Warnings Quotes

“Cognitive biases worked well when rapid pattern recognition and decision making was critical for survival,”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“In the past twenty years, that feeling of mastery has turned to growing fear, fear that antibiotics are losing their efficacy. The excessive and improper use of antibiotics has imparted resistance on the bugs they used to kill.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Influenza is amazingly adaptable. It changes lethality and transmissibility quickly and jumps from animal to human more readily than any other disease. New flu mutations emerge daily, some proving more contagious than others.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“In 1957, a flu virus that had not been seen for sixty-five years was discovered in Asia. Because of its long dormancy, most of the world had no immunity. In two waves of deaths, nearly 1.5 million people were killed, including seventy thousand Americans.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“When the next pandemic strikes, all that will matter is the capacity of our public health system to detect and respond.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Often it is not clear whose job it is to detect the warning, evaluate it, and decide to act. The President of the United States or the CEO of a corporation might be the person who could order action, but there may not be a general understanding of who should take the issue to them. Who owns it? Frequently, no one wants to own an issue that’s about to become a disaster. This reluctance creates a “bystander effect,” wherein observers of the problem feel no responsibility to act.7 Increasingly, complex issues are multidisciplinary, making it unclear where the responsibility lies. New complex problems or “issues on the seams” are more likely to produce ambiguity about who is in charge of dealing with them.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Regardless of what deadly microbe comes up next—pandemic influenza, a man-made chimera, or multi-drug-resistant bacteria—Garrett insists that the world needs a greatly improved public health infrastructure to respond appropriately”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“CRISPR’s greatest threat may be its use as a tool to create lethal diseases. Even hardened experts like Dr. Webster, who fight every day against the power of nature as it seeks to create killer influenza recombinations, are flummoxed by the reassortments humans may seek through CRISPR.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“The WHO warns, “This serious threat is no longer a prediction for the future; it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country. Antibiotic resistance—when bacteria change so antibiotics no longer work in people who need them to treat infections—is now a major threat to public health.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“If Fouchier’s pandemically engineered H5N1 had breached his laboratory, or if something similar emerges naturally, the resulting damage to civilization is hard to fathom. Even if H5N1 follows the Spanish Flu percentages—30 percent infected and a lethality of 2 percent—Fouchier’s superbug would kill 42 million people. However, Webster thinks that is a foolishly low estimate. Why would the lethality decrease when Fouchier just proved the virus can become airborne without weakening? Webster thinks 3.5 billion could die.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“In fact, Spanish flu infected so many in 1918 that it is the genetic Adam and Eve of nearly any modern pandemic flu strain.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Almost a hundred years later, after numerous studies, including sequencing the virus’s RNA, scientists still do not know exactly why the Spanish flu was so deadly, and that ignorance obviously makes experts uncomfortable.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“The disease was so deadly that it burned itself out: it killed victims so fast that they didn’t have time to infect many others.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Beginning in 1918 and lasting less than three years, the Spanish flu epidemic killed up to 5 percent of the earth’s population”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“At that point, both Dick Clarke from State and Richard Haass from the White House looked up from their note taking, staring across the table at each other in shock. Both of them students of military history, they knew what it meant when an army went silent.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“They had just held a naval exercise in the Gulf anyway, what more signaling could be necessary? In fact, U.S. ships were already leaving.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“It was not until 1962 that the definitive report on Pearl Harbor was written. And then, it was not written by a government committee, but by an academic named Roberta Wohlstetter. She concluded that the problem had not been a scarcity of information, but an overabundance of it. It was difficult, Wohlstetter concluded, to identify the reports that mattered among the avalanche of intelligence and other inputs.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“And then, it was not written by a government committee, but by an academic named Roberta Wohlstetter. She concluded that the problem had not been a scarcity of information, but an overabundance of it. It was difficult, Wohlstetter concluded, to identify the reports that mattered among the avalanche of intelligence and other inputs.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Before he had left the office the night before, Charlie had ordered the satellite to image those elite armor divisions. Now, looking at the results of the imagery collection, he did not like what he saw.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“Alternative history is a parlor game.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

“The Bible tells the story of the Hebrew prophet Daniel, who was able to read mysterious words that appeared on the wall of the Babylonian king Belshazzar’s banquet hall during a rowdy feast. The words mene, mene, tekel, upharsin (“numbered, numbered, weighed, divided” in Aramaic) were unintelligible to all but Daniel, who warned the king that they foretold the fall of his kingdom. According to the story, Belshazzar was killed in a coup only hours later. Daniel had seen the “writing on the wall.”
― Richard A. Clarke, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes