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.

Why did I always do the worst things? Why did I always arrange my life so that it 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.

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.

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 collapse of mainline Protestantism left a void in the hearts of America’s ruling class. The environmental movement fills it.

My happiest moment is at the end of the day when I’m on the brink of collapse from exhaustion knowing I did the best I could with the energy I had and the most wonderful part is, I will shall do the same tomorrow.

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.

I felt awful for him and the others at the firm.

I can only imagine what might have happened had we not acted so decisively.

while the American people lost jobs and homes through no fault of their own.

the alternative is not to act at all, which is far worse.

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.

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.

I have been blessed with a good memory, so I have almost never needed to take notes. I don’t

I’m a candid person by nature

Even with a great deal of help from others, I have found the process to be most challenging.

I’m a straightforward person. I like to be direct with people.

they lacked the resources and ability to make independent evaluations

we went straight into the building’s parking garage to avoid being seen.

It was in the best interests of the country to do this, he concluded.

But I had not known of the extent of the companies’ problems then.

Though personable and knowledgeable, he was not as consistent or predictable as Barney,

I simply need my eight hours of sleep. I wish it weren’t the case, but it is.)

I didn’t know him very well at all.

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

but I felt a burden lift off of me as I looked out on the Washington Monument.

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.

My mother inherited her grit and determination from her own mother,

I inherited from him my interest in birds of prey.

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 liked the idea, but the reason I didn’t go along with it is because the liberals will say it’s regressive,

My time in government had taught me that whom you work with is as important as what you do.

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.

My number one concern was the likelihood of a financial crisis.

He asked questions and didn’t let explanations pass if they weren’t clear.

It was a humbling question for someone from the financial sector to be asked—after all, we were the ones responsible.

He might not have had my technical knowledge of finance, but he had a Harvard MBA and a good natural feel for markets.

but I misread the cause, and the scale, of the coming disaster.

been apprehensive about how Wendy and I would fit in, given her fund-raising for Hillary Clinton, my ties to Wall Street,

Treasury needed desperately to be modernized. Its technology infrastructure was woefully antiquated.

I’m a hands-on manager, and I tried to establish a tone and style that ran counter to the formality of most governmental organizations.

I insisted on being called Hank, not the customary Mr. Secretary.

This would prove helpful later when I would need to work closely with people like John

When the crisis struck, I knew I could rely on John’s calmness and sharp judgment.

I held regular meetings with Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke, knowing that in a crisis we would have to work together smoothly.

I was fortunate to inherit an outstanding assistant secretary

but decided against doing so for fear that word might leak to the press,

she gave me great advice on how to relate to him, suggesting that I make sure to spend time alone with him.

Condi is smarter and more articulate than I am.

In the early days, with Condi watching out for me, I was fine.

President Bush hated it when cell phones went off in meetings.

No matter what the problem, large or small, there is no such thing as a quick solution when you deal with Congress. Frankly,

and although I knew it would be frustrating, I underestimated just how frustrating it would be.

Clinton and Bush administrations had both said as much, but many investors chose to believe otherwise.

But change was hard to come by.

The White House, however, had opposed it.

Overall, I found the French president to be engaging, with a biting sense of humor. He

We just needed to get everyone on board.

Industry leaders had a mixed response to the plan.

I’d long believed it had become almost too complex to manage.

I knew the markets were watching my every move: canceling the trip could spark rumors that might further endanger Citi.

Of all the rough nights I’d endured throughout the crisis, this one was by far the worst.

Always calm and measured, Bob put the public interest ahead of everything else.

He rarely called me, and the urgency in his voice that afternoon left me with no doubt that Citi was in grave danger.

Feeling low, I made my first call of the day, at about 5:30 a.m. Pacific time, to Tim Geithner in New York.

the free-market principles I had long believed in.

Afterward, I touched base briefly with Bob Rubin.