Difficult Problems Quotes - Page 2

• Everywhere that I go in the world, people desperately look to American leadership in all of their world's most difficult problems. You can look at any region of the world and the United States is still the country to which those regions look for leadership.

  Condoleezza Rice

  Country, People, United States

  Source: www.cnbc.com

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• The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult
  problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were
  impossible.

  Freeman Dyson

  People, Ignorant, Impossible

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• Instead of confronting its real and difficult problems and grappling honestly with a dark past, Hungary embraced a reactionary government and a self-pitying image of itself as the victimized nation, and went looking for scapegoats in the Roma, Jews, and, most recently, Syrian migrants.

  Susan Faludi

  Real, Dark, Past

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• If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

  Truman Capote

  Writing, Narrators, Problem

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Since I turned the fields back to their natural state, I can't say I've had any really difficult problems with insects or disease.

  Masanobu Fukuoka

  Disease, Fields, Problem

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• Leg locomotion was, for decades, thought to be an incredibly difficult problem. There has been very, very painstakingly slow progress there, and robots that essentially lumbered along at one step every 15 seconds and occasionally fell over.

  Stuart J. Russell

  Progress, Robots, Legs

  "Intelligent robots don't need to be conscious to turn against us". Interview with Guia Marie Del Prado, www.businessinsider.com. August 5, 2015.

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• The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

  W. H. Auden

  Thinking, Personal Knowledge, Guessing

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• Beset by a difficult problem? Now is your chance to shine. Pick yourself up, get to work and get triumphantly through it. The time you spend living in fear is time you cannot spend living in love. The time you spend hiding and retreating from life is time you cannot spend growing and advancing and achieving.

  Ralph Marston

  Shining, Growing, Chance

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• One of the high spots of the decade for me was offering the bill which culminated in the tax act of 1986, which brought rates down. That was the most difficult problem to solve: how to make the tax system of the United States more fair. We tried to make it simpler, but we failed on that one.

  Donald T. Regan

  Offering, United States, Bills

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• You have perhaps waited for years to be freed from some need. For a long, long time you have looked out from the darkness in search of the light, and have had a difficult problem in life that you have not been able to solve in spite of great efforts. And then, when the time was fulfilled and God's hour had come, did not a solution, light, and deliverance come quite unexpectedly, perhaps quite differently than you thought?

  Eberhard Arnold

  Light, Years, Long

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• ..if a special geometry has to be invented in order to account for a falling apple, even Newton might be appalled at the complications which would ensue when really difficult problems are tackled.

  Oliver Lodge

  Fall, Order, Apples

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• To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

  Zadie Smith

  Keys, Novelists, Fluidity

  "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays". Book by Zadie Smith, 2009.

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• Neumann, to a physicist seeking help with a difficult problem: Simple. This can be solved by using the method of characteristics. Physicist: I'm afraid I don't understand the method of characteristics. Neumann: In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

  John von Neumann

  Science, Simple, Understanding

  Quoted in Gary Zukav, The DancingWu Li Masters (1979)

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• Experience hobbles progress and leads to abandonment of difficult problems; it encourages the initiated to walk on the shady side of the street in the direction of experiences that have been pleasant. Youth without experience attacks the unsolved problems which maturer age with experience avoids, and from the labors of youth comes progress. Youth has dreams and visions, and will not be denied.

  William James Mayo

  Dream, Science, Vision

  William James Mayo (1921). “In the time of Henry Jacob Bigelow”

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• The advances of biology during the past 20 years have been breathtaking, particularly in cracking the mystery of heredity. Nevertheless, the greatest and most difficult problems still lie ahead. The discoveries of the 1970's about the chemical roots of memory in nerve cells or the basis of learning, about the complex behavior of man and animals, the nature of growth, development, disease and aging will be at least as fundamental and spectacular as those of the recent past.

  H. Bentley Glass

  Memories, Lying, Learning

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• The difficult problems in life always start off being simple. Great affairs always start off being small.

  Laozi

  Simple, Problem, Affair

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• If you procrastinate when faced with a big difficult problem... break the problem into parts, and handle one part at a time.

  Robert Collier

  Time, Procrastination, Problem

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• God has given me a mule-like stubbornness to stick with a difficult problem and the intuitive powers to conceptualize complex hypothetical situations in my mind.

  Albert Einstein

  Mind, Mules, Sticks

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• Courage means to keep working a relationship, to continue seeking solutions to difficult problems, and to stay focused during stressful periods.

  Denis Waitley

  Relationship, Courage, Moving Forward

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• All large political doctrines are rich in difficult problems - problems that are quite above the average citizen's reach. And that is not strange, since they are also above the reach of the ablest minds in the country; after all the fuss and all the talk, not one of those doctrines has been conclusively proven to be the right one and the best.

  Mark Twain

  Country, Average, Political

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• I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Stories, Problem, Come Up

  P. G. Wodehouse (2015). “Right Ho, Jeeves”, p.3, Booklassic

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• No matter what advantages you are born with-- money, intelligence, an appealing personality, a sunny outlook, or good social connections-- none of these provides a magic key to an easy existence. Somehow life manages to bring difficult problems, the causes of untold suffering and struggle. How you meet your challenges makes all the difference between the promise of success and the specter of failure.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Struggle, Keys

  Deepak Chopra (2012). “Spiritual Solutions: Answers to Life's Greatest Challenges”, p.3, Harmony

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• Don't duck the most difficult problems. That just ensures that the hardest part will be left when you are most tired. Get the big one done - it's downhill from then on.

  Norman Vincent Peale

  Wise, Tired, Ducks

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• We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this—through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication—we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, but yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Wall, Pain, Sadness

  FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from May 17, 2014

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• From the point of view of the pure morphologist the recapitulation theory is an instrument of research enabling him to reconstruct probable lines of descent; from the standpoint of the student of development and heredity the fact of recapitulation is a difficult problem whose solution would perhaps give the key to a true understanding of the real nature of heredity.

  E.S. Russell

  Nature, Real, Science

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