at this a long time. The good guys don’t always win. You take what you can get...

Winter arrived with December, and the world continued to suffer the loss of the Internet and most forms of communication. Supply chains were disrupted. The only mass form of personal communication was the letter, and postal workers were having their worst year ever, as they were actually meeded. Food was becoming scarcer and more expensive, as was fuel for vehicles and heating. Major cities experienced riots on a regular basis, spurred on by religious fervor and want. Civilization was on the brink of collapse.

In the morning he stepped from his tent looking haggard, fearful and guilt-ridden, an eaten shell of a human building rocking perilously on the brink of collapse.

Why did I always do the worst things? Why did I always arrange my life so that it was on the brink of collapse?

It makes sense that your response to a bad break-up line would be to set someone on fire," I responded. "Fire is magical to us because it embodies the passage of time. We can never grasp time because it is invisible, unreachable and continually slipping from our grasp. Do we live in the present? How can we? The present is infinitesimally small. It can't contain human action. We teeter on the brink between our assumed future...where we will be in moments to come...and our memory of the past...where we think we just were. The present doesn't exist in a comprehensible way. Similarly, fire is something we can neither grasp nor touch, yet it has a clear effect...the decay and collapse of life, the acceleration of entropy. Thus when we stand mesmerized by fire, we are actually mesmerized by our own mortality.

Meg had single-handedly brought the Swedish Fish ecosystem to the brink of collapse.

If your faith is based on lack of affliction, it’s on the brink of extinction and is only a frightening diagnosis or a shattering phone call away from collapse. Token faith will not survive suffering. Nor should it.

But there is so much more in those words than just loving books. I love the smell of them. I love the way their bindings look pressed together on a shelf. I love the feel of pages buzzing through my fingers. I love big books and small books. I love words and how they're strung together, and most of all, I love the stories. I love how books are not really just books at all, but doorways. They are portals into places I've never been and people I'll never be, and in them I have lived a thousand lives and seen a thousand worlds. In them I can be a princess or a knight of valor or a villian - I can be coveted, I can conquer evils, I can defeat Dark Lords and destroy the One Ring and unite a Federation on the brink of collapse.

We’re on the brink of collapse, my friends! They’ve put us into this mess and now can’t find their way out. Starvation, flooding, cold, and who knows what else. We’re on the edge of extinction! It’s not just about the valley anymore, it’s about our species!

Out of the slaughter of some 20,000 Communards, out of military defeat and economic collapse, what had in fact emerged was a regime whose capacity for government had been doubtful from its inception. So much, indeed, was this the case that within three years a society brought to the brink of ruin was clamoring for a dictator.

With the Russian Empire teetering on the brink of collapse, the tsarist regime responded to the crises with its usual incompetence and obstinacy. The basic problem was that Nicholas himself remained totally oblivious to the extremity of the situation. While the country sank deeper into chaos he continued to fill his diary with terse and trivial notes on the weather, the company at tea and the number of birds he had shot that day. When Bulygin suggested that political concessions might be needed to calm the country, Nicholas was taken aback and told the Minister: 'One would think you are afraid a revolution will break out.' 'Your majesty,' came the reply, 'the revolution has already begun.

In a single day, the Allies’ entire financial support network hovered on the brink of collapse. It had all been Wilson’s doing, the response to a note he had sent to the Federal Reserve shortly before the election. The president was determined not to let America’s financial entanglement with the Allies’ cause draw it further into support of their war effort.

kids. This is one of the reasons why the “self-sacrificing parent” idea is so insidious. When we constantly sacrifice our own needs in favor of our children’s, we all lose. Our children lose out by having an ungrounded parent who is frequently on the brink of collapse. We lose out on enjoying our life and our children. We also perpetuate this harmful pattern—effectively passing the buck to the next generation.

. . . for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savor the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish; unless, strained, simulated, again overstrained, and, at last, destroyed our faculties for enjoyment; then, truly, we may find ourselves without support, robbed of hope. Our agony is great, and how can it end? We have broken the spring of our powers; life must be all suffering‐‐ too feeble to conceive faith‐‐death must be darkness‐‐God, spirits, religion can have no place in our collapsed minds, where linger only hideous and polluting recollections of vice; and time brings us on to the brink of the grave, and dissolution flings us in‐‐a rag eaten through and through with disease, wrung together with pain, stamped into the churchyard sod by the inexorable heel of despair.

