Quotes about problems
page 17

“The world has tried fundamentalists, Communists and conservatives and has now turned to the Hindus to find solutions to the problems… Hindus should rise in unison and show the world leadership based on values.”

Mohan Bhagwat (1950) Indian activist

As quoted in " Time for Hindus to show leadership to the world: RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat http://indianexpress.com/article/india/politics/bhagwat-time-for-hindus-to-show-leadership-to-the-world/", The Indian Express (22 November 2014) 2011-2014

World

“The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Love, Money, Thinking

“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Third term as Prime Minister

Life, Women, Men, Children

“There are, then, syntactical problems in the fields of perceptual signs, aesthetic signs, the practical use of signs, and general linguistics which have not been treated within the framework of what today is regarded as logical syntax and yet which form part of syntactics as this is here conceived.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 16; partly cited in: [[Alan MacEachren|MacEachren (1995:235)

Parting

“What nationalist educators often fail to recognize is that merely being taught by teachers who are black has not and will not solve the problem if the teachers have been socialized to internalize racist thinking.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Rock My Soul (2003)

Education, Thinking, Teachers

“When I paint an abstract picture (the problem is very much the same in other cases), I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings – like that of a person who possesses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to build something useful which is not allowed to be a house or a chair or anything else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper, professional way he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Notes, 1985; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Abstract paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/abstract-paintings-7 1980's

Hope, Way, Effort, Painting

“The answer is in the problem, not away from the problem. I go through the searching, analysing, dissecting process, in order to escape from the problem. But, if I do not escape from the problem and try to look at the problem without any fear or anxiety, if I merely look at the problem — mathematical, political, religious, or any other — and not look to an answer, then the problem will begin to tell me. Surely, this is what happens. We go through this process and eventually throw it aside because there is no way out of it. So, why can’t we start right from the beginning, that is, not seek an answer to a problem? — which is extremely arduous, isn’t it? Because, the more I understand the problem, the more significance there is in it. To understand, I must approach it quietly, not impose on the problem my ideas, my feelings of like and dislike. Then the problem will reveal its significance. Why is it not possible to have tranquillity of the mind right from the beginning?”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

"Eighth Talk in The Oak Grove, 7 August 1949" http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=320&chid=4643&w=%22The+answer+is+in+the+problem%2C+not+away+from+the+problem%22, J.Krishnamurti Online, JKO Serial No. 490807, Vol. V, p. 283 Posthumous publications, The Collected Works

Fear, Way, Feeling, Search

“The Girvan-Vanmanjari of Dhuniraj 119 written in 1702-04 during the reign of Aurangzeb, brings out this problem clearly. The book is written in the form of a catechism between two Brahmanas discussing the correct course of action to be adopted to put a stop to the injustices of Aurangzeb. One of them advocates protest and resistance. The other is of the view that such a course would still more exacerbate the tyranny of the King, but if they cooperated with the regime, they might obtain some relief and minimise the tribulations of the Hindus under the Mughal government. Centuries have rolled by, the country has been partitioned on religious lines, and yet the problem remains as a legacy of Muslim rule in India. How to live with the Muslims who cannot but discriminate between the faithful and the infidels? Through appeasement or confrontation? Not a happy legacy indeed.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 6

Happiness, Books, Faith, Country

“Analysis is the critical starting point of strategic thinking. Faced with problems, trends, events, or situations that appear to constitute a harmonious whole or come packaged as a whole by common sense of the day, the strategic thinker dissects them into their constituent parts. Then, having discovered the significance of these constituents, he reassembles them in a way calculated to maximize his advantage.”

Kenichi Ohmae (1943) Japanese academic

Source: The Mind Of The Strategist, 1982, p. 12

Way, Thinking, Sense, Appearance

“The new vision of man and politics was never taken by its founders to be splendid. Naked man, gripped by fear or industriously laboring to provide the wherewithal for survival, is not an apt subject for poetry. They self-consciously chose low but solid ground. Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic and inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. What rules and sets the standards of respectability and emulation is not virtue or wisdom. The recognition of the humdrum and prosaic character of life was intended to play a central role in the success of real politics. And the understanding of human nature which makes this whole project feasible, if believed in, clearly forms a world in which the higher motives have no place. One who holds the “economic” view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science. The success of the enterprise depends precisely on this simplification of man. And if there is a solution to the human problems, there is no tragedy. There was no expectation that, after the bodily needs are taken care of, man would have a spiritual renaissance—and this for two reasons: (1) men will always be mortal, which means that there can be no end to the desire for immortality and to the quest for means to achieve it; and (2) the premise of the whole undertaking is that man’s natural primary concern is preservation and prosperity; the regimes founded on nature take man as he is naturally and will make him ever more natural. If his motives were to change, the machinery that makes modern government work would collapse.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 284.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Life, Wisdom, Men, World

“I'm going back to my tour where I belong. The attention was more than I expected. The golf course wasn't a problem. It was just the things around it. All the preparation I've done in the last month weighed on me.”

