Science Quote by Maxwell Maltz

Maltz needles the drama out of “crisis” by treating it less like a meteor strike and more like a fork in the road. The phrase “close scrutiny” is doing the heavy lifting: it’s a clinician’s directive, not a motivational poster. Look carefully enough and the emergency resolves into structure, incentives, choices. “Most” quietly concedes there are real catastrophes, but it also implies our culture overuses the word crisis as a way to excuse paralysis or demand sympathy.

The subtext is bluntly anti-fatalistic. Maltz reframes high-pressure moments as a referendum on agency: you can “advance,” or you can “stay where you are.” Not “fail,” not “collapse” - stagnation is positioned as the true loss. That’s a very mid-century, self-improvement-era move, consistent with Maltz’s broader influence on popular psychology and performance thinking: crisis isn’t destiny, it’s information. It reveals the habits you default to when your self-image is threatened.

The quotation’s wry bite sits inside those scare quotes around “crisis situations.” He’s hinting that many “crises” are socially constructed, magnified by ego, status anxiety, or the fear of choosing. In professional life especially, calling something a crisis can be a way to postpone responsibility; Maltz flips it into a test of motion. He also sneaks in a competitive worldview: opportunity is always present, but not evenly distributed, and not automatically taken. The line reads as reassurance, then lands as a challenge: if nothing changes after the crisis, that outcome was a decision too.