Dr. Awolesi will be proven correct in her epidemic forecast: the exponentially increased speed with which this rabies virus infects and progresses will aid in its own containment and control. Nine days after Josh and Luis meet Ramola and Natalie a massive pre-exposure vaccination campaign will finally begin in New England for both humans and animals. In concurrence with the quarantine, the vaccination program will be wildly successful and will return the region from the brink of collapse. In the final tally of what will be considered the end of the epidemic (but not, to be clear, the end of the virus; it will burrow, digging in like a nasty tick; it will migrate; and it will return all but encouraged and welcomed in a country where science and forethought are allowed to be dirty words, where humanity’s greatest invention—the vaccine—is smeared and vilified by narcissistic, purposeful fools [the most dangerous kind], where fear is harvested for fame, profit, and self-esteem), almost ten thousand people will have died.

I can no more; for now it comes again, That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain, That masterful negation and collapse Of all that makes me man; as though I bent Over the dizzy brink Of some sheer infinite descent; Or worse, as though Down, down for ever I was falling through The solid framework of created things, And needs must sink and sink Into the vast abyss. And, crueller still, A fierce and restless fright begins to fill The mansion of my soul. And, worse and worse, Some bodily form of ill Floats on the wind, with many a loathsome curse Tainting the hallow'd air, and laughs, and flaps Its hideous wings, And makes me wild with horror and dismay.

It is 1839. England is tumbling towards anarchy, with countrywide unrest and riots. The gutter presses are fizzing, fire-bombs flying. The shout on the streets is for revolution. Red evolutionists - visionaries who see life marching inexorably upward, powered from below - denounce the props of an old static society: priestly privilege, wage exploitation, and the workhouses. A million socialists are castigating marriage, capitalism, and the fat, corrupt Established Church. Radical Christians join them, hymn-singing Dissenters who condemn the 'fornicating' Church as a 'harlot,' in bed with the State. Even science must be purged: for the gutter atheists, material atoms are all that exist, and like the 'social atoms' - people - they are self-organizing. Spirits and souls are a delusion, part of the gentry's cruel deceit to subjugate working people. The science of life - biology - lies ruined, prostituted, turned into a Creationist citadel by the clergy. Britain now stands teetering on the brink of collapse - or so it seems to the gentry, who close ranks to protect their privileges. At this moment, how could an ambitious thirty-year-old gentleman open a secret notebook and, with a devil-may-care sweep, suggest that headless hermaphrodite molluscs were the ancestors of mankind? A squire's son, moreover, Cambridge-trained and once destined for the cloth. A man whose whole family hated the 'fierce & licentious' radical hooligans. The gentleman was Charles Darwin: well heeled, imperturbably Whig, a privately financed world traveller who had spent five years aboard HMS Beagle as a dining companion to the aristocratic captain.

The American share of the crisis began with grossly improper mortgages provided to wholly unqualified borrowers, all directly caused and encouraged by government distortion of and interference in the market. The government’s market deformation and market intervention was in turn the result of two factors: political favouritism and Leftist ideology, on the one hand; and upon the other, corruption: the blatant cooption of such Friends of Angelo as Mr Dodd and of such bien-pensant Lefties as Mr Frank. The stability and efficiency of any market is directly proportional to the amount and trustworthiness of market information. The Yank Congress, for blatantly partisan and ideological reasons, gave out false information to the market, pushing lenders into making bad loans and giving out, with the appropriate winks and nudges, that Fannie (will Americans ever realise how that sounds) and Freddie, imperfectly quangoised, were ‘really just as good as the Treasury’ and were in any case ‘too big to [be let] fail’: which, as it happens, was untrue. Similarly, this moronic mantra of ‘too big to fail’ was chanted desperately and loudly to drown out the warning sounds of various financial institutions on the brink and of the automobile industry. Incomprehensible sums of public money were thrown at these corporations so that they could avoid bankruptcy, and have succeeded only in privatising profit whilst socialising risk.

