Sri Mulyani Indrawati Quotes

Everything changed after Katrina. It's a new New Orleans now and I think it's better. It was a wake-up call and it rebuilt and cleaned up the city. It all happened for a reason. I'm now grateful for Katrina.

Well, there's Katrina, but you can go through lots of Kurdistan and it looks like Katrina was just there but there's people living in it.

The inconveniences we faced within this state are minor compared to... New Orleans.

The pictures we saw before we got down here didn't even touch the reality of what it is like being here. We can be right on the beach with all the devastation and still not be able to imagine what it was like when the wall of water actually came up.

9/11 occurs, and you're going to rebuild, and after awhile, the memory will be there, but there will be something new there, and different, and functioning, and electric.

I actually happened to be in Haiti right before the earthquake in 2010. I was there already with the organization I work with now, Artists for Peace and Justice, visiting the primary school that I had adopted, the Academy for Peace and Justice in Port-au-Prince. I came back, and within days, the earthquake happened.

When things fall apart you sometimes can see more. You might even be able to see how to put things back together.

The world, post-Katrina, was a hard time for my city. The hardest time. For people who didn't live through it, no words can fully express the pain, the rage, the grief, and the futility we New Orleanians felt. For the people who did, words seemed like a feeble protest against a relentless night without end.

After Katrina, no one was the same. People, relatives, they were dying one after another.

Iraq has gone from being on the brink to being on the mend, and it clearly has some big advantages.

We've taken a show about destruction and turned it into a show about construction.

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

Yes, life in Chechnya so far looks more like a life after a natural disaster.

The first light of day today revealed what we had feared. The devastation is greater than our worst fears. It's just totally overwhelming.

Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, 'Thank God, I'm still alive.' But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.

The trouble with progress is that it tends to happen slowly and quietly. It's not necessarily going to shout about itself, or make the nightly news like a disaster or a scandal would.

The city of New Orleans showed America what it takes to rebuild a great place. We're all going together, and we're not leaving anybody behind.

The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event - not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics - then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.

In peacetime without war, they have destroyed all that could be destroyed. We are standing on one-sixth of the world, a rich country with our pants down and hoping someone will help us.

It was the first time I was looking, really, right after the storm, that I saw maybe the amount of devastation that had happened in the Lower Ninth Ward. Where my friends lived, which was about six blocks from where the industrial canal was, houses was smashed into houses, and there were, like, four houses smashed together.

My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.

For me, it's not an option to despair. The question is: what can we do to make someone's life better? Take the unimaginable strides made in places like Bosnia, where I cut my teeth, and Rwanda. Their stories aren't perfect, but I wouldn't have dreamt they could happen in a million years.

I had four combat tours, and I never saw death on a scale like I saw in Haiti. A quarter-million people lost their lives.

We imagine 'the end' as a world-devastating event, but every time there's a terrible earthquake, a tsunami, an outbreak of disease - that's apocalyptic, on a micro-scale.

With loss comes growth.