Status Quo

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

David Friedman, The machinery of freedom: guide to a radical capitalism, Chicago, 1989, p. ix

[T]he status quo is the outcome of a system of national selfishness and political expediency, […] not the result of a considered attempt to work out the moral obligations of the developed nations[.]

Peter Singer, Practical ethics, Cambridge, 1993, p. 262