Quotes about problems
page 25

“All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class, and if morality is to mean anything at all to us, we must regard all the changes which tend toward the uplift and survival of the human race as moral.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

Change

“Photography has never been a problem for me, [what is important] is looking, the way of looking, of questioning with your eyes: I don’t think; I am impulsive, it is /looking/ that’s important, not photography. Now, since I have started drawing, I’ve merely switched tools, but it is still looking that’s important. To look the right way, one should learn to become a deaf-mute.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Photographing Is Nothing, Looking Is Everything! Interview with Philippe Boegner (1989), p. 113

Way, Question, Thinking, Learning

“Leadership is not just reacting to problems. Leadership is also preventing problems, and for a city or county to declare itself as a sanctuary city — meaning they would not comply and cooperate with federal authorities in compliance with immigration laws — I don’t believe that would make us safer.”

Ed Gillespie (1961) American political strategist

Interview With Virginia Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Ed Gillespie http://www.dailywire.com/news/22601/exclusive-interview-virginia-republican-tyler-dahnke# (October 23, 2017)

Law

“When external and internal forces hostile to the development of socialism try to turn the development of a given socialist country in the direction of the restoration of the capitalist system, when a threat arises to the cause of socialism in that country … this is no longer merely a problem for that country's people, but a common problem, the concern of all socialist countries.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Speech at the 5th Congress of the Polish United Workers Party (12 November 1968), quoted in The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy (2003) by Matthew J. Ouimet

Hostility, People, Country

“I am glad that my hon. Friend has raised the problems of the Kurdish people in Iraq, and I am sure that they will be grateful for that. Although the Government may not allow the export of military hardware to Iraq, is it not just as beneficial to the Iraqi Government to be given banking facilities, credits and increased trade? They have exactly the same effect of propping up the Iraqi economy, which is used to finance the war machine that is practising genocide against the Kurdish people.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/jul/14/foreign-affairs in the House of Commons (14 July 1989). 1980s

War, People

“The first attempts to consider the behavior of so-called "random neural nets" in a systematic way have led to a series of problems concerned with relations between the "structure" and the "function" of such nets. The "structure" of a random net is not a clearly defined topological manifold such as could be used to describe a circuit with explicitly given connections. In a random neural net, one does not speak of "this" neuron synapsing on "that" one, but rather in terms of tendencies and probabilities associated with points or regions in the net.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport. "Cycle distributions in random nets." The bulletin of mathematical biophysics 10.3 (1948): 145-157.
1940s

Way, Behavior

“Hints towards the solution of the problem of Eternity can be found in the various symbols and allegories of ancient religions and in some of the modern as well as ancient philosophies.”

P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) Russian esotericist

A New Model of the Universe (1932)

Religion

“But three decades have evaporated in our lives, too quickly and without sufficient residual evidence of their importance. But much has changed since then. The hope that there would be expeditious resolutions to our myriad problems has long since evaporated with those years. Many who debated and hoped then, now do neither. There now seems to be a broad acceptance of the racial divide as a permanent state. While we once celebrated those things that we had in common with our fellow citizens who did not share our race, so many now are triumphal about our differences, finding little, if anything, in common. Indeed, some go so far as to all but define each of us by our race and establish the range of our thinking and our opinions, if not our deeds by our color.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Hope, Color, Thinking, Change

“When you compare Mars to Earth, and Venus to Earth, you can see the problem [earthlings face]. We do not want to become Venus.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, Mark Bennett, Bill Nye still rocking science - TV personality making weekend appearance in town to help open Children's Museum, The Tribune-Star, Terre Haute, Indiana, September 24, 2010]

“The … false ideal … [that is] tokenism—which is commonly guised as Equal Rights, and which yields token victories—deflects and shortcircuits gynergy, so that female power, galvanized under deceptive slogans of sisterhood, is swallowed by The Fraternity. This method of vampirizing the Female Self saps women by giving illusions of partial success while at the same time making Success appear to be a far-distant, extremely difficult to obtain "elusive objective." When the oppressed are worn out in the game of chasing the elusive shadow of Success, some "successes" are permitted to occur—"victories" which can easily be withdrawn when the victim's energies have been restored. Subsequently, women are lured into repeating efforts to regain the hard-won apparent gains…. [¶] Thus tokenism is insidiously destructive of sisterhood, for it distorts the warrior aspect of Amazon bonding both by magnifying it and by minimizing it. It magnifies the importance of "fighting back" to the extent of making it devour the transcendent be-ing of sisterhood, reducing it to a copy of comradeship. At the same time, it minimizes the Amazon warrior aspect by containing it, misdirecting and shortcircuiting the struggle. [¶] This is a demonically double-sided trap, for of course reforms, such as legalization of abortion, aid many women in desperate situations. However, because the "changes" that are achieved are victories in a vacuum, that is, in a totally oppressive social context, they do not essentially free the Female Self but instead function to hide both the fact of continuing oppression and the possibilities for better options and for more radical freedom…. The Labrys of the A-mazing Female Mind must cut through the coverings of these double-sided/multiple-sided situations, dis-covering the context, identifying the more radical problems, yet neglecting none.”

Mary Daly (1928–2010) American radical feminist philosopher and theologian

Source: Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978–1990), pp. 375–376 (fnn. omitted, fn. at "apparent gains." giving as examples the Equal Rights Amendment, affirmative action, and abortion & fn. at "more radical freedom." stating "the fact that Lesbians/Spinsters have no need of abortions, unless forcibly raped").

Women, Game, Effort, Freedom

“This proposal will help protect everyone from hazardous lead paint chips falling onto the street. We need to remove this dangerous problem from our above ground subway lines.”

Jose Peralta (1971–2018) American politician

Help, Painting

“Only by abolishing private property in land and building cheap and hygienic dwellings can the housing problem be solved.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 455–480.
Collected Works

Housing

“The capacity for self-deception, rarely acknowledged or understood by those who offer us supernatural answers to our problems, is huge: as easy as it is to make a medium’s cold-reading statements ‘fit’ our own situation and come to believe that he must have some paranormal insight, it is hardly any more difficult for a would-be psychic with an average ego, upon hearing frequently positive feedback, to believe over time that he must be blessed with a special gift. It’s harder to think you’re doing it for real when you’re tossing tambourines in the dark or have ready-made ectoplasm stuffed into your mouth or bottom.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Harry Houdini on Deception (foreword) (2009)

Thinking, Time, Reading

“Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the 'Women' [series of paintings, De kooning started in 1950], but I felt that this was their problem, not mine. I don’t really feel like a non-objective painter at all... It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image. With paint, today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear I have to follow my desires.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 45.
1960's

Women, Fear, Feeling, Thinking

“Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history, their frequency increases with environmental degradation, population pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability.”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Chapter "The world as a polder: what does it all mean to us today?", section "If we don't solve them..." (Penguin Books, 2011, page 498, ISBN 978-0-241-95868-1.

Children, World, Disease, Way

“A major problem is the characterization of the government in Seoul as liberal, as if it were no less committed to constitutional values and opposed to totalitarianism than the West German social democrats were in the Cold War. This makes Westerners think, "North Korea can't take over the South without a war, but it knows it can’t win one, therefore it must now be arming only to protect itself."”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with The Conversation (September 2017)

War, Thinking

“Do not imagine that this problem is solely an Iraqi problem because the terrorist front represents a threat to all free countries and free people of the world… Thousands of lives were tragically lost on Sept. 11 when these impostors of Islam reared their ugly head. Thousands more continue to die in Iraq today at the hands of the same terrorists who show complete disregard for human life.”

Nouri al-Maliki (1950) Prime Minister of Iraq

Speaking before the U.S. Congress http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060726/D8J3VI507.html (26 July 2006).

Life, People, World, Imagination

“You know those guys that go to the strip club at the daytime? If you're at a strip club and the sun is out, you got some problems!”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Never Scared (HBO, 2004)

Guy, Sun

“Take the case of a famous problem which plays a great part in the history of Greek geometry, the doubling of the cube, or its equivalent, the finding of two mean proportionals in continued proportion between two given straight lines. …if all the recorded solutions are collected together, it is much easier to see the relations, amounting in some cases to substantial identity, between them, and to get a comprehensive view of the history of the problem. I have therefore dealt with this problem in a separate section of the chapter devoted to 'Special Problems,' and I have followed the same course with the other famous problems of squaring the circle and trisecting any angle.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

History, Parting

“If you’re very very rich, you can buy your Senate seat by spending as much of your money as you want. Meanwhile, your poor plebian opponent is running around groveling for the small contributions allowed by law. Hence the Corzines and the Kohls, who parachute into Congress seemingly out of nowhere. Having given this leg up to the rich, we should resist packing our legislatures with yet more privileged parachutists, the well-born. True, the Brits did it that way for centuries, but with characteristic honesty. They established a house of Parliament exclusively for high-born twits and ensconced them there for life. There they chatter away in supreme irrelevance deep into their dotage. Problem is that the U. S. Senate retains House of Commons powers even as it develops a House of Lords membership.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, December 19, 2008, "The U.S. House of Lords?" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer121908.php3 at jewishworldreview.com. 2000s, 2008

Life, Money, Law, Way

“A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.”

Jane Jacobs book The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Source: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), p. 410

“The problem of time in physics and chemistry is closely related to the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. Therefore another possible title of this lecture could have been: “the macroscopic and microscopic aspects of the second law of thermodynamics””

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist

Source: Time, Structure and Fluctuations (1977), p. 1; Introduction.

Law, Time

“Slowly at first, and now in growing numbers, from kitchen tables to nonprofit organizations to corporate boards, Americans are turning away from the politics of bickering and division and working on a new politics – a politics of creative problem solving. It would have us take the best from the political left and right, and come up with something new that serves us all. It would have us come up with solutions to public issues that are thoughtful enough, clever enough, and inclusive enough, to bring people and factions together.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 1, "A Creative and Practical Politics," p. 3.

People

“The view I have just sketched of the relationships between the most general types—the forms of social life—and human nature is based upon two key ideas that might appear contradictory. The first notion holds that there exists a limited fund of problems and possibilities of human association. Each form of social life is defined by the way it responds to the problems and pursues the possibilities. The fact that the fund is limited makes comprehensive theory and universal comparison possible. This principle, however, seems incompatible with the other half of my thesisː that the forms of social life are constituents and re-creators, rather than just examples, of human nature. ¶ The way to reconcile these two equally important ideas is to conceive of human nature as an entity embodied in particular forms of social life, though never exhausted by them. Consequently, humanity can always transcend any one of the kinds of society that develop it in a certain direction. Nonetheless, human nature is known, indeed it exists, only through the historical types of social life.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Law in Modern Societyː Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (1976), p. 260

Life, Way, Idea, Nature

“That's the problem with them fables, they're putting animals together that wouldn't meet. I don't know where a scorpion is knockin' around with a frog.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast
On Aesop's Fables

Animals

“[Their foremost task] … is to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil — material and spiritual — this entails for the masses of menu throughout the world…. So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous, and perhaps hypocritical, about our concern over the ten percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression.”

A. J. Muste (1885–1967) Christian pacifist and civil rights activist

As quoted in American Power and the New Mandarins (2002) by Noam Chomsky, p. 160.

World, Evil

“Miss Follett was not a “business woman,” in the sense of having actually managed any sort of business. But her lucid and illuminating ideas about organization were of priceless interest and value to the many industrial leaders and students of human relations problems, organization and politics with whom she came in contact. Her conceptions were in advance of her time. They are still in advance of current thinking. But they are a gold-mine of suggestion for anyone who is interested in the problems of establishing and maintaining human co-operation in the conduct of an enterprise. They have the added advantage of being presented with remarkable simplicity and clarity.”

Henry C. Metcalf (1867–1942) American business theorist

Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. xi

Idea, Business, Thinking, Sense

“Corruption is a global problem. But it is more widespread in rapidly developing countries. It is a growth problem. There are many corruption-related problems in Russia too. So, regarding stress tests, I think that such tests should be applied to all companies.”

Dmitry Medvedev (1965) Russian Prime Minister and former president

cnbc.com http://www.cnbc.com/id/102088768

Thinking, Country

“"So computers are tools of the devil?" thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him.”

Neil Gaiman book Good Omens

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (1990) -->

“Speak… of the separation of ownership and active leadership. Ordinarily the problem is stated in terms of the divorce between ownership and "control". This last word is badly overused, and it needs to be precisely defined… Our procedure… will be to study the ownership of officers and directors and then to ascertain the extent to which non-management stockholdings are sufficiently concentrated to permit through ownership the wielding of considerable power and influence (control?) over management by an individual, group or another corporation.”

Robert Aaron Gordon (1908–1978) American economist

Source: Business Leadership in the Large Corporation (1945), p. 24, footnote 20; as cited in: Marco Becht et al. Corporate Governance and Control, 2005. p. 61

Study

“It‘s [Fahrenheit 9/11] the work of a moral cretin and a political idiot. And it's up to the Democratic National Committee to say, do they want to continue being photographed with this man as we go into a very important election, not just in the United States, I might add, but first Democratic elections to be held in Iraq and in Afghanistan? In a few months, we will know the outcome of all these. In all three cases, Michael Moore says that the enemy is George Bush and Saddam Hussein and Mr. Zarqawi and Mr. Bin Laden are no problem. Indeed, they are—what a wonderful way to celebrate the Fourth of July weekend, by the way. Indeed, they are the Minutemen. They‘re the staunch American revolutionaries. Does he tell this to the widows that he goes and exploits?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Scarborough Country on MNSBC" http://web.archive.org/web/20070911061520/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5344115/, (2004-06-30): On Michael Moore 2000s, 2004

Way

“There is a great Man living in this country — a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.”

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) Austrian-American composer

Note of 1944; as quoted in the Charles Ives profile at Decca Classics http://www.deccaclassics.com/music/composers/ives.html 1940s

Learning, Country

“The main problem with many nonscientific world models is the vigor with which they insist upon their rightness. Once a world model claims to be completely right, it is no longer open to any changes. …Closed systems can be comforting, but they are limited. …It's not the best we can do. Neither is extreme "open-mindednesss" that slides into "empty headedness"—the ideal that we can never really know anything.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

World, Change

“It would be folly to deny that we still have problems of interstate relations to handle. We boast that this is a land of equal opportunity for all. We insist that there is one law for all the people. But that equality suffers often because of the divergencies between the laws of different States. So long as some can go to a distant State for divorces which others are denied at home, there is not equality in this regard. When some States grant valuable exemptions from taxation which other States impose, one person may enjoy while another is denied these benefits.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

People, Law, Home, Suffering

“A perennial problem of any organization which is involved in systems work of a changing nature is the need for the organization itself to change as it adapts to new opportunities, new objectives, new equipment, and new people.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 119

People, Nature, Change

“Make a list of all the environmental and social problems that today afflict us and our poor battered planet. – not just the extinction of species and animals and plants, that fifty years ago was the first signs of impending global disaster, but traffic congestion, oil prices, pressure on the health service, the growth of mega-cities, migration patterns, immigration policies, unemployment, the loss of arable land, desertification, famine, increasingly violent weather, the acidification of the oceans, the collapse of fish stocks, rising sea temperatures, the loss of rain forest. The list goes on and on. But they all share an underlying cause. Every one of these global problems, environmental as well as social becomes more difficult – and ultimately impossible - to solve with ever more people.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

People, Health, Fish, Affliction

“When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury—national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture—we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands.Given these developments, it is almost impossible for many Americans not to feel like their government is targeting them. Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2010s

Justice, Law, Feeling, Search

“The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

An Old Man's Diary ([1981] 1984) p. 39

Age, Fear

“The first paper I ever wrote was "Gestalt Programming" and that was in 1955. The whole idea there was to replace the laborious writing out of detailed programs and all those steps by having analyzed a problem area well enough so that you had what I later came to call a "systematized solution." Then you could compose different problems of this class by just plugging together pieces of program, and they would in turn be controlled by a pushbutton language. The user would make a number of discreet selections. It's just like nowadays it's done with menus, and when you had indicated all the pieces that you wanted to put together--by these mnemonic names and words for things associated with buttons, switches, with one meaning "period," essentially, for that sentence, you see--all these things would be brought together and that would be the man/machine, manual-intervention mode of problem-solving. I took over the term from studying Gestalt psychology, meaning that everything was brought together at once, as a unit, instead of this laborious step-by-step build-up.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1989), p. 4.

Idea, Study

“Despite the bare butts and crude sex jokes -- or because of them -- this Adam Sandler vehicle addresses some of the biggest political problems of our time. … At the very least, it's got to be the first picture to use smelly-feet jokes as a means of parsing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But more than that, it's a mainstream movie that dares to make jokes about the kinds of complex political realities that most of us don't dare bring up at dinner parties.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/06/06/zohan/ of You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008)

Sex, Reality, Time

“(Man in suit to Indian woman) Oh guru, ancient mother of the world, we men have been crippled. We have never learned how to feel; we don't even know how to cry. Oh my wise guru, can you teach me to cry? (Guru) Sure. No problem. Tomorrow I'll start you at a dead-end job, pay you at women's wages and then I'll throw in sole support of a pre-school child.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, pp. 198-199

Women, Men, World, School

“I knew I had a problem, and I couldn't admit it.”

Lindsay Lohan (1986) American actress and pop singer

As quoted in "Confessions of a Teenage Movie Queen" in Vanity Fair (February 2006) http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/toc/2006/toc200602.

“So what happens when the regime falls, as it must? We are in the first stage of change in our country, and the feeling among the revolutionaries is that the people of Yemen will find solutions for our problems once the regime has gone, because the regime itself is the cause of most of them. A new Yemen awaits us, with a better future for all.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Our revolution's doing what Saleh can't – uniting Yemen (2011)

People, Feeling, Change, Future

“We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue’s other and more precise name.”

John Erskine (1879–1951) American educator

Source: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent (1915), pp. 26-27

Love, Life, God, Intelligence

“Mussolini…hoped Herr Hitler would see his way to postpone action [against Czechoslovakia] which the Chancellor had told Sir Horace Wilson was to be taken at 2 p. m. to-day for at least 24 hours so as to allow Signor Mussolini time to re-examine the situation and endeavour to find a peaceful settlement. In response, Herr Hitler has agreed to postpone mobilisation for 24 hours. Whatever views hon. Members may have had about Signor Mussolini in the past, I believe that everyone will welcome his gesture of being willing to work with us for peace in Europe. That is not all. I have something further to say to the House yet. I have now been informed by Herr Hitler that he invites me to meet him at Munich to-morrow morning. He has also invited Signor Mussolini and M. Daladier. Signor Mussolini has accepted and I have no doubt M. Daladier will also accept. I need not say what my answer will be. [An HON. MEMBER: "Thank God for the Prime Minister!"] We are all patriots, and there can be no hon. Member of this House who did not feel his heart leap that the crisis has been once more postponed to give us once more an opportunity to try what reason and good will and discussion will do to settle a problem which is already within sight of settlement. Mr. Speaker, I cannot say any more. I am sure that the House will be ready to release me now to go and see what I can make of this last effort. Perhaps they may think it will be well, in view of this new development, that this Debate shall stand adjourned for a few days, when perhaps we may meet in happier circumstances.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1938/sep/28/prime-ministers-statement in the House of Commons (28 September 1938). Chamberlain received Hitler's invitation to Munich as he was ending his speech. Prime Minister

God, Peace, Hope, Way

“When people would come in with non-specific problems and we never quite got to the root of a medical diagnosis, it always seemed to me they were expressing problems in living, and that one needed to look at their problems in living, and how they manifested themselves in physical problems.”

Michael Marmot (1945) Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health

Interview, 18 March 2002

People

“FRAND licensing … in theory, would prevent someone with competitive problems from raising prices on competitors to cripple them if they were successful. Interestingly, the only firm in recent memory that ever did this was Apple …”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Why the Smartphone Market Works and Why Apple Wants to Kill It http://techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2017/06/12/432715-why-smartphone-market-works-why-apple-wants-kill.htm in TechZone360 (12 June 2017)

Memory, Success

“I don't take drugs. I never did. All the feelings that drugs are supposed to produce in you - confidence or energy - I can produce naturally. The only problem is going to sleep. But I never take pills… I drink herbal teas.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Madonna Rocks the Land, Time, 1985-05-27 http://time.com/3724297/madonna-rocks-the-land/,

Feeling, Confidence, Drink, Nature

“Mr. Wilson does not write as one who believes in a particular religion but rather as an intellectual who is being forced more and more into accepting religion as the only solution to the problem of the Outsider. In other words, the anxiety and uneasiness, the sheer horror of being oneself in the modern world is not to be cured by reason or even of study of philosophies which set out to explain them, like Existentialism; the unpleasant symptoms have to be lived through, leading to the worst, in order that the final, mystical experience may be attained. The Outsider has it within him to become a saint. Yet, though Mr. Wilson is drawn to religion, and all his arrows point that way, he never departs from his standards of intellectual analysis.”

Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) British author

'Loser Take All', Sunday Times, p. 5 (27 May 1956)

World, Religion, Way, Study

“It has always been characteristic of American Industry to change products and methods of doing jobs as often as competitive conditions or engineering progress dictates. This makes frequent changes in an individual's work necessary. In addition, the markedly greater turnover and absenteeism of recent years result in unbalanced production lines which again makes for frequent shifting of individuals from one job to another. One of the most serious production problems faced at the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation has been the resistance of production workers to the necessary changes in methods and jobs. This resistance expressed itself in several ways, such as grievances about the piece rates that went with the new methods, high turnover, very low efficiency, restriction of output, and marked aggression against management. Despite these undesirable effects, it was necessary that changes in methods and jobs continue.”

John R. P. French (1913–1995) American psychologist

Source: "Overcoming resistance to change." 1948, p. 512; Lead paragraph

Way, Change

“Our sweat is the answer to all our problems, and that the tiller, the artisan and the teacher are the three agents who feed the body, mind and soul.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

Source: Uniqueness of Zakir Husain and His Contributions (1997), p. 19.

Soul, Teachers

“It would seem that dead hunger strikers, who have extinguished their own lives, are of more use to PIRA than living members. Such is their calculated cynicism. This Government is not prepared to legitimise their cause by word or by deed. And we should be clear what that cause is. It is a dictatorship by force and by fear in Northern Ireland, and in the Republic. These men deny democracy everywhere; they seek power for themselves. Some people argue that the Government could make the problem go away. We can of course maintain and improve an already humane prison regime. But there is no point in pretending that this is what the PIRA want. They have remained inflexible and intransigent in the face of all that we have done because what they want is special treatment, treatment different from that received by other prisoners. They want their violence justified. It isn't, and it will not be.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech at Stormont Castle (28 May 1981) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104657 regarding the 1981 Irish hunger strike. First term as Prime Minister

Men, Hunger, People, Fear

“Sorry about the delay. We were having unholy connection problems of the damned. But things seem to be working fine now.”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=051220

“An important object of the Journal should be the publication of papers dealing with attempts at statistical verification of the laws of economic theory, and further the publication of papers dealing with the purely abstract problems of quantitative economics, such as problems in the quantitative definition of the fundamental concepts of economics and problems in the theory of economic equilibrium.
The term equilibrium theory is here interpreted as including both the classical equilibrium theory proceeding on the lines of Walras, Pareto, and Marshall, and the more general equilibrium theory which is now beginning to grow out of the classical equilibrium theory, partly through the influence of the modern study of economic statistics. Taken in this broad sense the equilibrium problems include virtually all those fundamental problems of production, circulation, distribution and consumption, which can be made the object of a quantitative study. More precisely: The equilibrium theory in the sense here used is a body of doctrines that treats all these problems from a certain point of view, which is contrasted on one side with the verbal treatment of economic problems and on the other side with the purely empirical-statistical approach to economic problems”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch (1927). as quoted in: Bjerkholt, Olav, and Duo Qin. A Dynamic Approach to Economic Theory: The Yale Lectures of Ragnar Frisch. Routledge, 2010: About "Oekonometrika"
1920

Law, Sense, Study

“The crux of the retrieval problem is that selecting documents to read grows ever more difficult, and new techniques are continually needed.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

B.C. Vickery (1970) Techniques of information retrieval. p. 5.

Reading

“Imaginary solutions work quite well, as long as you realize that problems are also imaginary.”

Pat Murphy book There and Back Again

Source: There and Back Again (1999), Chapter 15 (p. 259)

“Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. I have alluded to its touching acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God - that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

God, Faith, Democracy, Nature

“[Bryce] expressed his cordial agreement with what Mr. Washington had said as to the importance of basing the progress of the coloured people of the South upon industrial training. Having made two or three visits to the South he had got an impression of the extreme complexity and difficulty of the problem which Mr. Washington was so nobly striving to solve. It was no wonder that it should be difficult seeing that the whites had such a long start of the coloured people in civilization. He believed that the general sentiment of white people was one of friendliness and a desire to help the negroes. The exercise of political rights and the attainment to equal citizenship must depend upon the quality of the people who exercised those rights, and the best thing the coloured people could do, therefore, was to endeavour to attain material prosperity by making themselves capable of prosecuting these trades and occupations which they began to learn in the days of slavery, and which now, after waiting for 20 years, they had begun to see were necessary to their well-being.”

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) British academic, jurist, historian and Liberal politician

Speech at the reception for Booker T. Washington held in Essex Hall, Strand, London (3 July 1899), quoted in The Times (4 July 1899), p. 13.
1890s

People, Exercises, Learning, Waiting

“For the first twenty years of my life I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it's funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even make it to bed. I'd squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I'm now told that this is not called "going to sleep" but rather "passing out," a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.”

David Sedaris book Me Talk Pretty One Day

Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)

Life, Cats, Beer, Sleep

“I must say a few words here concerning the solution of the Polish problem…Groeber has posed the question: Do I not overestimate the value of the military guarantees? Are not political guarantees in connection with good relations between Poland and Germany far better and more durable than it is possible fo military guarantees to be? …The past conduct of the Polish fraction in the Reichstag and the House of Deputies, and the attempts to have the German Ostmark question discussed as a question of international importance at world peace congresses, do not give my political friends a sufficient guarantee to think that future relations between Poland and Germany can be based solely on a formal paper friendship.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Source: 1910s, Speech in the Reichstag, 21 June 1918, p. 175

Friendship, World, Peace, Question

“Perhaps as important is the relation between the existence of solutions to a competitive equilibrium and the problems of normative or welfare economics.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1950s-1960s, "Existence of an equilibrium for a competitive economy." 1954, p. 265

“A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

World, Suffering

“Barack believes in the greatness of America. He’s seen it in his own life’s journey. But he also knows that what’s holding us back is that our leaders have lost touch with the ideals that make this country great. Ideals like equality. Justice. Freedom from want and despair. And he believes that until we restore a sense of common destiny and shared purpose; until we understand that we are only as strong as the weakest among us; that there is more that binds us together than drives us apart; until we see ourselves in one another – until we truly care for all children; not just our own then we will continue to struggle with the problems that plague us.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2000s, A Challenge to Overcome (November 2007)

Life, Children, Justice, Understanding

“I was very shy as a child. Very shy. Lot of problems with very simple things. Like entering a restaurant all by myself.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

“What happens in Syria, for example, there's some thought about this. When you have drought, when people can't grow their crops, they're going to migrate into cities and when people migrate into cities and when they don't have jobs, there's going to be a lot more instability, a lot more unemployment and people will be subject to the types of propaganda that Al Qaeda and ISIS are using right now and so where you have discontent you have instability, that's where problems arise and certainly without a doubt, a climate change will lead to that.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

"Bernie Sanders doubles down on link between climate change and terrorism" http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/bernie-sanders-doubles-down-on-link-between-climate-change-and-terrorism/, CBS News (15 November 2015), when asked how drought connect with ISIS attacks in Paris. 2010s, 2015

People, Change

“Jobs: Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields. We all brought to this a sort of “liberal arts” air, an attitude that we wanted to pull the best that we saw into this field. You don’t get that if you are very narrow.
Cringley: How does the Web affect the economy?
Jobs: We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time. The reason Federal Express won over its competitors was its package-tracking system. For the company to bring that package-tracking system onto the Web is phenomenal. I use it all the time to track my packages. It's incredibly great. Incredibly reassuring. And getting that information out of most companies is usually impossible.
But it's also incredibly difficult to give information. Take auto dealerships. So much money is spent on inventory—billions and billions of dollars. Inventory is not a good thing. Inventory ties up a ton of cash, it's open to vandalism, it becomes obsolete. It takes a tremendous amount of time to manage. And, usually, the car you want, in the color you want, isn't there anyway, so they've got to horse-trade around. Wouldn't it be nice to get rid of all that inventory? Just have one white car to drive and maybe a laserdisc so you can look at the other colors. Then you order your car and you get it in a week.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Robert X. Cringley for a Public Broadcasting System [PBS] television series, “Triumph of the Nerds” (1995), “The Lost Interview: Steve Jobs Tells Us What Really Matters” https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/17/the-lost-interview-steve-jobs-tells-us-what-really-matters/#5cb0fc8e6c3a, Forbes, Steve Denning, Nov 17, 2011, 1990s

Money, People, World, Art

“I can honestly say that I never heard flannel like we got from the Minister… he said that we have nuclear power stations with us, whether we like it or not. I suggest to this Conference that we have coal mines with us… but they did something about this problem: they closed them down. This was a complete reversal of the policy… that was promised by the Labour Government before it was put into office… this represents a betrayal of the mining industry.”

Arthur Scargill (1938) British trade unionist

Speaking after a Labour Party conference speech on energy policy by Richard March (July 1967), quoted in Andrew Taylor, The Politics of the Yorkshire Miner (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 60

Betrayal

“I've had letters from Chinese scientists at the peak of the SARS epidemic who said the problem is a hybridization between the viruses planted into GMO feed, which is then fed to animals, then the virus jumped from the animals to humans. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of risks. I think the whole issue of the H1N1 virus was the fact that it had genes for three influenza types--human, chicken, pig. All of these crossings are becoming possible because of the crossing of genes across species barriers.”

Vandana Shiva (1952) Indian philosopher

On the SARS epidemic, as quoted in " A Visit to My Kitchen: Vandana Shiva http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-rodale/a-visit-to-my-kitchen-van_b_775298.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in", The Huffington Post (28 October 2011)

Thinking, Animals

“I really wanted to retire and rest and spend more time with my children, my grandchildren and of course with my wife. But the problems are such that for anybody with a conscience who can use whatever influence he may have to try to bring about peace, it's difficult to say no.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

On why he continues to be active in social and political issues.
2000s, Newsweek interview (2002)

Children, Peace, Time

“In the year 2000 you're going to have a problem…. Leisure time will be a problem in the year 2000. I just want you to realize, I just want to make sure that you know of it now.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Time

“They have a problem with unmarried women who think, "No, we don't need national defense, we need our birth control paid for." And why? Because single women look at the government as their husbands. "Please provide for me, please take care of me."”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2013

Women, Birth, Thinking

“While many of us feel a strong emotional attachment to our homeland, we should not allow emotions to deter us from speaking of things the way they really are. It should be remembered that this very surrender to emotion has led to insane and counterproductive atrocities on the scale of the Ankara and Istanbul suicide assaults, as well as the Orly bombing and the Lisbon disaster. By surrendering to emotions we enable the A. R. F. and slogans like "w:Hagop Hagopian" to lead thousands of well-intentioned patriots down a path which does not lead to Armenia, and to sacrifice the lives of young fighters in campaigns which directly contradict the interests of the Armenian people. If we are to achieve even the minimum requirements for Armenian national self-determination, we must approach problems in a serious and sober manner.”

Monte Melkonian (1957–1993) National Hero of Armenia

Source: The Right to Struggle (1993), P. 60.

People, Way, Feeling, Suicide

“Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions… that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. … In my opinion, the black hole is incomparably the most exciting and the most important consequence of general relativity. But Einstein … was actively hostile to the idea of black holes. … Oddly enough, Oppenheimer too in later life was uninterested in black holes, although… they were his most important contribution to science. … Oppenheimer in his later years believed that the only problem worthy of attention of a serious theoretical physicist was the discovery of fundamental equations of physics. Einstein certainly felt the same way.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Life, Hostility, Way, Star

“Missouri’s term limits, for example, serve as a restriction, yet Missourians overwhelmingly support them, and they are in effect for members of the Legislature. Noncompete clauses and nepotism laws restrict employment, but they are used to stop unethical behavior. Stopping legislators from immediately becoming lobbyists following their terms is not only common sense, it mirrors similar laws and practices frequently followed in the private sector. I believe this world is made up of imperfect people. Our political process is certainly no different. I also recognize that no law, rule or regulation will fix every problem, but they can certainly help.”

Jay Ashcroft (1973)

Get serious about meaningful ethics reform http://www.stltoday.com/opinion/columnists/get-serious-about-meaningful-ethics-reform/article_d9a98fc0-9172-54af-a084-335bc70fa3ed.html (March 10, 2016)

People, World, Law, Behavior

“The argument that the countries use for the sheer increase in Muslim doctors is the sheer increase in the Muslim population. In for example Birmingham, England where a lot of these guys came from, where one of these plots was hatched, it's up to 30% of the population. Maybe that's the problem?”

Neil Cavuto (1958) American television presenter

"Universal Healthcare: Terrorist Recruitment Tool" http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/07/06/universal-healthcare-terrorist-recruitment-tool/, crooksandliars.com, (July 6, 2007).

Guy, Country

“Chapter Five deals with the messiest problem of all— but the one to which all analytical roads should lead : the nature of organizational goals and the strategies used to achieve them.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. xi: Preface

Nature

“I think {the designated driver program} is a great idea, because anything is safer than the way we used to do it: "Hey dude, get up! Give us a ride home, man! C'mon, whaddaya say? We'll buy ya a beer!"…The only problem with the designated driver program {is} it's not the world's most desirable job…But if you ever get talked into doing it, have fun with the group. Like at the end of the night, drop them off at the wrong damn house, preferably in their boss's front yard or something.”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

Games Rednecks Play (1995)

World, Way, Home, Idea

“These burdens and frustrations are accepted by most Americans with maturity and understanding. They may long for the days when war meant charging up San Juan Hill-or when our isolation was guarded by two oceans — or when the atomic bomb was ours alone — or when much of the industrialized world depended upon our resources and our aid. But they now know that those days are gone — and that gone with them are the old policies and the old complacency's. And they know, too, that we must make the best of our new problems and our new opportunities, whatever the risk and the cost.
But there are others who cannot bear the burden of a long twilight struggle. They lack confidence in our long-run capacity to survive and succeed. Hating communism, yet they see communism in the long run, perhaps, as the wave of the future. And they want some quick and easy and final and cheap solution — now.
There are two groups of these frustrated citizens, far apart in their views yet very much alike in their approach. On the one hand are those who urge upon us what I regard to be the pathway of surrender-appeasing our enemies, compromising our commitments, purchasing peace at any price, disavowing our arms, our friends, our obligations. If their view had prevailed, the world of free choice would be smaller today.
On the other hand are those who urge upon us what I regard to be the pathway of war: equating negotiations with appeasement and substituting rigidity for firmness. If their view had prevailed, we would be at war today, and in more than one place.
It is a curious fact that each of these extreme opposites resembles the other. Each believes that we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead. Each side sees only "hard" and "soft" nations, hard and soft policies, hard and soft men. Each believes that any departure from its own course inevitably leads to the other: one group believes that any peaceful solution means appeasement; the other believes that any arms build-up means war. One group regards everyone else as warmongers, the other regards everyone else as appeasers. Neither side admits that its path will lead to disaster — but neither can tell us how or where to draw the line once we descend the slippery slopes of appeasement or constant intervention.
In short, while both extremes profess to be the true realists of our time, neither could be more unrealistic. While both claim to be doing the nation a service, they could do it no greater disservice. This kind of talk and easy solutions to difficult problems, if believed, could inspire a lack of confidence among our people when they must all — above all else — be united in recognizing the long and difficult days that lie ahead. It could inspire uncertainty among our allies when above all else they must be confident in us. And even more dangerously, it could, if believed, inspire doubt among our adversaries when they must above all be convinced that we will defend our vital interests.
The essential fact that both of these groups fail to grasp is that diplomacy and defense are not substitutes for one another. Either alone would fail. A willingness to resist force, unaccompanied by a willingness to talk, could provoke belligerence — while a willingness to talk, unaccompanied by a willingness to resist force, could invite disaster.”

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

1961, Address at the University of Washington

Men, Hate, War, People

“In western society, there is a problem similar to India that the income of a research scientist is less than that of a management person. But perhaps the facilities and the infrastructure being much advanced in the western universities, they are able to attract and retain the people. In our case this can happen but not to the extent we would like. A corrective measure to some extent has been taken by the establishment of the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs). They are doing for pure sciences what IIT’s do for applied sciences. Since they are attracting good talent it may happen that you will have more input in research in the next ten years.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

On the decline of interest in science education among students
An Exclusive Interview with Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

People, Education, Universe, Science

“We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem… We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Why Do We Want to Join the Reichstag? Der Angriff, 30 April 1928
1920s

Democracy, Wolf

“The entire purpose of a clean and well-ordered life is to liberate man from the thralldom of chaos and the burden of sorrow. (…) What is wrong with a life which is free from problems? Personality is merely a reflection of the real. (…) Once you realize that the person is merely a shadow of the reality, but not reality itself, you cease to fret and worry. You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Clean, well-ordered life
Source: "I am That.' P.33.

Life, Reality, Personality

“Some people are constructive, if you like. Others are destructive. It's this diversity in humankind that results in some making positive contributions and some negative contributions. It's necessary to have enough who make positive contributions to overcome the problems of each age.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

Academy of Achievement interview (1991)

People, Age

“More and more American pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control because of their personal moral objections. Hey, you know what would really teach us a lesson? If you took off your pretend doctor jacket and got another job. … Now, of course, I know the other side is saying, yes, but this is a moral issue. Yeah, but the problem is, not everyone gets their morals from the same book. You go by the book that says slavery is okay but sex is wrong until after marriage, at which point it becomes a blessed sacrament between a husband and the wife who is withholding it.
In conclusion, let me say to all the activist pharmacists out there, the ones who think sex is bad probably because sex with them always is. Fellas, a pharmacist is not a law-giver, not even a doctor. In the medical pecking order, you rank somewhere in between a chiropractor and a tree surgeon.
You don't answer to a law above the laws of men. You work for Sav-On. The doctors are the ones who make medical decisions because they went to medical school, whereas you were transferred from the counter where people drop off film.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

New Rules (2005)

Men, Marriage, People, Books

“My interest in game-theoretic problems in a narrower sense was first aroused by John Nash's four brilliant papers, published in the period 1950-53, on cooperative and on noncooperative games, on two-person bargaining games and on mutually optimal threat strategies in such games, and on what we now call Nash equilibria.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

"John C. Harsanyi - Biographical," 1994

Game, Optimism, Sense, Personality

“Sraffa’s criticisms of the concept of capital also amount – at least in principle –to a deadly blow to the foundations of the so-called ‘neo-classical synthesis’. Combining Keynes’ thesis on the possibility of fighting unemployment by adopting adequate fiscal and monetary policies with the marginalist tradition of simultaneous determination of equilibrium quantities and prices as a method to study any economic problem, this approach has in the last few decades come to constitute the dominant doctrine in textbooks the whole world over. It is only thanks to increasing specialisation in the various fields of economics, often invoked as the inevitable response to otherwise insoluble difficulties, that the theoreticians of general equilibrium are able to construct their models without considering the problem of relations with the real world that economists are supposed to be interpreting, and that the macroeconomists can pretend that their ‘one commodity models’ constitute an acceptable tool for analysis. For those who believe that the true task facing economists, hard as it may be, is to seek to interpret the world they live in, Sraffa’s ‘cultural revolution’ still marks out a path for research that may not (as yet) have yielded all it was hoped to, but is certainly worth pursuing.”

Alessandro Roncaglia (1947) Italian economist

Source: Piero Sraffa: His life, thought and cultural heritage (2000), Ch. 1. Piero Sraffa

World, Hope, Study, Fight

“There's nothing I enjoy more than sitting down with a big piece of marmite on toast and reading through the archives of a good webcomic. The only problem is that the good webcomics are all hidden behind pile upon pile of testicle sweat masquerading as entertainment.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

The Only Good Comics on the Internet
Fully Ramblomatic, Features

Reading

“Europe resolved a great problem – the problem of the Zionist danger. The Zionists, who constituted a strong political party in Europe, caused much disorder there. Since they had a lot of property and controlled an empire of propaganda, they made the European governments helpless. What Hitler and the German Nazis did to the Jews of Europe at that time was partly due to these circumstances with the Jews. They wanted to expel the Zionists from Europe because they always were a pain in the neck for the governments there. This is how this calamity fell upon the Muslims, especially the Palestinians, and you all know this history, more or less. […]The first goal was to save Europe from the evil of Zionism, and in this, they have been relatively successful.”

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1934–2017) Iranian politician, Shi'a cleric and Writer

Excerpts from a Friday sermon on International Jerusalem Day http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1575.htm (October 5, 2007) 2007

Pain, History, Strong, Evil

“We live in an age of belief-belief in the omnipotence of science. This belief is bolstered by the fact that the problems scientists are called on to solve are for the most part selected by the scientists themselves.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Source: 1960s, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962, p. 108

Age, Science, Parting

“Since whatever we do has to be part of a team, part of a community, we have to attempt to bring together those who have the same conviction, see the same things. Then it becomes a matter of time, when one or the other will prevail. Fortunately, there is all this diversity, and if not for that, problems would not be solved.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

Academy of Achievement interview (1991)

Communication, Time, Parting

“You need to laugh more. Life is filled with too many problems, to not laugh every day. … We need to have a sense of humor going into this because it's too tough without it.”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"Everyday Bravery" (25 March 2007)

Life, Sense

“We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Age, Support, Sense

“So the real problem in this whole question relates to utilization of national resources for productive and social welfare against the burden of defense expenditure which a country can bear at any particular time.”

Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971) (1919-1971), Indian physicist

On the issue of priority to internal development vis-a-vis external defense.
The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Post-colonial State

Question, Time, Country

“The chronological inconsistencies are perhaps most clearly exemplified by the writings of Nicole Oresme. In his Traictie de la Premierere Invention des Monnies, written about 1360, he develops a theory of money which reveals a very different approach to economic problems from that of his fellow Churchmen.”

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden (1907–2005) British economist

Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter I, The Beginnings, p. 53

Money

“Surely just about everybody has faced a moral dilemma and secretly wished, "If only somebody — somebody I trusted — could just tell me what to do!" Wouldn't this be morally inauthentic? Aren't we responsible for making our own moral decisions? Yes, but the virtues of "do it yourself" moral reasoning have their limits, and if you decide, after conscientious consideration, that your moral decision is to delegate further moral decisions in your life to a trusted expert, then you have made your own moral decision. You have decided to take advantage of the division of labor that civilization makes possible and get the help of expert specialists.We applaud the wisdom of this course in all other important areas of decision-making (don't try to be your own doctor, the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, and so forth). Even in the case of political decisions, like which way to vote, the policy of delegation can be defended. … Is the a dereliction of [one's] dut[y] as a citizen? I don't think so, but it does depend on my having good grounds for trusting [the delegate's] judgment. … That why those who have an unquestioning faith in the correctness of the moral teachings of their religion are a problem: if they themselves haven't conscientiously considered, on their own, whether their pastors or priests or rabbis or imams are worthy of this delegated authority over their own lives, then they are in fact taking a personally immoral stand.This is perhaps the most shocking implication of my inquiry, and I do not shrink from it, even though it may offend many who think of themselves as deeply moral. It is commonly supposed that it is entirely exemplary to adopt the moral teachings of one's own religion without question, because -- to put it simply — it is the word of God (as interpreted, always, by the specialists to whom one has delegated authority). I am urging, on the contrary, that anybody who professes that a particular point of moral conviction is not discussable, not debatable, not negotiable, simply because it is the word of God, or because the Bible says so, or because "that is what all Muslims [Hindus, Sikhs… ] [sic] believe, and I am a Muslim [Hindu, Sikh… ]" [sic], should be seen to be making it impossible for the rest of us to take their views seriously, excusing themselves from the moral conversation, inadvertently acknowledging that their own views are not conscientiously maintained and deserve no further hearing.”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Life, Wisdom, God, Faith

“A problem has arisen. Although I handed in my army rations to the cook, with the intention of living on these, nobody has taken me seriously, nor believed that any human being in his right mind and able to eat pasta would refrain from doing so.”

Norman Lewis book Naples '44

Naples '44

Cooking

“I found in your book the confirmation of my ultimate conclusions and the tools for deepening this aspect of the artistic problem.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Original in Italian: ho trovato nel vostro libro la conferma delle mie ultime conclusioni e gli strumenti per approfondire questo as petto della questione artistica. In a letter to Jacques Maritain, 18 September, 1923; as quoted in: Justine Grace, 'The Spirit of Collaboration: Gino Severini, Jacques Maritain, Anton Luigi Gajoni and the Roman Mosaicists' http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/colloquy/download/colloquy_issue_twenty-two/grace.pdf, COLLOQUY text theory critique Vol 22 (2011).

Books

“It is not hard to change when your biggest problem is whether the weeds prosper in a vegetable patch.”

David Gemmell book The King Beyond the Gate

Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 7

Change

““I hate students,” [Zizek] said, “they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.
In a recent interview at this year’s Zizek Conference in Ohio, Zizek talked about his personal life before delving into his thoughts on teaching. “I hate giving classes,” Zizek said, citing office hours and grading papers as his two biggest peeves. “I did teach a class here [at the University of Cincinnati] and all of the grading was pure bluff,” he continues. “I even told students at the New School for example… if you don’t give me any of your shitty papers, you get an A. If you give me a paper I may read it and not like it and you can get a lower grade.” He received no papers that semester. But it’s office hours that are the main reason he does not want to teach.
“I can’t imagine a worse experience than some idiot comes there and starts to ask you questions, which is still tolerable. The problem is that here in the United States students tend to be so open that sooner or later, if you’re kind to them, they even start to ask you personal questions [about] private problems… What should I tell them?”
“I don’t care,” he continued. “Kill yourself. It’s not my problem,””

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

As quoted by Eugene Wolters, " Professor of the Year: 'If You Don't Give Me Any of Your Shitty Papers You Get an A http://www.critical-theory.com/professor-of-the-year-if-you-dont-give-me-any-of-your-shitty-papers-you-get-an-a/'", Critical-Theory.com, May 26 2014; square brackets and lack of accent marks as in orginal

Life, Hate, People, Stupidity

“In secondary immigration, as I await processing, I sit with people for whom I imagine the experience is less of a novelty. To be blunt, non-white people. Mexican and Arabian people, mostly—I assume, I don’t look at their passports; they don’t have them, they’re behind the desks with the border police, equally trapped and obese, behind the counter, often the same color as the people they’re casually harassing. “Who does this notion of nation most suit,” I wonder as I sit there, unable to use my phone. Proper rich people don’t encounter these rooms, these borders, these problems. For them the world is as it is when seen from space, without boundary, without limitation, full of fluid possibility and whispering wonder.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

People, World, Color, Imagination

“My last vestige of "hands-off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11, 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer", when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonation and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Time to Stand Up"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

People, Faith, Religion

Quotes about problems page 25

Quotes about problems
page 25