The stuff that's going on is just so over-the-top, with the banking crisis and destroying the Gulf of Mexico, and the outrage hasn't quite caught up with the people yet. But when it does, I think you're going to see really virulent anti-authoritarian kind of comedy coming out.
I will forever be fascinated by how people deal with adversity, how people react in moments of crisis, or how people behave when life gets uncomfortable.
I think it's a shame that the day somebody hears about a shooting, the first thing they think about is, 'How can I go promote my gun control agenda?' as opposed to saying, 'How do I go pray and help the families that are suffering?'
Our world needs to move from managing crises to preventing them in the first place. Too often, the world responds too late and too little.
You think you would react one way when a situation develops and, and when the sharp shells are flying, you don't quite stand up like you think you might.
Managers can waste a lot of time at the outset of a crisis denying that something went wrong. Skip that step.
In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn.
Many persons sigh for death when it seems far off, but the inclination vanishes when the boat upsets, or the locomotive runs off the track, or the measles set it.
to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.
When faced with exceptional circumstances, people react differently.
In difficult times fashion is always outrageous.
If you're in a car crash, you're mostly involved in trying to not go off the bridge, and later on you say, 'Oh my God!'
We suddenly saw how people reacted in the event of massive social upheaval, and the way that the little problems in your life don't go away. You don't stop being frightened of spiders just because the world's blown up.
When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
People ask, 'Is the science going to run ahead of the ethics?' I don't think that's always the problem. I think it's that the science runs ahead of the politics. Bioethics can alert people to something coming down the road, but it doesn't mean policy and politicians are going to pay attention. They tend to respond when there's an immediate crisis. The job of the ethicist, in some ways, is to warn or be prophetic. You can yell loudly, but you can't necessarily get everybody to leave the cinema, so to speak.
There are two types of panicking: standing still and not saying a word, and leaping all over the place babbling anything that comes into your head.
