Bill McKibben Quotes

When there is a crisis, how you handle the crisis is just as important as the crisis.

I'm kind of the crisis communications person at 'SNL.' If there are fires to put out, they try and find me.

If my house is on fire, I don't need the fire chief telling me I should not have built the house out of wood. I need somebody to put the fire out.

Here's my philosophy in life: If there's a fire, you put it out. If there's a flood, you fill sandbags and you build a dike. You roll up your sleeves and you get to work.

Great, the worlds coming to an end and we're fixing it with Band-Aids

You want to put the fire out first and then worry about the fire code.

September 11 was horrific, but I've been through enough crises before that I had my own pattern as to how to collect facts, what a leader should do, how to communicate with people, how to set up operating mechanisms to work our way through it.

City government can and must help San Franciscans prepare for emergencies in order to avoid tragedy where possible and minimize loss of life and property when emergencies occur.

What you say and do in a crisis matters.

I try to put out fires when bizarre rumors get started.

If national safety - the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes - depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and on showy security drills, then a decentralized security scheme is useless.

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

A disaster like a hurricane is like a football game. You are going to lose the first quarter. There is no way you will win that quarter. The question is how ugly you will lose that quarter. Then you go into the second quarter – the search and rescue.

It’s a huge country. Floods, fires, accidents. You worry, you make phone calls, you sort things out.

If there's an air raid during the parade and there are dead and wounded, they must be quickly removed and the parade allowed to go on.

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

It’s bullshit. When people are dying, bureaucracy should be thrown out. I saw a guy kill himself at the Superdome. Two policemen have committed suicide.

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

Responding to a natural disaster is a complex problem.

The value of catastrophic events is that they can help people face up to problems that are otherwise impossible to address.

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.

Collaborative decision-making is very poor in crises.

We deal with emergencies on a regular basis out here in the Plain States.

It's so important to talk to the first responders.

When your house is burning down, you don't worry about the remodeling.