This may sound trite, but bad things happen to good people, and when you're facing terrorism, natural disaster, you can have every wonderful plan in place, but I am a realist.

Everyone is going to have to step up to the plate.

It was a bad idea, because I think that any government reorganization has to come in relatively small bites, or else you get indigestion.

We have to make a determination of what the minimum standards are for police, fire and emergency services in all of America's major cities. Once we determine that, then we can decide what the funding is.

And if you do all you can, that's all you can ever do.

Washington, D.C., has a much greater risk than Manchester, N.H. They both need some level of funding, but they ought not to be done per capita. Congress is to blame for some of this.

The president's very right about one thing: When you have a disaster of that scale, whether it be natural or a terrorist attack, there's only one part of our entire government, state or local, that is equipped to handle it, and that's the U.S. military.

And they will tell you unequivocally that if we have a chemical or biological attack or a nuclear attack anywhere in this country, they are unprepared to deal with it today, and that is of high urgency.

Well, it's taken a long time to get the Department of Homeland Security established. It's taken a long time for the Congress to decide how much it wanted to fund.

The two things that could have been better is number one, to get major military force into the community almost immediately to make sure that there was law and order. Number two, we had enough helicopters to airlift food into the centers of population and those places.

If there were a major earthquake in Los Angeles, with bridges and highways and railroads and airports all shut down and huge buildings collapsing, I don't care how much planning you do, the first 72 hours is going to be chaotic.

If you have a major disaster involving hundreds of thousands, or in this case millions of people, whether it be a natural disaster or an act of terrorism, the first 72 hours are going to be totally chaotic no matter what you plan to do.

We tend to pay attention to that which is the most current on our radar screen.

This may sound trite, but bad things happen to good people, and when you're facing terrorism, natural disaster, you can have every wonderful plan in place, but I am a realist.

The other thing about FEMA, my understanding is that it was supposed to move into the Department of Homeland Security... and be what it was, but also having a lot of lateral communication with all those others involved in that issue of homeland security.

Significant steps have been taken since 9-11 to protect out country here at home, but much remains to be done, Americans from across the political spectrum must come together to develop the next phase of our efforts to counter global terror.

If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.

The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.

Americans rightly asked, if this is the way our government responds to a natural disaster it knew about days in advance, how would it respond to a surprise terrorist attack? How would it respond to an earthquake?

Unlike most major American cities, Honolulu is geographically insulated from the rest of the country. When disaster strikes we cannot call on neighboring states for assistance.

The future is not Big Government. Self-serving politicians. Powerful bureaucrats. This has been tried, tested throughout history. The result has always been disaster. President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster - closed and forgotten within the first year.

I attended a very small junior high and specially in the end that became a disaster. The principal was pretty senile and a drunk, so the children more or less runned the school.

If I could learn to treat triumph and disaster the same, then I would find bliss.

There are no quick fixes to Indigenous poverty and social disaster.

The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College.

Homeowners and business owners across the country agreed to pay premiums, communities agreed to adopt building codes to mitigate flood dangers, and the Federal Government agreed to provide insurance coverage to policyholders after a disaster.

We pray that every field of science may contribute in bringing happiness - not disaster - to human beings.

There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.

First, those images help us understand the general and specific magnitude of disaster caused by the tsunami. The huge outpouring of aid would not have happened without those images.

The war on Iraq was a disaster, clearly carried out under false pretences.

Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.

Pride and excess bring disaster for man.

Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster.

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

He taught me never to smile, which helps me when I visit disaster sites.

It never occurred to me that we would have as grandiose a program as the Marshall Plan, but I felt that we had to do something to save Europe from economic disaster which would encourage the Communist takeover.

Turning the Internet over to the U.N. or some other phony international organization would be a disaster, and I am not willing to stand by and let it happen.

The most significant indicator that there is no disaster in Iraq is the fact that there is no exodus.

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

Much as we may wish to make a new beginning, some part of us resists doing so as though we were making the first step toward disaster.

The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster - especially if some nations are not democracies.

I certainly wouldn't say that my life is a disaster, but there have been moments where I've felt like that.

If the militarily most powerful - and least threatened - states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

There is humor in the specter of the worst disaster in our nation's history. All I have to do is sweep away the debris of shock to find it.

Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Islamic extremists will be a disaster for the world.