Quotes about problems
page 31

“The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.”

David D. Friedman book The Machinery of Freedom

Source: The Machinery of Freedom, 1973, p.4

Children

“I may be subjected to the criticism of being called ‘scientistic’ or a kind of blind believer in science who holds that science is able to solve absolutely all problems. Well, I certainly don’t believe that, because I cannot conceive that a day will come when science will be complete and achieved.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

Source: Myth and Meaning (1978), Chapter 1 : The Meeting of Myth and Science

Science

“If our age is not distinguished for a greatly increased number of happy marriages and a more intelligent approach to the problems of sex, we may surely assert that some forms of misery in the sexual realm are less widespread than they used to be; and of the many people who are unhappy, thousands have some idea of what lies at the root of their unhappiness, and thus far they are better off than their forefathers, who had none, or attributed their distress to sin.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Marriage, Happiness, People, Age

“Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day.”

Billie Holiday book Lady Sings the Blues

Source: Lady Sings the Blues (1956), Ch. 17.

People, Imagination

“We can’t remain in denial about the massive problem within Islam.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

2015, The religion of Islam must reform (December 9, 2015)

“That's Sony's issue, not my problem.”

Reggie Fils-Aimé (1961) American businessman

In reference to PSP not having launched in Europe
On Nintendo's competitors
Source: E3 2005 Press Conference

“I was never really affected by it because I don’t have the time to go up to every grime kid and explain the ideology and the lifestyle. It’s too hard…. Look at Afrikan Boy, he still has that problem. You have this talent to see something and articulate something new, but you can’t because the arena to do that doesn’t exist. It’s easier to breed movements in England than really support one artist, especially in urban culture.”

M.I.A. (1975) British recording artist, songwriter, painter and director

Interview http://web.archive.org/web/20080108025702/http://www.rwdmag.com/articles/6188/MIA-Flying-High.html to RWD magazine on the rejection of her first album Arular by the UK grime scene (2007) Sourced quotes

Boy, Support, Time

“Time and experience have forcefully taught that the power to inspect dwelling places, either as a matter of systematic area-by-area search or, as here, to treat a specific problem, is of indispensable importance in the maintenance of community health; a power that would be greatly hobbled by the blanket requirement of the safeguards necessary for a search of evidence of criminal acts.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360, 372 (1959); majority opinion in 5-4 ruling that allowed health inspectors to enter a private home without a search warrant (May 4, 1959).
Judicial opinions

Health, Search, Communication, Time

“The problem for China is political. China is held together by money, not ideology. When there is an economic downturn and the money stops rolling in, not only will the banking system spasm, but the entire fabric of Chinese society will shudder. Loyalty in China is either bought or coerced. Without available money, only coercion remains. Business slowdowns can generally lead to instability because they lead to business failure and unemployment. In a country where poverty is endemic and unemployment widespread, the added pressure of an economic downturn will result in political instability.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 96

Money, Failure, Business, Loyalty

“We completely agree that description by differential equations is not only a clumsy but, in principle, inadequate way to deal with many problems of organization.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory, p. 97

Way

“It is obvious that the problem of human behavior with which we are dealing can not be understood in terms of psychology or any one of the social sciences alone. Is it not possible, therefore, that in attempting to follow the problem wherever it leads us, and employing whatever concepts and research techniques are relevant, we shall be able to define the problem in such a way and develop concepts and a theoretical framework of such a nature that a major contribution will be made to the foundation for an integrated social and psychological science? Whether or not this result appears possible or attractive to present scholars in these fields, we who are studying industrial relations are forced to work in this direction. It is not a case of choice alone, but of necessity, for we can not get results satisfactory to ourselves and applicable to the solution of practical problems by employing the concepts, theories, and methods of any one science.”

E. Wight Bakke (1903–1971) American sociologist and economist (1903-1971)

E. Wight Bakke "Industrial Relations Research," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 92, no. 5, p. 379, November, 1948. As cited in: Tannenbaum, Weschler, and Massarik (1961; 8)

Way, Behavior, Nature, Study

“I have often since then asked myself why these five were successful when others, with long records of diplomacy, were unsuccessful, and, in fact, had allowed a bad situation to get worse, so that there was a danger of the conflict spreading.... I think that the answer really lies in the fact that those five Prime Ministers brought a fresh approach to bear on the problem. They were not seeking advantage for their own countries. They had no axe of power-politics to grind. They had but one interest-how to end the fighting in such a way that the chances of continuing peace and stability were enhanced....”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

Peace, Way, Thinking, Chance

“I don't know whether it's the governor's problem, or it's the president's problem, but somebody needs to get … on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now.”

Ray Nagin (1956) politician, businessman

2005, Interview with New Orleans radio station WWL (2005)

“Here was a problem, that I, a ten year old, could understand and I knew from that moment that I would never let it go. I had to solve it.”

Andrew Wiles (1953) British mathematician

Nova Interview

Understanding

“While not a single Marxist ‘charismatic leader’ in the twentieth century made revolution in an advanced capitalist country (as Marx prescribed), or undertook the ‘withering away of the state’ (as both Marx and Engels insisted), or insured against the rule of elites (that both Marx and Engels identified as an essential of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’), or provide for the obligatory ‘rotation in office’ (again, as both Marx and Engels insured would be a post-revolutionary feature of socialist society), or resolved the problem of human ‘alienation’ (so emphatically lamented by the young Marx)—Western academics have never hesitated to directly associate Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Castroism, and even the barbarism of the Khmer Rouge, with the philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 80

Country

“Right now we have Low Thia Khiang, Chiam See Tong, Steve Chia. We can deal with them. Suppose you had 10, 15, 20 opposition members in Parliament. Instead of spending my time thinking what is the right policy for Singapore, I'm going to spend all my time thinking what's the right way to fix them, to buy my supporters votes, how can I solve this week's problem and forget about next year's challenges?”

Lee Hsien Loong (1952) Prime Minister of Singapore

On why Singaporeans cannot vote in too many Opposition candidates. Channel NewsAsia, May 3, 2006. Politics and Change in Singapore and Hong Kong https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=0WKPAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT192&lpg=PT192&dq=Right+now+we+have+Low+Thia+Khiang,+Chiam+See+Tong,+Steve+Chia&source=bl&ots=76lI1MPB40&sig=zXnNwZuec_ceVfGBZ_3dI3nIXPE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiCo6udlc7SAhVHEbwKHQxICfMQ6AEIKDAG#v=onepage&q=Right%20now%20we%20have%20Low%20Thia%20Khiang%2C%20Chiam%20See%20Tong%2C%20Steve%20Chia&f=false

Way, Support, Thinking, Time

“We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into responding to each new problem by demanding that the government should act. That we should be constantly demanding that an institution we rather despise should solve large problems argues a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of times past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to help 'ordinary people' solve daily problems in their lives. This strange aspiration is a very large change in public life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded with derision to politicians seeking power in order to solve our problems. Today, the demos votes for them.”

Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013) Australian political theorist

Introduction, p. 3
The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life

Life, People, Thinking, Change

“One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: 'This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.”

Warren Weaver (1894–1978) American mathematician

"Translation" (1955), in W.N. Locke and A.D. Booth (eds.), Machine Translation of Languages (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.).

Nature

“The systems approach to problems does not mean that the most generally formulated problem must be solved in one research project. However desirable this may be, it is seldom possible to realize it in practice. In practice, parts of the total problem are usually solved in sequence. In many cases the total problem cannot be formulated in advance but the solution of one phase of it helps define the next phase. For example, a production control project may require determination of the most economic production quantities of different items. Once these are found it may turn out that these quantities cannot be produced on the available equipment in the available time. This, then, gives rise to a new problem whose solution will affect the solution obtained in the first phase.”

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

Source: 1940s - 1950s, Introduction to Operations Research (1957), p. 7

Time, Help, Parting

“We want to know that life is good. Not perfect but good. Not problem free, but good. Good in some way that we did not anticipate. Good in some way that connects us to God, others, and our purposes in life.”

John Townsend (1952) Canadian clinical psychologist and author

Where Is God (2009, Thomas Nelson publishers)

Life, God, Way, Perfection

“The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it.”

Joseph Heller book God Knows

God Knows (1984)

Suffering, Loneliness

“God's commandments are not grievous. God put them in the garden, said "You can eat of any tree except that one tree, The Knowledge of Good and Evil." It's real simple, Adam. Enjoy the garden, have lots of kids, and don't learn about evil. […] Parents, don't teach your kids about all the evil things. Don't have drug education classes where you show them, "Hey, this is marijuana. This is how you smoke it. Now don't you do that." Duh. Don't put them in sex ed classes in seventh grade, it's a plumbing class at that time. Don't do that, okay? Let them be ignorant. Let them learn it from mom and dad, not from some heathen, okay? It's real simple Adam. Enjoy the world and have lots of kids and don't learn about evil. Don't learn all that stuff. The Lord said, "Hey, have you eaten off that tree I told you not to eat from?" God is not asking for information. He's asking for a confession. And the man said, "The woman (he passed the buck) whom thou gavest to be with me. Now God, this is really your fault, you know. If you hadn't given her to me I wouldn't have this problem." He said to the woman, "Have you done this?" She said, "Well, the snake that you made…." We still do the same thing, nothing changes, okay? Fear God, keep his commandments. Just like the taking of life is very important in any culture. Murder is serious. Giving life is important. That's why God put certain rules down for reproduction, okay? Follow his rules. "Thou shalt not commit adultery. Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge." Don't even look and lust or you've committed adultery already in your heart. By the way, ladies, that's why it's important how you dress, okay? My daddy always said, "If you're not in business, don't advertise."”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Women should dress in modest apparel. That's what the Bible says, alright.
Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

Life, Women, God, World

“I think my greatest usefulness lies in what I've had the opportunity to demonstrate -that the most "hopeless" criminal in existence can be salvaged; that he's worth salvaging, on both humanitarian and hard-headed social grounds. Retributive justice and the execution chamber aren't the answer. In seeking a solution to the crime problem, I believe that vision can and should be substituted for vengeance. I'm convinced that there is much that is narrow and negative and wrong in society's attitude toward and treatment of the man who is said to be at "war" with it, and who often is at war with himself.”

Caryl Chessman (1921–1960) Convicted robber, kidnapper and rapist, writer

Caryl Chessman, Cell 2455, Death Row, New Jersey, 1960, p. 372

War, Justice, Thinking

“The differentiation of the neuroses from organic visceral diseases, Dr. Crohn said, "is one of the difficult problems in clinical medicine. Let him who is proud of his acumen and experience as a physician survey, from year to year, his own record in this respect, and his pride may take, will take, a severe fall. With his eyes wide open to the problem, with much experience with the world, people and moods, and with years of clinical training and knowledge, no one is immune to, at times, mistaking organic diseases for the neuroses, or of falsely interpreting neurotic symptoms in terms of pathological states.”

Burrill Bernard Crohn (1884–1983) American gastroenterologist

Speaking at the seventh annual graduate fortnight of the New York Academy of Medicine, 25 October 1934. [Many Stomach Ills Called Functional: Dr. Crohn Says Physicians at Times Err in Diagnosing Neurotic Symptoms, The New York Times, 25 October 1934, http://search.proquest.com.dclibrary.idm.oclc.org/docview/101198139/E252539BA742405APQ/8?accountid=46320]

People, World, Disease, Mood

“The first of the two cases which we are about to discuss concerns a large-scale Parisian administrative organization which may be described as rigid, standardized, and impersonal, and which seems unable to cope with the human and technical problems engendered by its recently accelerated growth. Its hierarchical structure, its promotional system, and its principles of organization are extremely simple. The behavior of its different categories of personnel, as actors within its social system, is therefore much easier to analyze. The actors appear to be both extremely rational and extremely predictable, as if they were playing a game that followed an experimental model. We shall use the opportunity afforded by such a situation to try to understand better one of the most fundamental problems usually associated with the concept of bureaucracy, the problem of routine.”

Michel Crozier (1922–2013) French sociologist

Source: The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, 1954, p. 12; Lead paragraph chapter 1

Behavior, Game, Understanding, Appearance

“The right method in any particular case must be largely determined by the nature of the problem.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 29

Nature

“I had some personal problems, and I started listening to a lot of radio ministers. I listened every Sunday all day, flipping the dial up and back. So, I heard just about every guy on Sunday. And then I heard Mr. Armstrong, and I said, "Ah, God has finally shown me the one, I guess."”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

1970s, BOBBY FISCHER SPEAKS OUT! (1977)

God, Guy, Personality

“My master's thesis and later my Ph. D. thesis had the aim of axiomatizing a value for e-person games in extensive form. This work made me familiar with the extensive form, in a time when very little work on extensive games was done. This enabled me to see the perfectness problem earlier than others and to write the contributions for which I am now honored by the prize in memory of Alfred Nobel.”

Reinhard Selten (1930–2016) German economist

"Reinhard Selten - Biographical," 1994

Game, Memory, Time, Personality

“No organization works if the toilets don't work, but I don't believe that finding solutions to business problems is my job.”

James G. March (1928–2018) American sociologist

On artistic sensibility.
Ideas as Art (2006)

Business

“If the terrorists have the sympathy of people, it's much harder to find them. So we need people on our side, and that leads us to be responsible leaders of the world, show some concern with the problems.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Interview with David Brancaccio (2003)

People, World

“With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs. You're going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants. This is the problem with Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, and progressives who push very hard to raise the minimum wage. Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job? If you're making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive — this is not rocket science. They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”

Andrew Puzder (1950) American businessman

Fast-food CEO says he's investing in machines because the government is making it difficult to afford employees http://www.businessinsider.com/carls-jr-wants-open-automated-location-2016-3 (March 16, 2016)

Age, Sex, Science, Help

“If in any process there are a number of contradictions, one of them must be the principal contradiction playing the leading and decisive role, while the rest occupy a secondary and subordinate position. Therefore, in studying any complex process in which there are two or more contradictions, we must devote every effort to finding its principal contradiction. Once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved.”

Mao Zedong book On Contradiction

On Contradiction (1937)

Decision, Effort, Study

“I am convinced that the enactment this year of tax reduction and tax reform overshadows all other domestic problems in this Congress. For we cannot for long lead the cause of peace and freedom, if we ever cease to set the pace here at home. For we cannot for long lead the cause of peace and freedom, if we ever cease to set the pace here at home.”

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

1963, Third State of the Union Address

Peace, Home, Freedom

“Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

Dantzig (1983) "Reminiscences about the origins of linear programming". In: Mathematical programming : the state of the art. New York, 1983, p. 78-86.

World, Optimism, Decision

“The class of "No technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class.”

Garrett Hardin (1915–2003) American ecologist

Tragedy of the Commons ( read on-line http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full), 1968. Tragedy of the Commons (1968)

“If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact, not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.”

Shimon Peres (1923–2016) Israeli politician, 8th prime minister and 9th president of Israel

As quoted by Donald Rumsfeld in "Sharon's Victory" (link is to a preview, but the quote is in the first few visible lines) https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB981508176687515426, Wall Street Journal (7 February 2001)

Time

“Being an artist is being an isolated individual. But the development of the creative foundation of the encumbers the individual artists more and more with the prevailing problems. You are of your time whether you like it or not. Developing ones foundation to an artist means continually revising it. The artistic formulae wear thin quickly and yet daily the artist — when developing his own foundation — must enter his own time and the problems of other contemporary artists. Paths cross and the soil of time is starting to be turned.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Quote in the late 1960s, as cited in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 28
1959 - 1973, Various sources

Time

“[H]aving problems is not a license to vote stupid. People need the tractor to plow the damn field, now.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

As quoted in "Debriefing Mike Murphy" https://www.weeklystandard.com/matt-labash/debriefing-mike-murphy (18 March 2016), by Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard 2010s

People, Stupidity

“Focused will is incredible. If you have a dream and you don't give up no matter what obstacles come up, then life's problems will fall away and you will get what you want. It happens. It works.”

Yanni (1954) Greek pianist, keyboardist, composer, and music producer

Yanni in Words. Miramax Books. Co-author David Rensin

Life, Dreams

“Gun ownership is a problem, not because it represents any physical danger to [the IRS]. Americans have proven dismayingly forbearing in that regard. But people who own guns often look at the world differently than those who don't. That's the real danger to social and political parasites. Roughly 25% of Americans own guns. The number increases each time there's widespread discussion of more gun control - call it what it is: 'victim disarmament'. If the figure ever rises to 50%, I suspect the widespread discussion will be about repealing the 16th Amendment.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Vermont Fudge," http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle511-20090322-04.html originally published in The Sierra Times 18 March 2002.

People, World, Time

“How is it possible for both naturalism and religion - atheism and theism, if you prefer it - to be but two sides of one truth, is the same as the problem how God can be both being and non-being, as one of the most ancient religious and mystical insights proclaims he is, or how he can be both the Eternal Yes and the Eternal Nay, as Böhme affirmed.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. VI.

God, Truth, Religion, Nature

“Books are the tools of both teacher and pupil. A library is perhaps the most important adjunct of instruction. It is open to all and is used by all. In every department of science throughout the world the keenest intellects are at work, seeking for solutions to the unending series of problems that present themselves in the physical and natural world. 'Light, more light,' said the dying philosopher, and the longing of the world is but the echo of his last faint cry. To do our duty and to give reply to the many demands made upon us requires all the light and all the experience of other minds, wheresoever they may be found.”

Henry H. Goodell (1839–1905)

Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, (1900), p. 17.

Books, World, Nature, Light

“I’m not going to be silenced on yet another attack involving Islamic extremism - especially one occurring in the state I am representing in the Senate, Australians know what the problem is. It's time this government wakes up and starts looking after Australians' welfare before those from other countries.”

Pauline Hanson (1954) Australian politician

After the death of Mia Ayliffe-Chung at Shelly’s Backpackers in Home Hill. http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/08/25/09/51/hanson-seizes-on-hostel-tragedy (August 25, 2016)

Silence, Time, Country

“In the years after 1936, whilst Hayek was working on The Pure Theory of Capital, most economists were convinced by Keynes, whose theory had an elegance and simplicity that Hayek’s did not. Keynes’ theory lacked Hayek’s theoretical rigor in that it was not based on equilibrium (on individual rationality), and there were places in the argument where Keynes relied on loose, informal arguments, preferring to put his trust in intuition rather than formal theory. Keynesians did not solve the problems with capital theory that Hayek had identified: they just bypassed or ignored them. According to Hayek’s methodological criteria, Keynes’ theory was decidedly inferior. Against this, Keynes’ theory provided opportunities for mathematical and statistical analysis that Hayek’s did not. Indeed, though Hayek paid some attention to data, he did so only minimally: he certainly made no attempt to test his theory against statistical data. The choice of Keynesian theory was, at least in part, a methodological one.”

Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist

"Hayek on money and the business cycle", 2006

Mathematics, Parting

“This report summarizes the activities of the M. I. T. Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Project from 1 December 1959 through 3 May 1967 in the development of a generalized 'system of software systems' for generating specialized problem-solving systems using high-level language techniques and advanced computer graphics. Known as the AED Approach (for Automated Engineering Design) the Project results are applicable not only to mechanical design, as an extension of earlier development of the APT System for numerical control, but to arbitrary scientific, engineering, management, and production systems as well.”

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

D.T. Ross & John Erwin Ward (1968). Investigations in computer-aided design for numerically controlled production http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/755/FR-0351-19563962.pdf?sequence=1. Electronic Systems Laboratory, Electrical Engineering Dept., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. iii Abstract.

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

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Eric Norden, "Saul Alinsky: A candid conversation with the feisty radical organizer," Playboy, 19 (3), March 1972 http://www.progress.org/2003/alinsky5.htm

“I feel comfortably qualified to talk about anything, but that's a personal problem and I'm dealing with it.”

Max Barry (1973) Australian writer

Great Writing interview

Feeling, Personality

“For victims, the hardest thing to do in the world is to hold themselves accountable for their problems. They’ve spent their whole life believing that others are responsible for their fate. That first step of taking responsibility for themselves is often terrifying.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 8, “The Importance of Saying No” (p. 180)

Life, Fate, World

“One can’t read a great deal of theology without appreciating the mental dexterity of its practitioners when faced with hard problems. And as a scientist, I regret how much more we’d understand about nature had that dexterity been applied to science instead, or to any field involved in studying what’s real.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 78-79

Understanding, Nature, Study, Science

“Political power automatically gravitates toward the center, and the purpose of the Constitution is to prevent that from happening. The centralization of political power always destroys liberty by removing the decision-making function from the people on the local level and transferring it to the officers of the central government. This process gradually benumbs the spirit of "voluntarism" among the people, and they lose the will to solve their own problems. They also cease to be involved in community affairs. They seek the anonymity of oblivion in the seething crowds of the city and often degenerate into faceless automatons who have neither a voice nor a vote.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)

People, Communication, Decision

“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask "why not?"”

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

Speech delivered to the Dail (Parliament of Ireland) (28 June 1963)
1963

Men, World, Dreams, Reality

“Lord, for sixty-so years I've surrendered my love,
to emblems of kindness, and not the kindness they were emblems of,
Trammels and rings, with the strength of old strings,
and some hobble skirt spring, by the old problem caught,
Children, sometimes I think all our thoughts are just things,
and then sometimes think things are just thoughts"
and the rabble rang.”

Aaron Weiss

Elephant in the Dock.
Ten Stories

Love, Children, Spring, Thinking

“We cannot point to a single definitive solution of any one of the problems that confront us — political, economic, social or moral, that is, having to do with the conduct of life. We are still beginners, and for that reason may hope to improve. To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind. There is no need to be dismayed by the fact that we cannot yet envisage a definitive solution of our problems, a resting-place beyond which we need not try to go.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Presidential Address, 1969

Life, Hope

“The basic problem of social organization is how to co-ordinate the economic activities of large numbers of people.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Source: (1962), Ch. 1 The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom, p. 12

People

“The U. S. could seek to acquire the moral authority to act as a healing presence in the world. Our role could be to adjudicate disputes, support "all-win" solutions to international problems, and make our resources available to people, groups and governments that were willing to help themselves. … We could seek to play a catalytic, rather than a dominant, role in the Third World. We could pay more attention to what the poor themselves want. We could concentrate less on funding massive projects, and more on building up the capacity of indigenous institutions to do for themselves. We could pay more attention to the context in which our aid is given. This may be a highly unconventional approach to foreign aid. But it could also be highly popular. It combines the traditional left's emphasis on equity and the traditional right's emphasis on self-help.”

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

Source: New Options for America (1991), Chapter 17, "Siding With the World's Poor," p. 136.

People, World, Support, Help

“Had it merely called to our attention the existence and exact nature of certain fundamental gaps in economic theory, the Theory of Economic Behavior by von Neumann and Morgenstern would have been a book of outstanding importance. But it does more than that. It is essentially constructive: where existing theory is considered to be inadequate, the authors put in its place a highly novel analytical apparatus designed to cope with the problem.
It would be doing the authors an injustice to say that theirs is a contribution to economics only. The scope of the book is much broader. The techniques applied by the authors in tackling economic problems are of sufficient generality to be valid in political science, sociology, or even military strategy. The applicability to games proper (chess and poker) is obvious from the title. Moreover, the book is of considerable interest from a purely mathematical point of view.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Leonid Hurwicz. "The Theory of Economic Behavior," The American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 5 (Dec., 1945), pp. 909: Lead paragraphs of the article

Books, Behavior, Game, Mathematics

“We all know the disappointments that come when we base anticipation on what we and other humans can deliver. God will never have a problem delivering!”

James MacDonald (1960) American pastor

Source: Always True (Moody, 2011), p. 89

God, Disappointment

“[…] In real war an officer may have only one chance at succeeding. Consider each problem.”

David Gemmell book Quest for Lost Heroes

Source: Drenai series, Quest for Lost Heroes, Ch. 1

War, Chance

“Our country's a mess. And that's why when she makes the speech, she doesn't talk about radical Islam. She doesn't talk about the problems that we have in this country and throughout the world. Many of the problems, she caused. I mean, she created ISIS with her stupidity and her lack of knowledge with her bad judgment.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)

Stupidity, World, Knowledge, Country

“The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and to act.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), p. 1278

Men

“As Moses sought to lead his people on, he discovered that there were those among them who would occasionally become emotionally and sentimentally attached to a particular spot so that they wanted to stay there and remain stationary at that point. One day when Moses confronted this problem, he wrote in the book of Deuteronomy, the first chapter and the fifth verse: “You have been in this mountain long enough, turn ye and go on your journey, move on to the mountof the Amorite.”~ This was a message of God through Moses. And whenever God speaks he says go forward, saying in substance that you must never become bogged down in mountains and situations that will impede your progress. You must never become complacently adjusted to unobtained goals; you have been in this mountain long enough, “turn ye and take your journey."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

"Keep Moving from this Mountain" http://www5.spelman.edu/about_us/news/pdf/70622_messenger.pdf – Founders Day Address at the Sisters Chapel, Spelman College (11 April 1960) 1960s

God, People, Books, Mountain

“Living mythical-political systems are invisible to those who live within them. The problem of myth and consciousness is reflected in the old saying: We don’t know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn’t a fish. Myth is the sea of commonly accepted assumptions that are not questioned by the majority of those living within a system. To the average, normal member of society, the myth is what is natural and obvious.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 99

Question, Nature, Fish, Water

“In general, we can say that the larger the system becomes, the more the parts interact, the more difficult it is to understand environmental constraints, the more obscure becomes the problem of what resources should be made available, and deepest of all, the more difficult becomes the problem of the legitimate values of the system.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 77; cited in John Gall (1978) Systemantics; how systems work... and especially how they fail

Understanding, Parting

“A false and undeliberated conception of what man is lies at the bottom, I think, of the whole bubble-castle of socialist theory. Although few seem to realize it, Marxism rests on the romantic notion of Rousseau that nature endows men with the qualities necessary to be a free, equal, fraternal, family-like living together, and our sole problem is to fix up the external conditions. All Marx did about this with his dialectical philosophy was to change the tenses in the romance: Nature will endow men with the qualities as soon as the conditions are fixed up.”

Max Eastman (1883–1969) American activist

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 29

Men, Family, Nature, Thinking

“[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39] "This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem…"”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

Age

“The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

On receiving the "Family of Man" Award (1964)

Communication, Speed

“Social production is not a panacea; it is just an alternative. Although we are better off being able to use it when it is valuable, it brings its own challenges, just as production via firms and governments does. Even the simplest pooled effort or voluntary participation can be fraught with tension among the individual participants, and between those individuals and the group. Like many aspects of social life, this problem has no solution; the dilemma can be addressed only by various compromises, none of them wholly satisfactory. One way to help a group of participants improve their ability to function together is the creation and maintenance of shared culture.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Cognitive Surplus : Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010)

Life, Way, Effort, Help

“We remember the refrain from the Phillippines: ‘Underneath the starry flag/Civilize him with a Krag /And then get underway for home sweet home.’ But you have to civilize him first, and how you do that with the ragheads is the problem.”

Jeff Cooper (1920–2006) American journalist

Cooper in Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries October 2003, Vol. 11, No. 12.

Home

“Bombing IS in Syria and Iraq, while refusing to see the problems at home, will have disastrous consequences.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

"Stop Denying the Obvious: Islam is a Problem" (26 September 2014) http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4733/stop-denying-the-obvious-islam-is-a-problem 2010s

Home

““The rules that society chooses to live by have always struck me as especially fascinating,” she said. “There are things one can do but not talk about, and there are things one can talk about but not do. There are things—not apparently gender-related—that men can do, but not women, and there are things women can do, but not men. We live in an invisible maze, and we have all learned where to turn and when, so as to find our way through.”
“Some of the rules are good, Mary, and many are necessary,” Lord Darcy said mildly.
“You misunderstood me, my dear,” Mary of Cumberland told him. “As in magic, where there are absolutely essential words to say and gestures to make or the spell won’t work; so in society there are absolutely essential words to say and gestures to make or we won’t understand each other or trust each other, and it will all come tumbling down around us. The problem is that the rules of society, unlike magic, have never been formalized mathematically, and we don’t know which words are essential to the spell and which are just silly words.””

Michael Kurland book Ten Little Wizards

Source: Ten Little Wizards (1988), Chapter 14 (p. 132)

Women, Men, Way, Mathematics

“When you're in the middle of nowhere and you see something moving in the jungle, you're forced to become a creative problem solver.”

Bob Parsons (1950) United States Marine

Forbes: GoDaddy Billionaire Founder Bob Parsons On His Passion For Golf And Motorcycles https://www.forbes.com/sites/monteburke/2017/10/18/godaddy-billionaire-founder-bob-parsons-on-his-passion-for-golf-and-motorcycles/ (18 October 2017)

“Here we were at Davos, moderating a discussion on value innovation, and yet only one European, Hasso Plattner [the founder and CEO of SAP AG], was on the panel. This raised the question, ‘Why aren’t there more European CEOs and companies worth listening to on this subject?’ What is the problem in Europe? The answer that kept coming back is this: Europe is strong in science and technology, but weak in connecting innovation and commerce.”

Renée Mauborgne American economist

Renée Mauborgne in: Stuart Crainer, " W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne: The Thought Leader Interview http://www.strategy-business.com/article/11695?gko=d33f3," strategy+business, January 12, 2002. First Quarter 2002. Issue 26 (originally published by Booz & Company)

Age, Question, Strong, Science

“My campaign is based upon the proposition that the answers to the problems which currently plague our cities, our towns, and our homes, are not to be found in the decisions in Washington. They are instead to be found in the hearts, minds and resources of our own people here at home.”

Jerry Springer (1944) American television presenter, former lawyer, politician, news presenter, actor, and musician

from a speech given circa 1970 to citizens in Cincinnati Ohio. This American Life http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/04/258.html, Ep. 258, 01/30/04, Leaving the Fold; Act One.

People, Home, Decision, Heart

“It is gratifying to report that the progress of industry, the enormous increase in individual productivity through labor-saving devices, and the high rate of wages have all combined to furnish our people in general with such an abundance not only of the necessaries but of the conveniences of life that we are by a natural evolution solving our problems of economic and social justice.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Life, People, Justice, Nature

“As a right-winger and UKIP member, I believe in immigration. That sentence might sound slightly surprising coming from the General Secretary of a Party which is perceived by the media as anti-immigration. So let me explain. I reject uncontrolled immigration. I reject immigration beyond the ability of our country’s infrastructure to cope. Recently, I’ve been listening to the Bruce Springsteen song ‘American Land’. It starts off well enough, talking about people relocating to America as it grew and helping to build the country. That’s the kind of immigration that I believe in. Those who believe that they can have a better life (in this case in the UK), who come over and are determined to see themselves as part of British culture and will put their heart and soul into improving this country for all of us. I’m talking about the kind of person who is proud to come to the United Kingdom and shows that pride at every opportunity. Such people are a real asset to the country. That’s why I’m so angry at the ‘left-wing’ in British politics, which has consistently pursued an effective open-door immigration policy. Uncontrolled mass immigration doesn’t provide any of those benefits, but instead creates huge cultural problems for us. Worse still, it creates resentment. In Sheffield, I see workers losing their jobs to immigrant workers. All that does is create resentment and fuels the kind of racism that we’ve painstakingly worked to get rid of from our nation.”

Jonathan Arnott (1981) British politician

I believe….in immigration? http://www.jonathanarnott.co.uk/2013/06/i-believe-in-immigration/ (June 23, 2013)

Life, People, Soul, Help

“I give you three examples: first, medical space research may open up new understanding of man's relation to his environment. Examinations of the astronaut's physical, and mental, and emotional reactions can teach us more about the differences between normal and abnormal, about the causes and effects of disorientation, about changes in metabolism which could result in extending the life span. When you study the effects on our astronauts of exhaust gases which can contaminate their environment, and you seek ways to alter these gases so as to reduce their toxicity, you are working on problems similar to those in our great urban centers which themselves are being corrupted by gases and which must be clear.”

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

1963, President John F. Kennedy's last formal speech and public words

Life, Way, Understanding, Study

“General systems theory deals with the most fundamental concepts and aspects of systems. Many theories dealing with more specific types of systems (e. g., dynamical systems, automata, control systems, game-theoretic systems, among many others) have been under development for quite some time. General systems theory is concerned with the basic issues common to all these specialized treatments. Also, for truly complex phenomena, such as those found predominantly in the social and biological sciences, the specialized descriptions used in classical theories (which are based on special mathematical structures such as differential or difference equations, numerical or abstract algebras, etc.) do not adequately and properly represent the actual events. Either because of this inadequate match between the events and types of descriptions available or because of the pure lack of knowledge, for many truly complex problems one can give only the most general statements, which are qualitative and too often even only verbal. General systems theory is aimed at providing a description and explanation for such complex phenomena.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic and Y. Takahare (1975) General Systems Theory, Mathematical foundations. Academic Press. Cited in: Franz Pichler, Roberto Moreno Diaz (1993. Computer Aided Systems Theory. p. 134

Game, Mathematics, Knowledge, Science

“There will be no room, here, for the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of peoples whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

As quoted in Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (1989) by Anders Stephanson, p. 160

People, World, Study, Universe

“Before health problems show up there is always a loss of self-respect or expression.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), p. 280

Health, Loss

“The only privilege a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of talking to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it. His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Money, Education, Thinking

“What we really mean by free will… is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. …the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

Imagination, Dependency

“The Diary of Vaslav Nijinjsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents that we have referred to on this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death; notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbors. We possess no other record of the Outsider's problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), p. 115

Life, Death, Men, Sense

“Psychologism is the most comfortable conception of life, because according to it there are no longer any more problems. That is why it also condemns all solutions from the outset, since it acknowledges the actual problems as little as the idea of truth.”

Otto Weininger (1880–1903) austrian philosopher and writer

Collected Aphorisms

Life, Truth, Idea

“An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now. On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

Paper Reactors, Real Reactors (1953)

Study, Light, Time

“personally i prefer the MX RR and a stylized name, but i was trying to solve the problem rather than create an industry.”

Paul Vixie (1963) American internet pioneer

NANOG mailing list http://www.mail-archive.com/nanog@merit.edu/msg24986.html (2004) Notes: about Sender Policy Framework

Personality

“But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos. …matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems. …The tie between information and action has been severed. …It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

Personality

“Of the many references to Newton in 18th-century electrical writings only a small number were to the Principia, the greater part by far were to the Opticks. This was true not alone of the electrical writings but also in other fields of experimental enquiry…. [The Opticks] would allow the reader to roam, with great Newton as his guide, through the major unresolved problems of science and even the relation of the whole world of nature to Him who had created it…. in the Opticks Newton did not adopt the motto… —Hypotheses non fingo; I frame no hypotheses—but, so to speak, let himself go, allowing his imagination full reign and by far exceeding the bounds of experimental evidence.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

I. Bernard Cohen, Preface to Opticks by Sir Isaac Newton (1952)

World, Imagination, Nature, Science

“Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of use passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 34, "Frames and reality", page 367 (ISBN 9780141033570).

Reality, Decision

“Remember that algebra, with all its deep and intricate problems, is nothing but a development of the four fundamental operations of arithmetic. Everyone who understands the meaning of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division holds the key to all algebraic problems.”

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician

Second Lecture, The Elements of the Theory of Probability, p. 38
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

Understanding

“The problem is that too often the only people who can act don’t want change. Power doesn’t so much corrupt as it breeds conservatism.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, The Engines of God (1994), Chapter 25 (p. 356)

People, Change

“Dodd's proposal takes regulatory authority away from one unaccountable institution and gives it to another even bigger one. This will not solve our problems.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

2010 Senate Campaign, Remarks regarding Christopher Dodd

“Everyone acknowledges that people come to the evidence with different preconceptions. But we can't go into these problems assuming that the civilian bias, which tends toward arms control, and the view that everyone is rational, is necessarily more appropriate than the military bias. That needs to be argued, not just assumed.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)

People

“Think about every problem, every challenge, we face. The solution to each starts with education.”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

Announcement of the America 2000 Education Strategy (18 April 1991) What Work Requires of Schools Pg 2 http://wdr.doleta.gov/SCANS/whatwork/whatwork.pdf.

Education, Thinking

“The great problem of our civilization is still unsolved. We have to account for and grapple with the mass of misery and destitution in our midst, co-existent as it is with the evidence of abundant wealth and teeming prosperity. It is a problem which some men would put aside by reference to the eternal laws of supply and demand, to the necessity of freedom of contract, and to the sanctity of every private right of property…Our object is the elevation of the poor, of the masses of the people—a levelling up of them by which we shall do something to remove the excessive inequality in social life.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech on 8 September, 1885.
1880s

Life, Men, People, Law

“To die every day to every problem, every pleasure, and not carry over any problem at all; so the mind remains tremendously attentive, active, clear.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

3rd Public Talk, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (24 May 1967)
1960s

Pleasure

“It is not my aim to surprise or shock you – but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Newell & Simon (1958), quoted in AI, by Daniel Crevier
1940s-1950s

World, Way, Thinking, Learning

“The filibuster of federal district and circuit judges cannot stand. … It's bad for the institution. It's wrong. It's not supportable under the Constitution. And if they insist on persisting with these filibusters, I'm perfectly prepared to blow the place up. No problem.”

Trent Lott (1941) United States Senator from Mississippi

On filibustering, as quoted in The Clarion-Ledger (23 May 2003), "Lott aims to change filibuster rules" http://orig.clarionledger.com/news/0305/23/m05.html 2000s

Support

“In strategic thinking, one first seeks a clear understanding of the particular character of each element of a situation and then makes the fullest possible use of human brainpower to restructure the elements in the most advantageous way. Phenomena and events in the real word do not always fit a linear model. Hence the most reliable means of dissecting a situation into its constituent parts and reassembling then in the desired pattern is not a step-by-step methodology such as systems analysis. Rather, it is that ultimate nonlinear thinking tool, the human brain. True strategic thinking thus contrasts sharply with the conventional mechanical systems approach based on linear thinking. But it also contrasts with the approach that stakes everything on intuition, reaching conclusions without any real breakdown or analysis… No matter how difficult or unprecedented the problem, a breakthrough to the best possible solution can come only from a combination of rational analysis, based on the real nature of things, and imaginative reintegration of all the different items into a new pattern, using nonlinear brainpower. This is always the most effective approach to devising strategies for dealing successfully with challenges and opportunities, in the market arena as on the battlefield.”

Kenichi Ohmae (1943) Japanese academic

Source: The Mind Of The Strategist, 1982, p. 304

Way, Imagination, Understanding, Nature