Annika Sörenstam (1970) Swedish golfer

Comments after missing the cut at the Bank of America Colonial PGA Tournament - May 2003 http://www.usatoday.com/sports/golf/pga/2003-05-23-colonial_x.htm

“I find it amoral if you're making a movie where the problem is solved with a guy standing in the back of pickup truck firing a machine at the bad guys. The morality of it is questionable because the repercussions of violence are incredibly far-reaching.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

Fightin Words (1999)

Guy, Question

“Scientific information is faced with the following problem. On the one hand, we have the world’s literature of science and technology, past and present, in many languages; on the other, and enquirer with a question. How to select, from a vast mass of words, the few that are the most closely relevant to an enquiry? It is this selection process that makes use of classification.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 3.

World, Literature, Question, Science

“In our search for a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem, both in its external and internal dimensions, we shall not traverse solely on the beaten track of the past. Mindsets will have to be altered and historical baggage jettisoned.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

Quoted in [Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace, http://www.questia.com/read/118148594/kashmir-roots-of-conflict-paths-to-peace, 2003, Harvard University Press, 1]

Search, Past

“Then came those years in which I was forced to recognize the existence of a drive within me that had to make itself small and hide from the world of light. The slowly awakening sense of my own sexuality overcame me, as it does every person, like an enemy and terrorist, as something forbidden, tempting, and sinful. What my curiosity sought, what dreams, lust and fear created — the great secret of puberty — did not fit at all into my sheltered childhood. I behaved like everyone else. I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My conscious self lived within the familiar and sanctioned world; it denied the new world that dawned within me. Side by side with this I lived in a world of dreams, drives and desires of a chthonic nature, across which my conscious self desperately built its fragile bridges, for the childhood world within me was falling apart. Like most parents, mine were no help with the new problems of puberty, to which no reference was ever made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.”

Hermann Hesse book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 135

Life, Children, Secret, World

“Nigeria, it's a beautiful country with a great potential and I believe that in that part of the continent, Nigeria, once it sorts out its own problems, have a crucial role to play, like South Africa has in the more southern part of our continent.”

F. W. de Klerk (1936) South African politician

On The Washington Journal of C-SPAN https://www.c-span.org/video/?124979-1/the-trek-beginning (11 June 1999) 1990s, 1999

Beauty, Parting, Country

“When we consider a human work, we believe we know where the "intelligence" which fashioned it comes from; but when a living being is concerned, no one knows or ever knew, neither Darwin nor Epicurus, neither Leibniz nor Aristotle, neither Einstein nor Parmenides. An act of faith is necessary to make us adopt one hypothesis rather than another. Science, which does not accept any credo, or in any case should not, acknowledges its ignorance, its inability to solve this problem which, we are certain, exists and has reality.”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)

Faith, Intelligence, Fashion, Reality

“If there was a problem connected with my being a lesbian, even after I became aware of it, it was the loneliness, the fact that I didn't know anybody else like me.”

Elsa Gidlow (1898–1986) Canadian-American poet

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977), as cited in Palmer, Chris, October 6, 1978, "' Word is Out' an important film on gays http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=we08AAAAIBAJ&sjid=Yi4MAAAAIBAJ&pg=3700%2C2698575", Bangor Daily News.

Loneliness

“It was no problem for me to say I came from another world and could go back and forth in time in my emphysemic old Tardis which was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. Problem? For me who believed in Guardian Angels and was convinced that pigs were possessed by devils after their New Testament encounter with God's son? It was easy and I loved it.”

Tom Baker (1934) English actor

Love, God, World, Angels

“The idea of making machines that think has an unfailing fascination, not only for science fiction readers, but for all who can see it is a possible way of gaining some understanding of the working of our own minds. Thinking, however, is not an easily defined phenomenon, although it is often considered to be the process of solving problems.”

Edward Ihnatowicz (1926–1988) Cybernetic sculptor

Source: The Relevance of Manipulation to the Process of Perception, 1977, p. 133

Way, Idea, Understanding, Thinking

“From the point of view of seeking a consensus of the moral imperative of individuals, such consensus being assumed to exist, the problem of choosing an electoral or other choice mechanism, or, more broadly, of choosing a social structure, assumes an entirely different form from that discussed in the greater part of this study.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1950s-1960s, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), p. 85

Study, Parting

“Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression.
The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion.
This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man.
Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective.
His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy.
Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind — exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Foreword of "Man and his Gods" by Homer W. Smith
Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)

Truth, Books, Fear, Religion

“They say that, 'Why are you telling us that this Knowledge has to be taken from me?' But I don't say that this Knowledge has to be taken from me. I want that you should take this Knowledge, that's only I want to tell you. I don't say take from, from me. Take it. If you want to take it from me, go ahead. I'll give you. You can get it from someone else, go to someone he will give you. But the problem is you have to take it. That is the main thing. That doesn't mean you take from me. Go around the world, search for the spiritual master. If you cannot get this Knowledge, and you cannot receive this true Knowledge, then please come to me and I will give you this Knowledge.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Frankfurt, Germany, March 11, 1972
1970s

World, Search, Knowledge

“The solution of the most important problems of the theoretical social sciences in general and of theoretical economics in particular is thus, closely connected with the question of theoretically understanding the origin and change of 'organically' created social structures.”

Carl Menger (1840–1921) founder of the Austrian School of economics

Source: Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, 1883, p. 147

Understanding, Question, Science, Change

“Among recent contributions we may refer in particular to Professor A. G. Greenhill's noteworthy papers… when one remembers that these complex curves reach only especially simple cases of gyroscope motion, one may get some notion of the difficulty of the problem involved.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

Footnote: Greenhill: Applications of Elliptic Functions, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc., 1895, 1896; Engineering, July, 1896.
"The Mathematical Theory of the Top" (April 8, 1898)

“The problems is mastered — insupportably
tiring when it was impending.
Deliverance accounts for what sounds like axiom. The Gordian knot need not be cut.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

"Charity Overcoming Envy"
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

“The agenda, as I conceive of it, is the list of subjects or problems to which government officials, and people outside of government closely associated with those officials, are paying some serious attention at any given time.”

John W. Kingdon (1940) American political scientist

Source: Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies - (Second Edition), Chapter 1, How Does an Idea's Time Come?, p. 3

People, Time

“Krupp cannon have thundered over the battlefields where German unity was fought for and won, and Krupp cannon are the energy of the German army and navy today. The ships constructed in the Krupp yards carry the German flag into every sea. Krupp steel protects our vessels and our forts…But the Krupp works has not only been an exploiter in this sense. It has also been the first in Germany to recognize the new social problems and to seek to solve them, thus leading to social legislation.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Speech at the Krupp Centenary in Essen (8 August 1912), quoted in William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1968), p. 303
1910s

Sense, Sea

“Hamlet is the tragedy of tackling a family problem too soon after college”

Thomas Lansing Masson (1866–1934) American journalist

Source: Arbutus Yearbook, Indiana University., 1912, p. 255.

Family

“Zen is a form of liberation - being liberated from Yin and Yang elements, and enabling you to remain calm and cool when you are troubled. Zen is not something definite and tangible, it is a refuge for mental solace. Zen is about concentration of mind. It is a profound culture, enabling people to gain spiritual tranqulity and be awakened. Even though not a word is spoken, it enables one to gain a thorough understanding of the truth of life. This is what we call the harmony between Yin and Yang. It is like a substance deep in your soul, generating a kind of wisdom and energy in your mind. It is also a kind of energy of self-confidence, helping you to achieve self-emancipation, self-regulation and self-perfection, leading you to the path of success. As such, Buddhism talks about ‘Faith, Commitment, and Action’. The theory, when applied in the human realm, is all about Zen. Concentration gives rise to wisdom. With concentration, the mind will be focused and it will not be drifting apart. Hence, the problem of schizophrenia will not arise. Zen culture is about the state of mind. It is a kind of positive energy! Positive energy is a kind of compassion, which enables people to understand each other when they encounter problems, to understand the country and society at large, and to understand their family and children, colleagues and friends. In this way, people will be able to live in peaceful co-existence and remain calm when they are faced with problems. When you see things in perspective using rationality and positive energy, you are able to change your viewpoint pertaining to a certain issue. This is the moment Zen arises in your mind! In fact, Zen is within you. This theory is very profound.”

Jun Hong Lu (1959) Australian Buddhist leader

10 October 2013
Special Interview by People' Daily, Europe Edition

Life, Wisdom, Children, People

“Apple tends to aggressively work to not discover problems with products that are shipped and certainly not talk about them.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Tesla and Apple: When Analytics Can Bite You http://itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/tesla-and-apple-when-analytics-can-bite-you.html in IT Business Edge (28 October 2015)

“You know the word master, teacher? When you go to schools, you say, Master, I have got this, this, and this question. Master, can you solve this problem for me? In India, instead of saying Master, we say Guru. Same thing. Master teaches you something. Master takes off your ignorance and puts some knowledge into your mind. Same way, a true Guru does that. He takes off all the ignorance, egos, from our mind and puts Knowledge. And peace he gives.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 2, 1971
1970s

School, Peace, Way, Question

“Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 44

Science

“Quantum mechanics as it stands would be perfect if we didn't have the quantum-gravity issue and a few other very deep fundamental problems.”

Gerardus 't Hooft (1946) Dutch theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Does Some Deeper Level of Physics Underlie Quantum Mechanics? An Interview with Nobelist Gerard 't Hooft http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/2013/10/07/does-some-deeper-level-of-physics-underlie-quantum-mechanics-an-interview-with-nobelist-gerard-t-hooft/

Perfection

“People love actors. They love reading about them and thinking about their lives. But they also secretly hate them. They think their lives are frivolous and all they do is go to parties, and they don't know real problems… There's something at the root of our love-hate relationship with celebrity that I think has the makings, if you could do it in a really substantive way, of a great modern American novel.”

Ethan Hawke (1970) American actor and writer

The Observer http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2002/sep/08/fiction.features (2002-09-08) 2000&ndash;2004

Love, Hate, People, Way

“I just want people who are qualified, I want them to believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. So yep, I don't have a problem with appointing an openly gay person. Because they're not going to try to put sharia law in our laws.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

at Family Leader Presidential Lecture Series in Pella, Iowa, 2011-10-06, quoted in [Cain Says He Would Be Ok With Appointing Gay Cabinet Members Because They Wouldn’t Impose Sharia Law, 2011-06-06, Marie, Diamond, Think Progress, http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/06/06/238067/cain-says-he-would-be-ok-with-appointing-gay-cabinet-members-because-they-wouldnt-impose-sharia-law/, 2011-10-09]

People, Law, Personality

“Computer scientists have so far worked on developing powerful programming languages that make it possible to solve the technical problems of computation. Little effort has gone toward devising the languages of interaction.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 6, p. 180.

Effort

“We should like to see this Assembly shake itself out of complacency and move forward. We should like to see the committees begin their work and not stop at the first confrontation. Imperialism wishes to convert this meeting into a pointless oratorical tournament, instead of solving the grave problems of the world. We must prevent their doing so.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Address to the United Nations (1964)

World

“A central problem in teaching mathematics is to communicate a reasonable sense of taste—meaning often when to, or not to, generalize, abstract, or extend something you have just done.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Communication, Mathematics, Sense

“If you’re born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others. If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else to go to university. If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately. If you’re a woman, you still earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s too often not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home. These are all burning injustices, and – as I did with the misuse of stop and search and deaths in police custody and modern slavery – I am determined to fight against them.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech declaring bid for the Conservative Party leadership http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-mays-tory-leadership-launch-statement-full-text-a7111026.html (30 June 2016)

Death, Health, Education, School

“It doesn't matter," WisestFrog answered. "You knew that the thoughts were beneath you and you felt small. And here in the Land of the Gods, everything is so creative that your thoughts may give results you don't expect at all. But you really have no problem. Just think big yourself bigger. Go ahead, think a big thought.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Emir's Education In The Proper Use of Magical Powers (1979), p. 44-45

God, Thinking

“Always try the problem that matters most to you.”

Andrew Wiles (1953) British mathematician

Nova Interview

“There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect the truth.”

Victor Pelevin (1962) Russian author

Никаких философских проблем нет, есть только анфилада лингвистических тупиков, вызванных неспособностью языка отразить Истину.
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf [Священная Книга Оборотня], p. 226. (2004, translated by Andrew Bromfield in 2008)

Truth

“There's no doubt that we have other problems with Iran. But personally, I'd rather deal with the other problems having put that lid on their nuclear program than still to be facing that.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

Personality

“What seems to emerge is not a moral reprimand of the management scientist, but rather a moral problem of the profession, a wicked moral problem.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, Guest editorial: Wicked problems (1967), p. 142 cited in: Rob Hundman (2010) Weerbarstig veranderen. p. 38

“Maybe you've put your faith in spiritual claptrap because our random, narrative-free universe terrifies you. But that's no solution. If you want comforting, suck your thumb. Buy a pillow. Don't make up a load of floaty blah about energy or destiny. This is the real world, stupid. We should be solving problems, not sticking our fingers in our ears and singing about fairies.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

[Screen Burn, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/columnists/story/0,,2145124,00.html, The Guardian, 11 August 2007, 2007-08-19]
Guardian columns, Screen Burn

Stupidity, World, Faith, Universe

“This sensitivity to the phenomena of recession and inflation is a symptom of an increased public awareness of both the need for and the attainability of economic progress. It is precisely because so much of current industrial and governmental practice can be better in the future that our meetings this year are focused on the broad problem of improving the performance of the American economy. However, as we go about the task of appraisal and criticism, it will be well to discipline our impatience for reform. In the measure that we avoid exaggerating our nation's failures or understating its successes, we shall make it easier for ourselves as well as for economists in other countries to see current needs and developments in a just perspective.”

Arthur F. Burns (1904–1987) American economist and diplomat

Source: "Progress Towards Economic Stability", 1969, p. 101-2

Failure, Success, Future, Country

“The problem is not scarcity; the problem is power.”

Jim Stanford (1961) Canadian economist

Part 4, Chapter 22, Development(and Otherwise), p. 270
Economics For Everyone (2008)

“It's extremely dangerous trying to resolve political problems outside the framework of the law — first the ‘Rose Revolution', then they'll think up something like blue. [word play here: "rose" having the colloquial sense of "lesbian" in modern Russian, and "blue" meaning "gay"]”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

On the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine and the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia, News conference http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/russia/article405454.ece, (23 December 2004). On Ukraine

Law, Thinking, Sense

“Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Remarks Prepared for Delivery at the Trade Mart in Dallas

World, Education, Justice, Home

“For this is our central human problem: that we are almost constantly the victims of our emotions, always being swept up and down on a kind of inner-switchback. We possess a certain control over them; we can 'direct our thoughts' -- or feelings -- in such a way as to intensify them. This is certainly our most remarkable human characteristic: imagination. Animals require actual physical stimuli to trigger their experience. A man can retreat into a book -- or a daydream -- and live through certain experiences quite independent of the physical world. He can even, for example, imagine a sexual encounter, and not only experience all the appropriate physical responses, but even the sexual climax. Such a curious ability is far beyond the power of any animal.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: G. I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep (1980), p. 23

Books, World, Way, Feeling

“Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Preface, p. xiii (2012 ed.)

Communication, Universe, Time

“In the summer of 1930 my academic future, however, was not uppermost in my mind. I had been stricken by an acute attack of a disease which at regular intervals afflicts all mathematicians and, for that matter, all scientists: I became obsessed by a problem.”

Mark Kac (1914–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Prologue, How I Became a Mathematician, p. 1.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)

Disease, Affliction, Future, Summer

“Included in the problems of systems engineering are those of complexity and of choice. Of all the available facts about a system or the needs for a system, which are of most significance for the present circumstances and for their probable future course? How much information is needed and how should it be used to make a satisfactory decision, considering the time and resources available and the purpose to which these data are to be applied? Since most of the means of understanding which we as individuals use, or which are used by the automatic decision-making processes which we employ, are serial processes, we are continually faced with choices of how to divide the jobs to be done and to select an order or an arrangement for systematically handling the abundance of data which are available.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 1

Understanding, Decision, Time, Future

“In the course of some ninety years, the wheel has certainly turned full circle. The Protectionist case, which seemed to most of our fathers and grandfathers so outrageous, even so wicked, has been re-stated and carried to victory. Free Trade, which was almost like a sacred dogma, is in its turn rejected and despised… many acute and energetic minds in the ’forties “looked to the end.” They foresaw what seemed beyond the vision of their rivals— that after the period of expansion would come the period of over-production… [Disraeli] perceived only too clearly the danger of sacrificing everything to speed. Had he lived now, he would not have been surprised. The development of the world on competitive rather than on complementary lines; the growth of economic nationalism; the problems involved in the increasing productivity of labour, both industrial and agricultural; the absence of any new and rapidly developing area offering sufficient attractive opportunities for investment; finally, the heavy ensuing burden of unemployment, in every part of the world— all these phenomena, so constantly in our minds as part of the conditions of crisis, would have seemed to the men of Manchester nothing but a hideous nightmare. Disraeli would have understood them. I think he would have expected them.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

‘Preface’ to Derek Walker-Smith, The Protectionist Case in the 1840s (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933), pp. vii-viii.
1920s-1950s

Men, World, Thinking, Victory

“I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own.”

Andrew Wiles (1953) British mathematician

Nova Interview

Love, School, Home

“So all you people here, despite evidence to the contrary, still choose to support a man that for all intents and purposes can't even support himself? OK, OK, so if you're a Jeff Hardy fan, if you're wearing a Jeff Hardy t-shirt, if you're wearing one of his diabolical little handsleeves, God forbid if you have your face painted, I want to see you stand up right now. I want to hear you make some noise! Go ahead, if you love and support Jeff Hardy, let the world know! (Crowd cheers, stands up.) Cameraman, cameraman get a good shot, get a real good shot at all these people. The truth is ladies and gentlemen, I don't blame you. I don't blame anybody here for supporting Jeff Hardy. The people I blame, are their parents. Or let's be realistic here, I said parents, what I should have said was parent. Because it's obviously a single parent situation, just like the way Jeff Hardy grew up. See you people are so concerned with the relationship with your children failing, just like your marriage did, that you acquiesce to their every whim and their every desire. I hate to tell you, this doesn't make you a good parent, Philadelphia, it makes you an enabler. (Crowd boos. Starts chanting for Hardy.) And the fact that you even let your children look up to a guy like Jeff Hardy, just shows that you really don't care what happens to them to begin with. It's a sad situation. So I don't blame anybody here or sitting at home watching this, that supports Jeff Hardy if they're under 17, because they're young and they're, well, they're impressionable. The real problem lies with the parents, it's the parents who don't make a conscious effort to sit their children down and teach them the proper way to live! (Crowd boos.) You see it starts with a Jeff Hardy t-shirt, next thing you know they're smoking a pack of cigarettes, after that, they're drinking a bottle of beer. Right after that they move on to shots of Jack Daniels, which is a gateway drug for marijuana…(Crowd pops for marijuana.) And the fact that you people sit here and cheer that goes to show that I'm telling the truth! How about some old fashioned street drugs? And before you know it they're digging through Mom's purse because they're addicted, they're addicted to prescription medication. (Crowd cheers, Punk mouths,"That's not cool!" to fans.) All of this can be stopped before it's too late! Parents, all you have to do is talk to your children. Sit them down and show them the way, tell them the words that can save their lives, show them that sometimes it's what you don't do that makes you who you are! For weeks, for weeks I've been saying to people like you, just say no. But today I think we should just say yes. Yes to the future of a straight edge, drug free America! Just say yes to the winner of tonight's match, just say yes, to the World Heavyweight Champion! Thank you!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

At Night of Champions 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Love, God, Hate, Marriage

“Americanization is the science of racial relations in America, dealing with the assimilation and amalgamation of diverse races in equity into an integral part of its national life. By "assimilation" is meant the indistinguishable incorporation of the races into the substance of American life. By "amalgamation" is meant so perfect a blend that the absence or imperfection of any of the vital racial elements available will impair the compound. By "an integral part" is meant that, once fused, separation of units is thereafter impossible. By "in equity" is meant impartiality among the races accepted for the blend, with no imputations of inferiority and no bestowal of favors. With anything less than this in mind, America will fall short of a science and of giving the world anything of lasting value for its racial problems. Nation building is to be in the future a deliberate formative process, not an accidental, dynastic, geographical, and economic arrangement. It is to consider the rights and desires and hopes of races. It is to be a deliberative process, and as such must be selective. If the Allies succeed in freeing the small nations, as now seems certain, the world will witness the most interesting and dramatic re-assemblage of races that has ever taken place in history.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, World, Hope, History

“Problem solving has traditionally been taken to be an essential function of management. Through systems thinking, however, we have come to doubt the existence of problems and solutions to them.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1970s, Redesigning the future, 1974, p. 20.

Thinking

“Today we face many problems. Some are created essentially by ourselves based on divisions due to ideology, religion, race, economic status, or other factors. Therefore, the time has come for us to think on a deeper level, on the human level, and from that level we should appreciate and respect the sameness of others as human beings.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

"Kindness and Compassion" p. 47.
The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness (1990)

Religion, Thinking, Time

“The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1960 - 1970, Interview with David Sylvester 2. Spring 1965, p. 259

Life, Thinking, Painting

“You are right to demand that an artist engage his work consciously, but you confuse two different things: solving the problem and correctly posing the question.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (October 27, 1888)
Letters

Question

“"There are two errors in the the title of this book." --A sourcebook of philosophical puzzles, paradoxes and problems, Robert M. Martin, p. 4,”

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004) American philosopher

Books, Error

“In retrospect we might have been more cautious about allowing the creation in the 1950s of substantial Muslim communities here, although when one observes the, in some ways, greater problems which France and Germany have in this respect, it is an illusion to believe that in the integrated world of today any major country can remain exclusively indigenous.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

'On Race Relations and the Rushdie Affair', The Independent Magazine (4 March 1989), p. 16, quoted in Elham Manea, Women and Shari'a Law: The Impact of Legal Pluralism in the UK (I.B. Tauris, 2016), p. 256.
1980s

World, Way, Communication, Country

“We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child — that the future of the child in Buffalo is our future; that the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is our struggle; that the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger; that the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Democratic National Convention Address (1984)

Hunger, Pain, School, Family

“In his defense of Ambassador John Bolton and repudiation of the United Nations and the Third World, referring to the Third World, "That latter group includes a huge number of so-called nations, little more than spots on the map that would get invaded, taken over, subsumed, eliminated, except no-one wants to get stuck with their problems of poverty, disease and corruption."”

John Gibson (media host) (1946) American radio talk show host

http://www.newshounds.us/2005/04/06/john_gibson_oozes_hate_and_contempt_for_third_world_nations_un.php

World, Disease

“There you have the worst problem for prohibition officials. They resort to all sorts of tricks, concealing metal containers in their clothing, in false bottoms of trunks and traveling bags, and even in baby buggies. On the Canadian, Mexican and Florida borders inspectors are constantly on the lookout for women bootleggers, who try to smuggle liquor into the states. Their detection and arrest is far more difficult than that of the male law-breakers.”

Georgia Hopley (1858–1944) American journalist and temperance advocate

In regards to woman bootleggers. Quoted in "First woman prohibition agent says her sex must see to law enforcement". The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) March 12, 1922 p. 5.
Quoted in Minnick, Fred (2013). Whiskey Women: The Untold Story of how Women Saved Bourbon, Scotch, and Irish Whiskey pg. 33

Women, Law, Travel, Baby

“Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatic about [the go to statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a simple trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1973) in personal communication to Donald Knuth, quoted in Knuth's "Structured Programming with go to Statements".
1970s

Religion, Feeling

“The semiliterate on the next bar stool will tell you with absolute, arrogant assurance just how to solve the world's problems; while the scholar who has spent a lifetime studying their causes is not at all sure how to do this.”

Edwin Thompson Jaynes (1922–1998) American physicist

Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (2003)

World, Study

“The original dispute was one of poetic diction… From an interest in the minor problem of poetic diction I was led to see that the problem was really one of a suitable medium for all branches of Chinese literature. The question now became: In what language shall the New China produce its future literature? My answer was: The classical language, so long dead, can never be the medium of a living literature of a living nation; the future literature of China must be written in the living language of the people. "No dead language can produce a living literature." And the living language I proposed as the only possible medium of the future literature of China, was the pei-hau, the vulgar tongue of the vast majority of the population, the language which, in the last 500 years, had produced the numerous novels read and loved by the people, though despised by the men of letters. I wanted this much despised vulgar tongue of the people and the novels to be elevated to the position of the national language of China, to the position enjoyed by all the modern national languages in Europe.”

Hu Shih (1891–1962) Chinese philosopher, essayist and diplomat

The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 50

Love, Men, People, Literature

“Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

Visa and Amex Drop CardSystems, Schneier, Bruce, 2005-08-15, Cryptogram newsletter, 2006-09-08 http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0508.html#16,

“There science is dealing with physical facts, in art we are dealing with psychic effects. With this I come to my first statement: 'The source of art – that is, where it comes from – is the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect'. That's what I'm talking about. When I want to speak about why I am doing the same thing now, which is squares, for – how long? – 19 years. Because there is no final solution in any visual formulation. Although this may be just a belief on my part, I have some assurances that that is not the most stupid thing to do, through Cezanne whom I consider as one of the greatest painters. From Cézanne we have, so the historians tell us – 250 paintings of Mont St. Victoire. But we know that Cézanne has left in the fields often more than he took home because he was disappointed with his work. So we may conclude he did many more than 250 of the same problem.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

Stupidity, Art, Disappointment, Home

“I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

"Kubrick on Barry Lyndon : An interview with Michel Ciment" (1982) http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.bl.html

Quotes

“Browser compatibility problems are nature's way of saying "stop trying to be so fuckin' clever."”

Jamie Zawinski (1968) American programmer

http://inkee.org/quote/dnaquotes.txt
DNA quotes
Inkee.

Way, Nature

“Administration has to do with getting things done; with the accomplishment of defined objectives. The science of administration is thus the system of knowledge whereby men may understand relationships, predict results, and influence outcomes in any situation where men are organized at work together for a common purpose. Public administration is that part of the science of administration which has to do with government, and thus concerns itself primarily with the executive branch, where the work of government is done, though there are obviously administrative problems also in connection with the legislative and the judicial branches. Public administration is thus a division of political science, and one of the social sciences.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Source: 1930s, "Science, Value and Public Administration", 1937, p. 189

Men, Understanding, Knowledge, Science

“We have played at venues up and down the country on this tour, some of which had no security, and have encountered no problems or witnessed any aggression. I simply asked the bouncer last night to apologise for his behaviour, three times in fact, and he refused. I was very upset at his attitude and although I'm very sorry for letting everyone down last night, I refuse to play at venues where pumped up, 16 stone men feel the need to be aggressively rude and to bully teenage kids around.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

After cancelling a gig at the Barfly, August 2004
People

Men, Feeling, Time, Night

“Another feature of Alexandrian algebra is the absence of any explicit deductive structure. The various types of numbers… were not defined. Nor was there any axiomatic basis on which a deductive structure could be erected. The work of Heron, Nichomachus, and Diophantus, and of Archimedes as far as his arithmetic is concerned, reads like the procedural texts of the Egyptians and Babylonians… The deductive, orderly proof of Euclid and Apollonius, and of Archimedes' geometry is gone. The problems are inductive in spirit, in that they show methods for concrete problems that presumably apply to general classes whose extent is not specified. In view of the fact that as a consequence of the work of the classical Greeks mathematical results were supposed to be derived deductively from an explicit axiomatic basis, the emergence of an independent arithmetic and algebra with no logical structure of its own raised what became one of the great problems of the history of mathematics. This approach to arithmetic and algebra is the clearest indication of the Egyptian and Babylonian influences… Though the Alexandrian Greek algebraists did not seem to be concerned about this deficiency… it did trouble deeply the European mathematicians.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p.144

History, Mathematics, Reading

“I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

"OS Shock"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

Beauty

“There are two general Methods made use of in the Mathematicks, viz. Synthesis and Analysis, which we shall explain, after having acquainted the Reader, that the Method we make use of to resolve a Mathematical Problem, is called Zetetick; and that that Method which determines when, and by what way, and how many different ways a Problem may be resolved, is called Poristick. But in treating of Methods, we will first premise, that in general, a Method is the Art of disposing a Train of Arguments or Consequences in a right Order, either to discover the Truth of a Theorem, which we would find out, or to demonstrate it to others, when found.”

Jacques Ozanam (1640–1718) French mathematician

Source: A Mathematical Dictionary: Or; A Compendious Explication of All Mathematical Terms, 1702, p. 26

Truth, Art, Way, Mathematics

“His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen it through.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

On Isaac Newton
Essays In Biography (1933), Newton, the Man

“I try to solve my problems by writing music and recording albums, but you know what's really funny about that? Once the album becomes a success, it doesn't solve your problems. It just gets harder to write the next album.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

NYROCK: Interview with Chris Cornell, 1999-10-01 https://web.archive.org/web/20030919022841/http://www.nyrock.com/interviews/1999/cornell_int.asp, Euphoria Morning Era

Music, Success

“Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience or their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that "Islam is peace and tolerance."”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 16: Politics

Women, Men, People, World

“I am thankful to have borne a part in the emancipating labours of the last sixty years; but entirely uncertain how, had I now to begin my life, I could face the very different problems of the next sixty years. Of one thing I am, and always have been, convinced—it is not by the State that man can be regenerated, and the terrible woes of this darkened world effectually dealt with. In some, and some very important, respects, I yearn for the impossible revival of the men and the ideas of my first twenty years, which immediately followed the first Reform Act.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to George William Erskine Russell (6 March 1894), quoted in G. W. E. Russell, One Look Back (Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., 1911), p. 265.
1890s

Life, Men, World, Idea

“The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Source: The Web of Life (1996), p. 3; As cited in: Michael C. Jackson (2000) Systems Approaches to Management. p. 5.