The satanic spirit of the secret sect will push the Church to the brink of collapse. Apostasies will occur, from the secret sect that has influenced education by monetary support, in countries of the western world. Contempt for the sacred will include, trying to eliminate consecration of the bread and the wine from the Holy Mass. This is still an ultimate goal of the Freemasonry/Illuminati.

It seems as though most of us have less and less space to think creatively or imaginatively, if at all. Even among people who work within the ‘creative industries’, their imagination seems increasingly harnessed to create demand for things nobody really needs, whose production is increasingly pushing our human and ecological systems to the brink of collapse – almost as if imagination has been coopted in the service of our own extinction.

banks lost more than $1 trillion on toxic assets from January 2007 to September 2009. What Burke feared the East India Company would do to England in 1772 – potentially drag the government ‘down into an unfathomable abyss’ – actually happened to Iceland in 2008–11, when the systemic collapse of all three of the country’s major privately owned commercial banks brought the country to the brink of complete bankruptcy. In the twenty-first century, a powerful corporation can still overwhelm or subvert a state every bit as effectively as the East India Company did in Bengal in the eighteenth.

Augustine realized that, even in an era when the Roman Empire teetered on the brink of collapse, the essence of human existence is that we stand in history and that this history is the revelation of God’s great plan.

A half century of neoliberalism has brought the world to the brink of collapse. Only concerted effort and cooperation by the world’s governments provides any chance of survival. Understanding MMT does not make this easy. But it helps us to recognize what the true constraints are: resources, initiative, politics, imagination.

The education of our children is on the brink of collapse which is supposed to be priority over bailouts

When we constantly sacrifice our own needs in favor of our children’s, we all lose. Our children lose out by having an ungrounded parent who is frequently on the brink of collapse. We lose out on enjoying our life and our children. We also perpetuate this harmful pattern—effectively passing the buck to the next generation.

None of my training can prepare me for this, to find her lifeless, and lost to me, forever. My jaw so tight it aches, I haul the lid up and look down. An empty pod glares back at me. I stand and turn full circle, unseeing, as panic wrestles my mind to the ground. I don't know if she's alive, or dead, or on the brink of dying of hunger. This is worse than trying to find her pod. A thousand million times worse. She could be anywhere. She will think she's alone, she will believe I didn't come for her, or that I didn't survive all this. And it hits me, with all the force of a star collapsing into a black hole. I wasn't there. I. Wasn't. There. 'Blue!' I bellow into the day made into night. Anguish claws at me, tears me into shreds. To be so close to where she was and to have lost her. It's unbearable. 'Blue!' I shout with all the force of my once-military voice, fuelled by fear, dread, and the ache of my love, burned to hell. In the distance, a startled rush erupts from the marsh, what sounds like hundreds of leathery wings against the air. Then, nothing. I look up, wracked with hopelessness. Through the sparse tufts of the treetops, the stars continue their relentless slide across the heavens, even though it's the middle of the day. How the fuck will I ever find her in this endless, overgrown wilderness? I won't. It's impossible. She will die and this place will bury her in its vines. I know I will never find her again. I close my eyes and in the constellation of my mind, my pole star dies.

By the time the official reports were written everyone understood careers teetered on the brink, and great care was taken in the penning of those missives.

It began again! It began when everything had ended, When there was nothing left that could be defended, The universe was rapturing in all possible ways, When days were like nights and nights felt like days, There was nothing left, so it seemed, And suddenly life from its brink of extinction was redeemed, By the memory of your kiss, by the memory of your smile, And everything came alive, everything; even if it was just for a while, Then my love Irma, the universe was recast in its original form, My universe, our universe, where your essences arise to ease me like some magical balm, So it began again, the romance that actually can never end, Because even universe cannot destroy what a heart chooses to defend, Now there is nothing except our love story, Because the universe ended and then began with our love story, And in this universe where everything exists just for you and me, The universe can be, the world can be, as long as in your eyes my reflection I see, Let the universe end, let the realms collapse, let all the stars turn dark, I shall not regret it, as long as my heart bears your mark, Of those feelings and emotions experienced together, Where in the season of our lives, our love was the climate and it was the permanent weather!

