Social Resilience Quotes

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

Even in these difficult times we face, there is not one nation on Earth that would not want to trade places with us.

I go to South Dakota for ceremonies when I have the time. And when you learn what the Indian peoples have gone through to hold onto their culture and traditions... wow, it's an amazing story.

Women are not children. We are not fragile little birds who can't cope with jokes, works of art, or controversial speakers.

Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resume its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage.

The moral immune system of this country has been weakened and attacked, and the AIDS virus is the perfect metaphor for it. The malignant neglect of the last twelve years has led to breakdown of our country's immune system, environmentally, culturally, politically, spiritually and physically.

Societies' abilities to cope with the unknown depend on the flexibility of their institutions and individuals, and on their capacity to experiment freely with alternative forms of adaptation to the risks which threaten them.

Well, when you think about it black American culture evolved over three and a half centuries. Every minute under which they lived under oppression and they adapted to dealing with the fact that those freedoms were going to be cut off. They had to somehow make a life within all of those restriction, and they did.

Often confused with shyness, introversion does not imply social reticence or discomfort. Rather than being averse to social engagement, introverts become overwhelmed by too much of it, which explains why the introvert is ready to leave a party after an hour and the extravert gains steam as the night goes on.

I think it's going to be a tough century; I also think people are starting to rise up, and that a growth in human solidarity will help compensate for the loss of margin in the natural world that will make life harder.

For India's sake as much as its own, Bihar needs to be strong again, less vulnerable to the many forces that would deny democracy and curtail choice. Its people are its strength, and have many skills that other states have benefited from.

If you look at our theories of social pathology and then at the dismal conditions in which children grow up in our ghettos, you would predict that all of them would be on drugs or psychological basket cases. Yet if you use criteria like gainful employment, forming partnerships and life without crime, you will find that most of those kids make it.

Haiti is always talking about decentralization and nothing has been so obvious, perhaps a weakness, as the centralized nature of Haitian society as being revealed by the earthquake. I mean, they lost all these medical training programs because they didn't have them anywhere else.

Every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

From the outside you may see all the social indicators of decline, but from the inside I see an extremely tenacious people interested in holding on to their traditions.

... universal adoption of the institutions of the free society would better enable adaptation to climate both now and in the future. It would also ensure that, if at some point in the future, a real catastrophe, whether human-induced or otherwise (including climate change), does loom on the horizon, humanity would be in a better position to address it.

Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.

I think that any of the places that's cut off from money, things come up, what the people have to rely on.

We put people at the centre of securing the country. You can't secure your country with only a security apparatus and missiles.

You will attract the younger generation and they might well prove tougher than the older generation. What we are trying to do is to look at the future and see what we can do to bring some stability back to people's lives.

'Treme' begins after Hurricane Katrina, and it's a year-by-year account of how everyday people there put their lives back together. It's sort of a testament to, or an argument for why, a great American city like New Orleans needs to be saved and preserved.

When it comes to our collective health, how we deal with the multiple crises and problems around us also depends on the power of context - in other words, our resilience.

The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.

There may be some tough times here in America. But this country has gone through tough times before, and we're going to do it again.

You can shut down a service, and yet people will find ways to communicate.