Study, Time

“The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

First Annual Report of the Arts Council (1945-1946)

Life, Religion, Heart

“However a systems problem is solved—by a planner, scientist, politician, antiplanner, or whomever—the solution is wrong, even dangerously wrong. There is bound to be deception in any approach to the system.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 229; cited in Charles Smith (2007, p. 43)

“You, why do you let me say such things when and where I shouldn’t?” “the problem is not ordering the course of your speech. Its shutting you up in the first place””

Alice Borchardt book The Dragon Queen

The Dragon Queen

“But as president of General Motors, I realized our thinking affected the lives of hundreds of thousands directly and influenced the economic welfare of many important communities, in some of which we were almost the sole provider. In some way, visible or invisible, as we expanded, the economic welfare of millions was becoming linked with the welfare of General Motors. Previously, when industry was smaller, the absorbing problems of industrial management were largely limited to the fields of engineering, production and distribution. Out of its endeavors in these fields had come a continuous stream of new products, providing new comforts and making possible better ways of living. General Motors was becoming large through a, but only because it was rendering a service to community. As its volume of business expanded it became able to do more for workers, stockholders and customers.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Adventures of a White-Collar Man. 1941, p. 144

Way, Communication, Business, Thinking

“The problem is that people think faith is something to be admired. In fact, faith means you believe in something for which you have no evidence.”

Victor J. Stenger (1935–2014) American philosopher

In God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science (2012)

People, Faith, Thinking

“The contrast between the morals at the centre of power and those practiced by wide communities in many subject lands presented problems of ever growing unrest.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On the last years of Rome and Roman Britain; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

Communication

““What is the Vienna Circle?” is a question which is neither rhetorical nor trivial. It is perhaps an attempt to ‘square the circle’ – which is, meanwhile, mathematically possible, as Karl Menger described as early as 1934.
This question might be also a problem of how the whole relates logically to the parts or the parts to the whole, which was already addressed by mereology (whole-part theory) according to Stanislaw (1916).
Of course, we are all familiar with the irritating fact that one and the same phenomenon can be described consistently by more than one theory”

Friedrich Stadler (1951) Austrian historian

underdetermination of a theory by observation
Source: "What is the Vienna Circle?" 2006, p. xi

Mathematics, Question, Parting

“Hindus learn to look at themselves through borrowed eyes. The two approaches, that of self-discovery and creative response and that of self-alienation and imitation, were both inherited from the immediate history of the freedom struggle, though they derive their strength from the deeper sources in the psyche…. For one, the problem is of helping the society to find its roots, for the other to remake it in the image of a chosen pattern. The one serves; the other manipulates…. [The first approach] once formed a powerful current, and the freedom struggle was waged under its auspices. But increasingly its hold became weak, and in our own times it seems to have lost altogether…. Some see in this change a triumph of Nehru over Gandhi…. Nehru represented, in his own way, the response of a defeated nation trying to restore its self-respect and self-confidence through self-repudiation and identification with the ways of the victors. The approach was not altogether unjustified at one time. It had its compulsions and it also had a survival value for us. But its increasing influence can mean no good to us. We, however, believe that deeper Indian nationalism, which is also in harmony with deeper internationalism, may be weak just now, but it has the seed-power and it is bound to come up again under propitious circumstances”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Cultural Self-Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces, 1987, p. 4-5

Way, Confidence, History, Freedom

“I distinguish two kinds of "applied" research: problem-solving research — government or commercially initiated, centrally managed and institutionally coupled to a plan for application of the results, useful science — investigator-initiated, competitively evaluated and widely communicated. Then we have basic science — useful also, also investigator-initiated, competitively evaluated and widely communicated.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

Source: Confessions of a Technophile (1994), p. 31

Communication, Science

“I don't believe in the sort of eureka moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time. And it wasn't that suddenly it came to him.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee (podcast/audio plus transcript) http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html

Idea, Thinking, Time

“I am hoping that President Aquino will be able to sign the Senate Bill 2834 or PAGASA Modernization Bill into law within the year to give long-overdue upgrades to the weather bureau’s equipment, staff pay, research capabilities and communication reach. The bill also aims to arrest the brain-drain problem in the agency by increasing the basic pay, allowances and other benefits of its workers.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2015, July 3). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153401664525610/ 2015, Facebook

Law, Hope, Communication, Weather