Samantha Power Quotes

Good household decision-making often relies on thinking about your household like a firm.

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.

I’ve worked as a leader for many years and I’ve always trained myself to be prepared for the worst.

It is difficult to change the rules in the middle of a crisis.

The great problem now is that we don’t know what to do.

Reducing future risks requires paying some immediate costs.

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

The Nation trembled on the brink. Events moved with such speed that it was necessary to decide to act on the instant, as each successive crisis arose.

In our government we drive decisions either by leadership of by crises. If the leadership is not there, we rely on crises.

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.

The pressure of time, is the overwhelming challenge for policymakers who must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time and whose mistakes are irretrievable.

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

We have multiple challenges competing for finite resources—–and grotesque uncertainty with regard to the military budget.

I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems.

In markets, there are times when you are looking for what makes sense. At other times, you are looking for what you can do that is sensible versus constraints and uncertainties.

We ought to prioritize national disasters... in a fiscally responsible way.

The humanitarian aid system is built on a concept that when disaster strikes, outside agencies provide a temporary helping hand until people can take back control of their own lives. But across the world, we see millions of people caught in semi-permanent crises. As each year goes by, they are less and less likely to break free.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Paying for disasters and being fiscally responsible are not mutually exclusive.

Terrible things happen all of the time, and they can happen in a second. The best thing is to be prepared to react. If you try to control every little thing, you're going to end up miserable - and you're going to fail.

I learned one of the very important lessons in life in the 9/11 attacks. It's good to have a plan for your future; it's even better to write your plan in pencil.

There is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there's one thing I've learned throughout my work in finance, government, and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.

Politics is not a laboratory experiment where you can control everything. You have to take calls even when you feel that matters may spin out of your hand.

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.

Access to humanitarian assistance and information are all the more important during the Covid-19 pandemic.