Emergencies Quotes

“Out of the way! We are in the throes of an exceptional emergency! This is no occassion for sport- there is lace at stake!" (Ms. Pole)”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

“But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“I sit up straight and do the first thing a person is supposed to do in an emergency, which is send a text message.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“To be a good professional engineer,
always start to study late for exams.
Because it teaches you how to
manage time and tackle emergencies.”
― Aamir Sarfraz (aamir rajput khan)

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.”
― Jill Lepore

“Do you know your Bible?'
'Uh, not very well.'
'It merits study, it contains very practical advice for most emergencies.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Fear, poverty, alcoholism, loneliness are terminal illnesses. Emergencies, in fact.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“The economy of your country shall never determine the size of your three square meals if you know you can rise against and above all limitations! The climatic emergencies in the weather shall never determine your survival rates if you know you are above their standards!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else.
I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code.”
― Ryan Boudinot, Blueprints of the Afterlife

“Stop letting other people hijack your day.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, Soul Food: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

“You are my emergency contact.
This is the emergency!
My life is burning down!”
― Elizabeth von Transehe

“And the night unwound as those days and nights do--those days and nights that hijack time. Those days and nights that hold up the car on its way home and gun down the driver and the passengers and leave the wreckage in the rain.

You were moving through your days and nights and then the call came. You were thinking about supper or going to bed. You weren't thinking about death and loss. And now there's a flood and it's dark and you're trying to get there before it's too late but it's already too late because the time where there was enough time is over. You don't know how long it is until morning and in the hospital the hands on the clock crawl round like an insect walking the same pane of glass till it dies.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“Never forget to put the beneficiaries on top of your organogram!”
― Geir Furuseth

“As noted in Chapter 4, there’s abundant evidence that presidents use their disaster-declaration
authority under the Stafford Act to aid their own reelection prospects. Presidents direct more
disaster relief to politically important states and declare more disasters in election years—and the
average number of yearly disaster declarations has been increasing over time.35 Bill Clinton still
holds the election-year record, with 75 disaster declarations in 1996; George W. Bush came in a
close second in 2004, and has declared disasters at a faster rate overall than Clinton.”
― Gene Healy, The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power

“But maybe his father was right. Maybe what had happened in 1918 could never happen again.

"U.S. Reveals Detailed Flu Disaster Plans."

Cole decided to make this the topic for his research report. Plans for manufacturing and distributing vaccines and other medications. Plans to quarantine the sick and to call up extra doctors and nurses and to replace absent workers with retired workers so that businesses wouldn't have to shut down. Plans to keep public transportation and electricity and telecommunications and other vital services operating and food and water and other necessities from running out. Plans to mobilize troops (for Cole this was the only exciting part) in the event of mass panic or violence.

One day he would ask Pastor Wyatt why, despite all these plans, everything had gone so wrong.

"Son, that is just the thing. That is what people did not--and still do not--get. There is no way you can count on the government, even if it's a very good government. The government isn't going to save you, it isn't going to save anyone. There's no way you can count on other people in a situation like we had. People afraid of losing their lives--or, Lord knows, even just their toys--they'll panic. Even fine, decent Christian folk--you can never know for sure what they'll do next. So I say, love your neighbor, help your fellow man all you can, but don't ever count on any other human being. Count on God."

What Cole didn't know was that most of the plans he read about that night would have been sufficient only for an emergency lasting a few weeks.”
― Sigrid Nunez, Salvation City

“The majority of hurricane Ian deaths were drownings, vehicle crashes, medical emergencies, falls and suicides.”
― Steven Magee

“Mr. Geronimo was a hoarder of fuel, gas masks, flashlights, blankets, medical supplies, canned food, water in lightweight packets; a man who expected emergencies, who counted on the fabric of society to tear and disintegrate, who know that superglue could be used to hold cuts together, who did not trust human nature to build solidly or well. A man who expected the worst.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights