Problem Quotes - Page 40

• If in the modern world wars have unfortunately to be fought (and they do, it seems) then they must be stopped at the first possible moment, otherwise they corrupt us, they create new problems and make our future even more uncertain. That is more than morality; it's sense.

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  War, World, Firsts

  Interview with James Cameron, Picture Post, October 28, 1950.

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• When we talk about values, I think of rationality in solving problems. That's something I value. Fairness, kindness, generosity, tolerance. That's different. When they [Conservative right wing Republicans] talk about values, they're talking about things like going to church, voting for Bush, being loyal to Jesus, praying. These are not values.

  Bill Maher

  Jesus, Kindness, Thinking

  "Real Time with Bill Maher", November 5, 2004.

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• You "have a date," you "go out with a date," you "groan because there isn't a decent date in town." A situation defined as containing a girl - or boy - of the right social background, the right degree of popularity, a little higher than your own.

  Margaret Mead

  Girl, Boys, Men

  "Male and Female". Study by Margaret Mead, 1949.

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• Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.

  Andre Malraux

  Art, Past, Culture

  "The Voices of Silence". Book by Andre Malraux, Doubleday, Part IV, Chapter VII, 1953.

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• My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him. I had some sort of gift and when it came time to try to find a publisher I had a little bit of an "in" because I had his agent I could turn to, to at least read my initial offerings when I was about 20. But the only problem was that they were just awful, they were just terrible stories and my agent, who ended up being my agent, was very, very sweet about it, but it took about four years until I actually had something worth trying to sell.

  Anne Lamott

  Sweet, Father, Reading

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.

  William Winwood Reade

  Men, Atoms, Agents

  William Winwood Reade (1874). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.186

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• The problem is that we live in an uptight country. Why don't we just laugh at ourselves? We are funny. Gays are funny. Straights are funny. Women are funny. Men are funny. We are all funny, and we all do funny things. Let's laugh about it.

  Bob Newhart

  Country, Laughter, Gay

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• Strategy making needs to function beyond the boxes to encourage the informal learning that produces new perspectives and new combinations... Once managers understand this, they can avoid other costly misadventures caused by applying formal techniques, without judgement and intuition, to problem solving.

  Henry Mintzberg

  Perspective, Judgement, Intuition

  "The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning" by Henry Mintzberg, hbr.org. 1994.

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• We find that the manager, particularly at senior levels, is overburdened with work. With the increasing complexity of modern organizations and their problems, he is destined to become more so. He is driven to brevity, fragmentation, and superficiality in his tasks, yet he cannot easily delegate them because of the nature of his information.

  Henry Mintzberg

  Senior, Organization, Tasks

  "The structuring of organizations: A synthesis of the research". Book by Henry Mintzberg, 1979.

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• Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Children, Philosophy, Philosophical

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Carl Klagge, Alfred Nordmann (1993). “Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951”, p.175, Hackett Publishing

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• It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Thinking, Philosopher, Solve

  "Culture and Value" by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Peter Winch, (p. 75e), 1980.

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• In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Book, Eye, Writing

  "Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69". Interviewed with Peter H. Stone. Issue 82, p. 322, www.theparisreview.org. Winter 1981.

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• The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow "expertise" and "theoretical sophistication" (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought... Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Numbers, Ignorant

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• Nothing radically changes when instead of human satisfaction, we think of the satisfaction of some heavenly being! God's person displaces the problem and does not abolish it.

  Georges Bataille

  Thinking, Doe, Heavenly Beings

  Georges Bataille (2004). “On Nietzsche”, p.18, A&C Black

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• Anyone from abroad will tell you that it is the class system that really lies at the root of our problems, economic and industrial. The House of Lords symbolises that.

  Tony Benn

  Lying, Class, Roots

  "The Yorkshire Post" Newspaper, November 22, 1976.

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• We should go to the masses and learn from them, synthesize their experience into better, articulated principles and methods, then do propaganda among the masses, and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and help them achieve liberation and happiness.

  Mao Zedong

  Practice, Principles, Helping

  Mao Zedong (2017). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works”, p.69, Lulu.com

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• I can't be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It's at that level.

  Donald Knuth

  Years, Levels, Computer

  Computer Literacy Bookshops Interview, 1993.

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• The United States needs serious change in its fiscal, entitlement, infrastructure, immigration, and education policies, among others. And yet a polarized and often paralyzed Washington has pushed dealing with these problems off into the future, which will only make them more difficult and expensive to solve.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Immigration, United States, Needs

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• The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Struggle, Men, Community

  Ludwig Von Mises (1962). “The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method”

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• one sex of voice in public matters, and that we could in no way so increase the attention , the intelligence and the devotion which may be brought to the solution of social problems as by enfranchising our women .

  Henry George

  Sex, Voice, Matter

  Henry George, William Saunders, Francis George Shaw (1900). “Social problems”

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• Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.

  Saul Alinsky

  Asking, Diarrhea, Solve

  "Saul Alinsky: A candid conversation with the feisty radical organizer". Interview with Eric Norden, Playboy, 19 (3), March 1972.

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• The term "paradigm," from the Greek paradeigma ("pattern"), was used by Kuhn to denote a conceptual framework shared by a community of scientists and providing them with model problems and solutions

  Fritjof Capra

  Community, Greek, Patterns

  Fritjof Capra (1989). “Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with Remarkable People”, Bantam

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• In war there are none but particular cases; everything has there an individual nature; nothing ever repeats itself. In the first place, the data of a military problem are but seldom certain; they are never final . Everything is in a constant state of change and reshaping.

  Ferdinand Foch

  Military, War, Data

  Ferdinand Foch, Alphonse Grasset (1920). “Precepts and Judgments”

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• Will an Iraq war make our Al Qaeda problem worse? Not likely.

  Christopher Hitchens

  War, Iraq, Als

  "A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq". Book by Christopher Hitchens (published in the United Kingdom as "Regime Change"), 2003.

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• The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.

  Northrop Frye

  Thinking, Answers, Literature

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.437, University of Toronto Press

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