Ron DeSantis Quotes

You take care of emergencies first—in life and in politics.

Putting the budget ahead of the policy is the wrong way to do it. It's too often the way it's done in Washington.

You wait until the forest fire is on your front step before you step up.

In typical Washington fashion, nothing gets reformed until a disaster happens.

Too many people in Washington care about power institutions, not caring about changing the lives of everyday Americans.

When you're managing an emergency department, you're trying to keep everybody calm, so when an emergency comes in the door, everyone can do their best work.

If anything happened, I think my husband would have to deal with that as the time came.

Anyway, our family went into complete crisis mode. I have two older brothers, and we rallied as a family.

This emergency spending measure is certainly only the beginning, since we here in Washington will continue to work closely with the president and emergency agencies to ensure they continue receiving the funding they need.

The most important lesson my dad taught me was how to manage fear. Early on, he taught me that in a time of emergency, you've got to become deliberately calm.

When the going gets tough in Washington, presidents appoint 'blue ribbon' commissions.

Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to be fanatically precise and well-organized. On the other, they must be able to establish rapport with panicky callers.

I think in the wake of Katrina, the Coast Guard may well have been the only entity or agency that came out of that exercise free of fault and free of blame.

We've got to be judged by how we do in times of crisis.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

911 rings at the mayor’s office, not at the Justice Department or the White House.

American government has usually been pretty good in a crisis and pretty lousy at all other times.

After a national crisis, it’s never too early for a partisan debate in Washington.

The nation’s disaster mechanisms do not seem to be in the hands of those who know how to use them.

The bureaucracy needs to do more than one thing at a time. It’s appropriate to save people with helicopters, but it can’t be done to the exclusion of everything else.

All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time.

As with most politicians, it took a disaster for them to do something.

The Obama administration's zeal to not 'waste a good crisis,' as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it, has been stunning even for Washington insiders to behold.

A true relief effort for hurricane victims is not a partisan issue. However, in Washington we are notorious for making our jobs far more difficult than they need to be.

Over the years, I've been involved in many business crises. I qualify this, since my crises have never involved life and death or the survival of the human race. But they are still crises.