Even the mightiest empires, standing tall and confident on the brink of their collapse, once dreamed of futures as grand as their pasts—unaware that greatness is fleeting and that the seeds of their undoing had already been sown.

The 2008–2009 Great Recession also sent U.S. auto sales plunging from nearly 17 million in 2005 to 10.4 million in 2009, helping push the U.S. industry to the brink of collapse.

The society with lots of open disagreement and social conflict is the one surging with power in art, science, commerce, constructive social reform, and (most of all) religious revival; the hushed-up society where everyone is afraid to say what he thinks is on the brink of violence and collapse.

Life on this planet has always been a balancing act—a complex web of interconnectivity that’s surprisingly fragile. Remove or even alter enough key components and that web begins to fray and fall apart. Such a collapse—or mass extinction—has happened five times in our planet’s geological past. The first struck four hundred million years ago, when most marine life died off. The third event hit both land and sea at the end of the Permian Period, wiping out 90 percent of the world’s species, coming within a razor’s edge of ending all life on earth. The fifth and most recent extinction took out the dinosaurs, ushering in the era of mammals and altering the world forever. How close are we to seeing such an event happen again? Some scientists believe we’re already there, neck-deep in a sixth mass extinction. Every hour, three more species go extinct, totaling over thirty thousand a year. Worst of all, the rate of this die-off is continually rising. At this very moment, nearly half of all amphibians, a quarter of all mammals, and a third of all reefs balance at the edge of extinction. Even a third of all conifer trees teeter at that brink. Why is this happening? In the past, such massive die-offs had been triggered by sudden changes in global climate or shifts in plate tectonics, or in the case of the dinosaurs, possibly even an asteroid strike. Yet most scientists believe this current crisis has a simpler explanation: humans. Through our trampling of the environment and rise in pollution, mankind has been the driving force behind the loss of most species. According to a report by Duke University released in May 2014, human activity has driven species into extinction at the rate a thousandfold faster than before the arrival of modern man.

After the meeting, Guay met with Verville for a debriefing. Guay reports that Verville said that all investors would have to roll to avoid a market collapse. Guay told Verville that on Monday, at the first chance to roll its maturing paper, the Caisse should not be the only investor rolling in a particular trust. If that happened, it would end up in a worse position than not rolling at all.

Their gazes separated temporarily as their minds were pushed to the brink of collapse. They needed rest. When the three pairs of eyes met once again, they were uncertain and erratic, like candles flickering in the wind. Evil! Evil! Evil! We’ll become devils! We’ll become devils! We’ll become devils! “But... what are they thinking?” Dongfang Yanxu asked softly. To the two vice-captains, her voice, while soft, seemed to linger uninterrupted in the white space, like the buzz of a mosquito. Yes. We don’t want to become devils, but who knows what they’re thinking. Then we’re already devils, or how else could we think of them as devils unprovoked? Very well, then we won’t think of them as devils. “That won’t solve the problem,” Dongfang Yanxu said with a gentle shake of her head. Yes. Even if they aren’t devils, the problem remains. Because they don’t know what we’re thinking. Suppose they know that we’re not devils? The problem still exists. They don’t know what we’re thinking about them. They don’t know what we’re thinking about what they’re thinking about us. That carries on in an endless chain of suspicion: They don’t know what we’re thinking about what they’re thinking about what we’re thinking about what they’re thinking about what we’re... How can this chain of suspicion be broken? Communication?

I am sorry. Genuinely uttered, that three-word statement, has saved many relationships that were on the the brink of collapse and has strengthened many more.

This is one of the reasons why the “self-sacrificing parent” idea is so insidious. When we constantly sacrifice our own needs in favor of our children’s, we all lose. Our children lose out by having an ungrounded parent who is frequently on the brink of collapse. We lose out on enjoying our life and our children. We also perpetuate this harmful pattern—effectively passing the buck to the next generation.

The main objective in a crisis is to instill confidence and to avoid miscommunications, which undermine trust.

I cannot say enough good things about Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who were true partners.

