Time & Perspective Quote by David Rockefeller

Pragmatism is doing a lot of emotional labor here. Rockefeller frames 9/11 and a recession as twin forces that simply "put a number of building plans on hold", as if catastrophe and market contraction are just weather systems passing through the real story: capital's timetable. That restraint is the point. Coming from a man whose name is synonymous with New York's financial architecture, the sentence performs steadiness, an elite refusal to dramatize what everyone else is still trying to metabolize.

The phrasing is calibrated to normalize shock. "Attacks" and "recession" sit side by side, linked by a neat "and", turning trauma into a factor in a project pipeline. Even "particularly powerful in New York City" subtly shifts the emphasis from human loss to operational impact, centering the city's role as an economic machine. This is not callousness so much as a worldview: the city is built, literally and figuratively, by plans, financing, timelines, and confidence. When confidence breaks, development pauses.

The subtext is reassurance to investors, civic leaders, and institutions: the pause is temporary, not a reckoning. "For the time being" is a small but strategic promise that the engine will restart, that the future remains a matter of coordination rather than moral uncertainty. In the post-9/11 context, when New York was negotiating grief alongside a frenzy of redevelopment symbolism, Rockefeller's language stakes out the banker-patriarch position: mourn, yes, but keep the ledger legible.