Systemic Failure Quotes

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.

The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.

It is possible for great nations to rot from within.

Unintended Consequences

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.

The old system collapsed before a new one could be created.

There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

The presently existing global financial and monetary system will disintegrate during the near term. The collapse might occur this spring, or summer, or next autumn; it could come next year; it will almost certainly occur during President William Clinton's first term in office; it will occur soon. That collapse into disintegration is inevitable, because it could not be stopped now by anything but the politically improbable decision by leading governments to put the relevant financial and monetary institutions into bankruptcy reorganization.

The U.S. healthcare system is probably the most interesting large group of companies that are heading for major problems that we've seen in a long, long time.

Over the last decade the United Nations has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge, and cannot do any better today.

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

If the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?

The civilization you sit in ... is now obvious in crisis, perhaps death pangs, twisting grotesquely like a dying animal, swirling down the garbage drain-this civilization was founded on God's road map.

The drug war is causing crime. It is just chewing up young, Black men. And it is killing Newark.

The best instituted governments carry in them the seeds of their own destruction; and though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend visibly to their dissolution. Every hour that they live is an hour less that they have to live.

If you serve a child a rotten hamburger in America, federal, state, and local agencies will investigate you, summon you, close you down, whatever. But if you provide a child with a rotten education, nothing happens, except that you're liable to be given more money to do it with. Well, we've discovered that money alone isn't the answer.

When the house of a great one collapses Many little ones are slain.

If Adam Schiff is able to review covert operations and intelligence, and if we have to be able to rely on his representations, our whole system is broken.

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.

… capitalism is being killed by its achievements.

We're facing a crisis that we have not provoked, yet we are the main victims of the greatest crisis since the 1930s. It's not been generated by factors external to the system, but by factors that are of the very essence of the system: exacerbated individualism, deregulation, competition, and so on.

There are so many things that we could do to change the world in so many aspects. There are people working in nonprofit organizations, tackling the issues that we so desperately need to face, while governments fail so appallingly.