A Quote by Paddy Ashdown

Now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico; it’s a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down; the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia; food riots in Africa.
I'm really an alarmist when it comes to epidemics. Swine flu now; when SARS was big, I was all freaked out about that, bird flu. That terrifies me.
That's the problem with bacterial meningitis: it progresses really fast. You think you have the flu, and they say within 15 hours it's severely deadly - for sure within the first 24 hours - but even the first 15 hours.
Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu - like the vast majority of new outbreaks - comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.
I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.
I often say to entrepreneurs, 'If Lehman Brothers were Lehman Brothers & Sisters, it wouldn't have gone into bankruptcy.'
When I left my job at Lehman Brothers to start a company, my best friend's mother said, 'How could you leave a sure thing like Lehman to do a silly carpool startup?' That was three months before Lehman went bankrupt.
A lot of the listeners don't realize that the Daytona 24 Hours is the most difficult race in the world. It's 24 hours, a lot of darkness because it's held at the end of January, so you're talking about 13-14 hours of darkness.
Discipline is the whole key to being successful. We all get 24 hours each day. That's the only fair thing; it's the only thing that's equal. What we do with those 24 hours is up to us.
The reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you've lost the ability to contain it.
I did a thing called 24 Hour Plays, a thing they do every year on Broadway. A bunch of playwrights and actors get together, you write a play and you act it out in 24 hours, literally. People pay and the money goes to charity. So I did one - I was horrible. I was bad. I was terrified. And I was like, "Oh, I gotta do this again." Because I know I can do it.
I woke up one time coming out of a blackout, and I was on an airplane, descending to land in Charles de Gaulle Airport in France. And all I can think is I must have decided it was a good idea to go to France, and got my passport, and got on a plane.
With 30,000 deaths and 200,000 hospitalizations from the seasonal flu, those numbers are certainly higher than what we've seen of the swine flu. Protecting yourself from both viruses is very important.
Since 2001, people have been scared. There's been some really scary stuff that's been happening - 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system's breaking down.
Nobody believed the 'Food Network' could last. Even I was short sighted and thought to myself, 24 hours of food on TV? They'll run out of things to talk about in four days! But that wasn't true. 'Food Network' continues to get better and evolve.
This crisis has the potential to be a lot worse than Lehman Brothers.
Time is a finite resource that you can't get back. I have the same 24 hours you have, and you get the same 24 hours as me. As you rise, so does you chance for opportunity.
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