Jennifer Granholm Quotes

We need to provide humanitarian assistance to civilians and accept our fair share of refugees.

Part of the redesign of FEMA is that they have so many people on standby, whether it is a retired nurse or a doctor who will take time off to go exactly where they are needed.

Through the example of our own policies as well as leadership in international fora, the United States should work towards adoption of more effective policies to avert, respond to, and resolve refugee and related humanitarian crises.

We have already provided a strong humanitarian response to the problems in the Middle East and that response will be stronger within coming days.

We are looking at what more we can do. As well as a strong security response we need a strong humanitarian one.

If you consider that there are a million people forced out of their homes by Katrina, multiply that by 150, and then stick those people in countries who, as inconceivable as it seems, are less prepared than we were to deal with the whole thing.

The two things that could have been better is number one, to get major military force into the community almost immediately to make sure that there was law and order. Number two, we had enough helicopters to airlift food into the centers of population and those places.

This is the United States of America. It means we respond to our fellow Americans in times of crisis and emergency and disaster.

When you are pulling people out of the water and off of rooftops, there are no Republicans and no Democrats.

It's especially important since September 11 for people to be trained for the unexpected. We want to try to make sure people are safe.

A massive state and federal effort, the likes of which we've never seen is going to be needed. We can do it for tsunami victims half a world away. We can do it for our own citizens.

When you have an emergency, there is the urge to do whatever it takes to see people get assistance.

Americans rightly asked, if this is the way our government responds to a natural disaster it knew about days in advance, how would it respond to a surprise terrorist attack? How would it respond to an earthquake?

One of the things government should be around for is to deal with catastrophes. It should do that well. To me, that's a government function, and we shouldn't be playing political games with it.

I can only hope the federal aid made available today will be sufficient in our recovery efforts, and pray that our citizens continue to be safe from the fallout of this dangerous natural disaster.

I'll just tell you, I'm not a big FEMA fan.

My father did a lot of disaster relief work, and he was always in places where there was a lot of pain.

For political and bureaucratic reasons, governments at all levels are telling far less to the public than to insiders about how to prepare for and behave in the initial chaos of a mass-casualty event.

In a world full of competing emergencies and disasters, it really helps if there is an international locomotive that can help us bring attention - help us bring resources.

You have to first handle the humanitarian crises and troops are very useful for doing that.

Through both our admissions policies and, equally importantly, through our support for international protection and assistance, the United States leads the world in responding to refugee and related humanitarian crises.

Responding to a natural disaster is a complex problem.

There is never a humanitarian solution for a humanitarian crisis. The solutions for the humanitarian crisis are always political ones.

Whenever there is an international crisis - an earthquake, a flood, a war - Americans provide more assistance than the people of any other nation.

In life, you don't really know what's coming at you. Like a firefighter, or police officer, or anyone else working in the emergency field, they don't know what's going to come at them. You gotta be ready for anything.