Tony Blair Quotes

Our world needs to move from managing crises to preventing them in the first place. Too often, the world responds too late and too little.

It's obvious we can't ignore the problem any longer. Locally and nationally, we cannot wait to see how bad it gets. We need to act now.

I am a big believer in early intervention.

If terrorists attacked New York, Washington, or San Francisco with a weapon of mass destruction, the next day we will all be asking what steps we might have taken to prevent it. So the question is, “Why do we not take those steps now?”

Preventive policies are greatly superior to reactive ones.

We should not be focusing on quick solutions. The really important concern for policymakers everywhere is to prevent disasters - that is, the outlier events that matter the most.

To anticipate and prevent disasterous contingencies would be the part of wisdom and patriotism.

The essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic.

Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.

It is often too late by the time the government reacts.

Take care of what is difficult while it is still easy, and deal with what will become big while it is yet small.

Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.

Our task, your task... is to try to connect the dots before something happens. People say, 'Well, where's the smoking gun?' Well, we don't want to see a smoking gun from a weapon of mass destruction.

On the whole, when the unexpected danger happens to you, you're thinking so fast, you're thinking so hard, every bit of you is alive to 'What should I do?' 'What can I do?' There isn't a lot of time for contemplation.

At Sun, we have a special number you can call if there is something important happening.

You gotta strike while the iron's hot.

I fear, my Lords, it is too much the temper of this country to be insensible of the approach of danger, until it comes with accumulated terror upon us.

When the ship has sunk everyone knows how she might have been saved.

The earlier you start to solve a problem, the less draconian the solution needs to be.

The art of government is to deal with threats before they become overwhelming.

We must solve problems before they occur, rather than scrambling to deal with crises after they erupt..

When your house is on fire—that is not the time to talk

When these attacks occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them.

The core functions of government are negative—putting out fires, arresting criminals, settling disputes—and much more of what government does is the unromantic work of preventing bad situations from getting worse.

As soon as something really bad happens, I guarantee you Congress will act. I absolutely guarantee you Congress will act. But the question is, should we wait for that?