I now have a much greater appreciation for others who put the national interest above their own political calculations.

I left office on January 20, 2009, with mixed feelings.

I regretted having been unable to develop a more successful government program to prevent the foreclosures that cost millions of Americans their homes.

Frankly, this was too good a political opportunity for Putin to pass up.

Behind closed doors Medvedev was very engaged,

I was surprised not to be asked about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because Kudrin had told me to be ready to talk about the GSEs,

I made two public statements myself that week in support of the GSEs.

I made a series of calls to alert key Hill leaders to the worsening situation

The president understood the gravity of the moment.

But Dodd-Frank falls short in other areas.

When confidence goes, it goes quickly.

The first step is to correct the obvious problems that caught us off guard five years ago.

trying to address manageable problems before they become unmanageable.

when the crisis first began, I had the great privilege of seeing our system work at its best—and in the most difficult of times.

The longer we wait, the less attractive our options will be.

my impact on public policy was very limited.

But people who are in power have to understand the need to act responsibly even when this is not politically in their best interests. And the same holds true for those in the minority.

economy. He wanted to hear my views on how we’d gotten to this point, and how serious the problems were.

morning I had made the mistake of telling a good friend in church my news, but I forgot to tell her that I hadn’t yet told my mother.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen her cry.

Humility is at the core of the religion.

We shared similar values and interests.

Later, I would frequently caution young professionals never to do something they believed was wrong just because a boss had ordered it.

I didn’t spend a lot of time with Nixon, but I got along fine with him when I did.

and I occasionally interrupted him out of eagerness to get my point in, but he didn’t take offense.

I became close to the CEO, John Bryan, an extraordinary man whom I admired as an executive, as well as for his values:

I’d come home too tired to want to do much with the children when they were very young.

Remember, you are not going to get ahead, in any case, being a grunt.

Nonetheless, we arranged for his team to come over to brief me later that morning.

He wanted to know more, but I had to cut him off to get to the meeting.

I can only imagine what was going through their minds.

they couldn’t possibly predict the consequences of any course of action they chose.

The CEOs were left wondering how their firms could fill a hole that size and

I reiterated the severity of the situation.

We believed others would likely follow if they stepped up as leaders of a collaborative effort to save the stricken bank.

I would only put money in if management was replaced.

suspected that Chris was trying to buy pieces of AIG on the cheap, and I promised he would not be part of the meeting.

because I respected his judgment, I pressed Jamie for his assessment of the situation.

In the end, I felt reassured that I could count on Jamie’s leadership.

I didn’t bother talking about BofA.

Merrill Lynch had been weighing on my mind.

He had never been good at hiding his emotions; now he looked somber and uneasy.

As we talked about the lack of options for his firm, I could see that the full impact of the crisis had settled on John.

At a minimum I wanted to keep BofA warm as a bidder, because the presence of another buyer would help us negotiate more effectively with Barclays.

I left the New York Fed before 9:00 p.m. optimistic about the prospects for a deal.

the deal was the same as killing it: we needed certainty today. As I listened to Tim and Chris, I went over again in my head my Friday conversation with Alistair Darling, and it occurred to me that I had not caught his true meaning when he’d expressed concern about a British bank’s buying Lehman. What I had taken as understandable caution should have been taken as a clear warning.

Believing we shouldn’t sugarcoat the situation, I told the bank chiefs we had run into some regulatory issues with Barclays but were committed to working through them.

In the end, they had come much further than Tim and I thought they would.

If Barclays had committed to the deal, we would have had industry financing in place.

Barney Frank had explained to me how important they were to him and his colleagues,

Worried that I’d said too much, I decided I had better get to Barney before Nancy could.

Without their support, legislation would go nowhere.

I knew there was a lack of enthusiasm on the Hill for what we wanted.

All we’ll do is spook the markets.

Over and over I explained how critical the capital markets were to the economy, how important the GSEs were to housing, how we were getting real reform that was going to make a difference.

He told me that his differences with me weren’t personal,

Dodd was resisting our demand to make the Fed a consultative regulator.

I trusted their expertise and judgment, and believed I could persuade them to join me.

I knew the move would require a sacrifice on his part.