Robert J. Shiller Quotes

We cannot stop natural disasters but we can arm ourselves with knowledge: so many lives wouldn't have to be lost if there was enough disaster preparedness.

Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future.

As a country with experience of coping with earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters, Japan believes in emphasizing the mainstreaming of disaster risk reduction. We therefore prioritize investment in disaster prevention and post-disaster improvements under a policy of Build Back Better (BBB).

Don’t ignore planning for unlikely events. Over long periods of time the highly improbable gets more probable to occur at least once.

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.

Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.

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

So not only do we need to deal with threats as they emerge, we have to be thinking in anticipation of future threats, and the things we do have to be things that enable the system to continue to work.

Too many families and homes remain unnecessarily vulnerable to natural disasters like hurricanes. While mitigation will never eliminate the risk to homeowners, it could reduce loss and, in many cases, save a family's home. For every $1 spent on mitigation, $4 in post-storm cleanup and rebuilding is saved.

I think the idea that you would do everything you can to prevent what is coming at you by way of something very disruptive - a 9/11 - it's a no-brainer.

To prepare for a disaster, practice the worst case scenario. We don’t usually do that.

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?”

Reducing future risks requires paying some immediate costs.

When we have a disaster in Japan, I wonder, how can we prevent our lives and traditions and history from the disaster?

Soon after a disaster passes, we tend to turn our eyes away and focus our resources on the day-to-day, rather than on preparing for the rare, but foreseeable and potentially catastrophic disaster. It's another form of triage, how much we invest in preparing for that, a very important question for public policy. We are a short-sighted species.

Did you know that the word 'tsunami,' which is now being used worldwide, is a Japanese word? This is indicative of the extent to which Japan has been subject to frequent tsunami disasters in the past.

Disasters happen. We still have no way to eliminate earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, floods or droughts. We cope as best we can by fortifying ourselves against danger with building codes and levees, and by setting aside money to clean up afterwards.

We owe it to the flood victims of New Orleans to give them truthful answers as to why this event took place and to assure our citizens that tragedies like this will never happen again.

During a large disaster, like Hurricane Katrina, warnings get hopelessly jumbled. The truth is that, for warnings to work, it's not enough for them to be delivered. They must also overcome that human tendency to pause; they must trigger a series of effective actions, mobilizing the informal networks that we depend on in a crisis.

Let's not go through that again. Redirect it, reduce the amount of money spent, but let's not destroy it. Because you don't know 10 years out what you're going to face.

We are ready for an unforeseen event that may or may not occur .

No risk that is preventable is acceptable.

In a disaster you have to have speed. In order to have speed, you have to have trust. And in order to have trust, you have to have people organized and planning before the disaster.

There is nothing we can do to assure that this will never happen, but there is a lot we can do to assure that it happens more rarely.

Assure personal survival in any kind of disaster.