Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse Quotes

“Authoritarianism begins,” Snyder wrote, “when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing.”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“Things are never so bad that they can’t get worse,” she said. “They can.”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“But during all those boom years, Venezuela saved nothing.15 All the oil money had been spent or stolen. There was a law that said the government had to put money in a rainy day fund. Chávez repealed it and spent the money that had been set aside. When he died, the fund contained just $3 million.16”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“What does that mean in people’s lives? In broad terms, it would be as if, for every three people who used to have a full-time job, two are now unemployed. For every three shops on a block, two are closed. A family that used to eat three meals a day now eats just one (and often only lentils or pasta). Of course, the effects aren’t even across the economy and across society: some families eat more, some less, some go hungry.2 The United Nations estimated that in 2019, a third of the population had difficulty getting enough food to eat.3”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“From 2013 through 2019, according to an estimate by the International Monetary Fund, nearly two-thirds of all economic activity disappeared.1 That’s a 65 percent drop in gross domestic product.”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“The scene reminded Vespucci of Venice, prompting him to call the place Venezuela, or Little Venice.”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“It was well known that Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were acolytes of Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian guru who died in 2011. They had traveled to India to visit the guru and kept an altar to him in their home. I asked Porras if he was talking about Maduro’s attachment to Sai Baba. It was more than that, he said. “There are two things. He believes in predestination, in fate. Everything that’s going to happen has already been written. There’s not much you can do about it, and it’s already going to happen anyway. And he believes in signs. When Maduro was foreign minister, he was always in a good mood and there was no way to stress him out. He told me more than once that if something was going to turn out badly, he would know because he would have received a sign.”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“What Chávez understood intuitively was that the way to stay in power was to exploit the “us versus them” dynamic of populism.”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“The core claim of populism, according to the political scientist Jan-Werner Müller, is this: only some of the people are really the people. There is no more succinct description of Chávez’s fourteen years in power. Populism, according to Müller, a professor at Princeton University, incorporates a moral vision that pits the pure people against the corrupt elites.6”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“All the heads of institutions had to watch because you never knew if he was going to call you, you never knew what he was going to come up with, you didn’t know if he was going to give you a direct order. It was about governing through the media, like what Twitter is now, where it became popular with presidents to give orders or make announcements on Twitter. Chávez was ahead of his time.” (Chávez was an early adopter of Twitter also; he joined the platform in 2010, five years before Barack Obama.)”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“In the eyes of its citizens, the Venezuelan state is little more than an ATM—the magic box that stands between the oil in the ground and the outstretched palm, the device that performs the alchemy of turning oil into money in my pocket.”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

“policies. What’s distinctive about Venezuela is that its economy revolves entirely around oil. The government owns the oil in the ground and receives money from oil sales. The effect of that is to put the government at the center of economic life. And the government’s main function becomes the distribution of the oil money to its citizens.”
― William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela