Quotes about problems
page 32

“This is my prayer for all of us—"Lord, increase our faith." Increase our faith to bridge the chasms of uncertainty and doubt…. Grant us faith to look beyond the problems of the moment to the miracles of the future…. Give us faith to do what is right and let the consequence follow.”

Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Lord, Increase Our Faith, Ensign, Nov. 1987, 52–53.

Faith, Future

“While [ACORN] may have problems, they've also done a lot of good for people in minority neighborhoods.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

December 7, 2009 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35296_ACORN_Review_Finds_No_Illegality/comments/

People

“(William Berger) was a guy who had everything. He was handsome, knew how to act. He could have gone all the way to the top. But he got mixed up with drugs. I got a couple of parts because he was busy or he was arrested. When I made that Crea film, Berger had just been arrested because somebody had left drugs in his place, on the Costa Amalfi. His wife died in prison. I didn't get along with him because he was too hippy or what they call it, and I'm square! I don't drink, I don't smoke, and that's the way it is…But I knew so many psychedelic sophisticates in the early 1950s in Paris, that I just have my problems with them.”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

Way, Guy, Drink, Business

“So far we have studies how, for each commodity by itself, the law of demand in connection with the conditions of production of that commodity, determines the price of it and regulates the incomes of its producers. We considered as given and invariable the prices of other commodities and the incomes of other producers; but, in reality the economic system is a whole of which the parts are connected and react on each other. An increase in the incomes of the producers of commodity A will affect the demand for commodities Band C, etc., and the incomes of their producers, and, by its reaction will involve a change in the demand for A. It seems, therefore, as if, for a complete and rigorous solution of the problems relative to some parts of the economic system, it were indispensable to take the entire system into consideration. But this would surpass the powers of mathematical analysis and of our practical methods of calculation, even if the values of all the constants could be assigned to them numerically.”

Antoine Augustin Cournot Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth

Source: Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth, 1897, p. 137

Law, Mathematics, Reality, Study

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

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 322

Books, Thinking, Solitude

“That is my problem with life, I just rush through it, like I'm being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea I suck it down like I'm in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

"The Man on the Stairs" in Fence (Spring/Summer 2004)

Life, Drink, Tea

“There must be opportunities for judgment to mature. When, therefore, you increase your business to a very great extent, and the multitude of problems increase with its growth, you will find, in the first place, that the man at the head has a diminishing knowledge of the facts and, in the second place, a diminishing opportunity of exercising a careful judgment upon them.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Testimony before the United States Senate, Committee On Interstate Commerce (December 14, 1911).
Extra-judicial writings

Exercises, Business, Knowledge

“Because of these rulers’ oppressive behavior towards God’s guests, the world of Islam must fundamentally reconsider the management of the two holy places and the issue of hajj. Negligence in this regard will confront the Islamic Ummah with more serious problems in the future.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

2016, Hajj hijacked by oppressors, Muslims should reconsider management of Hajj (September 2015)

God, World, Behavior, Future

“The usual Marxist line of argument runs: 'only successful socialist revolution will render possible the abolition of women's repression, the end of the destructive exploitation of nature, relief from the threat of nuclear destruction…' My thesis is that of Saul Kripke's antidescriptivism offers us the conceptual tools to solve this problem.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

97
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Women, Nature, Success

“There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all our problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil--our enemy--will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.”

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

From Russia and the West under Lenin by George Kennan (1960)

Life, War, Democracy, Nature

“Sean Hannity: For what possible reason would he possibly want to destroy America's economy and place in the world. Where is that coming from?
Herman Cain: Where I'm coming from is if you weaken the United States militarily, economically, and culturally, then America is gonna suffer from the same problems that all of— a lot of the other countries suffer from, and that opens the door to some dramatic change in how we run this country.
Sean Hannity: Would that fit into black liberation theology, social, Marxism, redistribution, G. D. America, America's chickens have come home to roost—?
Herman Cain: It fits into what I would call anti-American, anti-Constitutional, anti-Declaration of Independence. That's what it fits into.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

Hannity
Television
2010-04-14
Fox News, quoted in * Herman Cain calls Obama's policies "anti-American, anti-Constitutional, anti-Declaration of Independence"
Media Matters for America
2010-04-14
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201004140078
2011-10-08
regarding President Obama

World, Home, Thinking, Suffering

“My having been in the LSE made me suspect in the eyes of the Right but funnily enough it did not help me with the Left either. After getting a seat, and a pretty unsafe one at that, my campaign started, my opposite number from the Left said in his speeches that I was an Anglicised sahib who knew nothing of Kerala, did not eat Malayali food and did not even know how to wear a mundu dhoti]! So there were problems for me on both sides.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Source: Gopalkrishna Gandhi A remarkable life-story http://hindu.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=20051202005812900.htm&date=fl2224/&prd=fline, The Hindu

Food, Help

“I’ve always said, if I get tired of it, I won’t do it. And I still enjoy it, and what’s there to get tired of? I always think that if people don’t recognize me, that’s when the problem starts. Right? That’s my way of looking at it. It’s great fun. I enjoy it. As I say, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it.”

Peter Mayhew (1944–2019) British actor

People, Way, Thinking

“Human beings do not wish to be modest; they want to be as expressive — that is, as immodest — as fear allows; fashion helps them solve that paradoxical problem.”

Edward Sapir (1884–1939) American linguist and anthropologist

Source: Fashion (1931), p. 140

Fear, Fashion, Help

“This is a report of an actual industrial experiment designed to determine why workers resisted job changes and what could be done about the problem. The research arose out of the need to change industrial operations to meet competitive conditions and was instituted after earlier incentives and propaganda procedures had proved ineffectual.”

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

Abstract, lead sentences
"Overcoming resistance to change." 1948

Change

“The only way to solve the problems now besetting mankind is to eliminate completely the exploitation of dependent countries by developed capitalist countries, with all the consequences that this implies.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

On Development (1964)

Way, Dependency, Country

“Nobilities, indecencies, heroic impulses, cowardly ravings, good and bad, white and black — the mystery of mysteries, the central island of nescience in a sea of science, the dark spot in the lighted room of knowledge, the unknown quantity, the X in the universal problem.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Knowledge, Light, Universe, Science

“In a zero-sum game, the problem is entirely one of distribution, not at all one of production.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter VII, Some Implications Of The Third Image, p. 202

Game

“I am biased towards the belief that every painter must be grounded in strong and faultless drawing skills, and until one has not experimented with all styles of painting and has not comprehended their potentialities one's work is not complete. Even an abstract painter must know how to draw as well as a figurative artist. As for me, drawing has never created any problem, since I know how to draw anatomy correctly if I had to, I understand the function of muscle groups and sculpture.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Source: Ayandegan (1973), p. 4

Understanding, Strong, Drawing, Painting

“Let me give you an example that encapsulates the whole difference between America and Singapore. America has a vicious drug problem. How does it solve it? It goes around the world helping other anti-narcotic agencies to try and stop the suppliers… Singapore does not have that option. What we can do is to pass a law which says that any customs officer or policeman who sees anybody in Singapore behaving suspiciously… can require that man to have his urine tested. If the sample is found to contain drugs, the man immediately goes for treatment. In America if you did that it would be an invasion of the individual's rights and you would be sued.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, Interview with Fareed Zakaria of Foreign Policy, 1994 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1994-03-01/conversation-lee-kuan-yew 1990s

World, Law, Help

“I have to dedicate myself. Do you understand? I don't feel conflict in myself because if I do, my work doesn't go well. If there's conflict I have to sit down or go to sleep to solve it. And the only way to solve the problem is to produce really affirmative work which can only come – I can't make it come. I can't conjure it up. I can only go to sleep and hope it happens... You have to digest it and if you digest you can contribute.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Art Talk, conversations with 15 woman artists', (1975), p. 15

Hope, Way, Feeling, Understanding

“Because men complained less, we made the false assumption that the complaints women experienced were only women’s complaints and, therefore, only women’s problems. Which created the rationale for women’s problems to be solved – or at least addressed – by public policy.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Women, Men, Falseness

“The solution to all the problems of daily life is to cherish others.”

Kelsang Gyatso (1931) Tibetan writer and lama

Transform Your Life: A Blissful Journey (2001)

Life

“Dear Reichsführer, among 10's of millions of Jews in Europe, there are, I figure, at least 2-3 millions of men and women who are fit enough to work. Considering the extraordinary difficulties the labor problem presents us with, I hold the view that those 2-3 millions should be specially selected and preserved. This can however only be done if at the same time they are rendered incapable to propagate. About a year ago I reported to you that agents of mine have completed the experiments necessary for this purpose. I would like to recall these facts once more. Sterilization, as normally performed on persons with hereditary diseases is here out of the question, because it takes too long and is too expensive. Castration by X-ray however is not only relatively cheap, but can also be performed on many thousands in the shortest time. I think that at this time it is already irrelevant whether the people in question become aware of having been castrated after some weeks or months, once they feel the effects. Should you, Reichsführer, decide to choose this way in the interest of the preservation of labor, then Reichsleiter Bouhler would be prepared to place all physicians and other personnel needed for this work at your disposal. Likewise he requested me to inform you that then I would have to order the apparatus so urgently needed with the greatest speed. Heil Hitler! Yours, Viktor Brack.”

Viktor Brack (1904–1948) SS officer

Letter written to Heinrich Himmler (23 June 1942).

Women, Men, People, Disease

“Now of course, the idealistic slogans are still needed for the media, for a lot of scholarship, for the schools, and so on. But, where the serious people are, the problem is that we have to maintain this disparity, and obviously it's gotta be maintained by force. So none of the idealistic slogans at home. So when you're setting up death squads in El Salvador under the Alliance for Progress, you're not hampered by these idealistic slogans. That's for the masses, for us. Well, given this kind of thinking, it's not too surprising that President Kennedy should say, with regard to El Salvador after supporting a military coup there, that "Governments of the civil-military type of El Salvador are the most effective in containing communist penetration in Latin America." This at the time when he organized the basic framework for the death squads that have been torturing and murdering ever since, and which we attribute to some kind of extreme right-wingers who somehow we can't get under control.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Reflecting on George Kennan's Memo PPS23.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s, Talk at University of California, Berkeley, 1984

Death, People, School, Home

““Are you all right, sir?” asked Hezekiah.
“Just fighting over old battles in my mind,” said John. “It’s the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I’m the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays.””

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Heartfire (1998), Chapter 11.

Age, Fight

“The problem of the biquadratic equation was laid prominently before Italian mathematicians by Zuanne de Tonini da Coi, who in 1540 proposed the problem, "Divide 10 parts into three parts such that they shall be continued in proportion and that the product of the first two shall be 6." He gave this to Cardan with the statement that it could not be solved, but Cardan denied the assertion, although himself unable to solve it. He gave it to Ferrari, his pupil, and the latter, although then a mere youth, succeeded where the master had failed. …This method soon became known to algebraists through Cardan's Ars Magna, and in 1567 we find it used by Nicolas Petri”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

of Deventer
Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, pp.467-468

Youth, Parting

“You know what your problem is, Hallie?' 'I have just one problem?”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

“My loving children, my children who were created with God's beauty, my wise children, whatever difficulty you may have, do not ever leave His charge. Just as the prophets of God kept their faith firm and were tolerant in spite of the problems they had, no matter what difficulties you may experience, be tolerant, be forbearant and embrace all living things as your own life.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

The Tree That Fell To The West: Autobiography of a Sufi (2003)

Love, Life, God, Children

“Philosophy is any culture’s pole of maximum abstraction, or intrinsically experimental intelligence, expressing the liberation of cognitive capabilities from immediate practical application, and their testing against ‘ultimate’ problems at the horizon of understanding.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"What is Philosophy? (Part 1)" http://www.xenosystems.net/what-is-philosophy/ (2013)

Intelligence, Understanding

“This is not to underestimate the historical obstacles to the development of democratic institutions and a democratic culture. Such problems nearly destroyed our country – and that should encourage a spirit of humility and a patience with others. Freedom is not merely a political menu option, or a foreign policy fad; it should be the defining commitment of our country, and the hope of the world. That appeal is proved not just by the content of people’s hopes, but a noteworthy hypocrisy: No democracy pretends to be a tyranny. Most tyrannies pretend they are democracies. Democracy remains the definition of political legitimacy. That has not changed, and that will not change.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2010s, 2017, Speech at "Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In the World" event (2017)

People, World, Hope, Democracy

“Interviewer: You once said you had a drug problem…
Lily: Yeah, I still do. It's so hard to find good grass these days.”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

Contributions of Jane Wagner

Grass

“There are people who say "I'll never need this math, these trig identities from 10th grade or 11th grade," or maybe you never learned them. Here's the catch: whether or not you ever again use the math that you learned in school, the act of having learned the math established a wiring in your brain that didn't exist before and it's the wiring in your brain that makes you the problem solver.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Why would-be engineers end up as English majors, May 21, 2011 http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/17/education.stem.graduation/index.html, 2010s

People, School, Learning

“God is still around. One day, you're going to need him. The problems of life will begin to overwhelm you; disappointments will begin to beat upon the door of your life like a tidal wave. And if you don't have a deep and patient faith, you aren't going to be able to make it. I know this from my own experience.”

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

1960s, Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool (1967)

Life, God, Faith, Disappointment

“The Goldberg Variations have always enjoyed a special status, with pianists regarding them as a touchstone of their technical and interpretative powers. At stake are the ability to light up the work from within, a tightrope walk that at the same time describes a vast circle, starting out and returning to a state of apotheotic stillness, the ability to find one’s bearings within a particular concentration of inner and outer complexity, an inner and outer coherence and homogeneity that are all-embracing, the ability, finally, to produce an explosion of inner cells by reduced means and, hence, a particular sensitivity, sinewy tension, and color. The performer must play a game with particular devices, finding solutions to the problems posed by the work not in octave doublings and other playful expedients but in a tightly structured inner rigor and order. What is demanded is a particular form of internalization, of inner and outer lyricism. It is this that makes the Goldberg Variations so unique - and so demanding.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Color, Game, Light, Time

“We can have think tanks on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to start to explore problems that still exist in the political area.”

Lien Fang Yu (1943) wife of Lien Chan

Lien Fang Yu (2013) cited in " KMT's Lien Chan visits Beijing's Space City https://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/china-taiwan-relations/2013/02/28/371610/KMTs-Lien.htm" on The China Post, 28 February 2013

Thinking

“There can be no justification to admit, in any way, the use of armed forced to intervene in the internal affairs of a WTO [Warsaw Treaty Organization] member country. The solving of domestic problems belongs exclusively to the Party and people of each country and any kind of interference can only do harm to the cause of socialism, friendship and collaboration among the socialist countries.”

Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989) General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party

Commencement address at the Romanian Military Academy (14 August 1968), quoted in The Prague Spring (2010) by M. Mark Stolarik

Friendship, People, Way, Country

“Intelligence has two parts, which we shall call the epistemological and the heuristic. The epistemological part is the representation of the world in such a form that the solution of problems follows from the facts expressed in the representation. The heuristic part is the mechanism that on the basis of the information solves the problem and decides what to do.
[…]
The right way to think about the general problems of metaphysics and epistemology is not to attempt to clear one's own mind of all knowledge and start with 'Cogito ergo sum' and build up from there. Instead, we propose to use all of our knowledge to construct a computer program that knows. The correctness of our philosophical system will be tested by numerous comparisons between the beliefs of the program and our own observations and knowledge.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

John McCarthy and Patrick J. Hayes. " Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcchay69.html", Sect. 2.1, Machine Intelligence 4, ed. Donald Michie (Elsevier, 1969), p. 463 ff., ISBN 0444197443 1960s

World, Way, Intelligence, Knowledge

“The claim by the IPCC that an imposed climate forcing (such as added atmospheric concentrations of CO2) can work through the parameterizations involved in the atmospheric, land, ocean and continental ice sheet components of the climate model to create skillful global and regional forecasts decades from now is a remarkable statement. That the IPCC states that this is a ‘much more easily solved problem than forecasting weather patterns just weeks from now’ is clearly a ridiculous scientific claim.”

Roger A. Pielke (1946) American meteorologist

"A Short Summary of Why Skillful Climate Prediction Is Much More Difficult than Skillful Weather Prediction," Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog (2007-05-23) http://climatesci.org/2007/05/23/a-short-summary-of-why-skillful-climate-prediction-is-much-more-difficult-than-skillful-weather-prediction/

Weather

“Although the problem of transmuting chemical elements into each other is much older than a satisfactory definition of the very concept of chemical element, it is well known that the first and most important step towards its solution was made only nineteen years ago by the late Lord Rutherford, who started the method of the nuclear bombardments.”

Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) Italian physicist

Nobel lecture (12 December 1938)

“Francis Bacon, who died in the seventeenth century, argued strongly that philosophy and theology should be kept separate, and that we should concentrate our studies on the local problems and the interconnections between material and efficient causes. Final-cause analysis was just a distraction: ‘Inquiry into final causes is sterile, and, like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.”

Stephen Baxter (1957) author

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 5, “The Earth’s blood is the veins of its waters” (p. 43)

God, Study

“It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (1969), p. 72.

Fear, Religion, Question, Parting

“The problem is not merely that of the transformation of Christianity into a state religion but of the diffusion of this faith that has stopped being a faith and has become a collective ideology, a kind of manifestation of thought that collects all the commonplaces, the legends, the miracles, the “prophecies,” the apocalypses, the thaumaturgies, and formulates for the people a facile, moralistic, and constructive set of beliefs.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 40

People, Faith, Religion

“In 1949, I ceased figurative painting and began works that were object oriented. The drawings from plant life seem to be a bridge to the way of seeing that brought about the paintings in 1949 that are the basis for all my later work. After arriving in Paris in 1948, I realized that figurative painting and also abstract painting (though my knowledge of the latter was very limited) as I had known in the 20th century no longer interested me as a solution to my own problems. I wanted to give up easel painting which I felt was too personal.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Source: 1969 - 1980, In: "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper," 1987, p. 9 : 'Notes from 1969'

Life, Way, Knowledge, Drawing

“"I think that is a big problem with a lot of Christians," Paul begins. "We want to feel special. And there are times when it does, you know. But not all the time. Sometimes life just feels like life. We have to put our faith in God.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Life, God, Faith, Feeling

“The list of characteristics of the good life suggested by Lord Skidelsky include neither work nor politics and that indicates that there is a problem with understanding power. Part of a good life is not to be dominated by the rich and the powerful and that can only be done through asserting the necessity of recognising labour as a value so that the people who do it are treated humanely and that involves the other thing that defines human beings, they can get together and change things through the power of association. Politics is part of the good life too although I can tell you it doesn’t always feel that way.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Blue Labour, Work As Value http://www.bluelabour.org/2013/10/31/work-as-a-value/

Life, People, Way, Feeling

“Jim Crow is old. That's not who I'm mindful of today. The problem is that Jim Crow has sons. The one we've got to battle is James Crow Jr., Esq. He's a little more educated. He's a little slicker. He's a little more polished, but the results are the same.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

Remarks at the funeral of Rosa Parks (3 November 2005).[citation needed]

Education

“Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining its claims to legitimacy, by discovering a victim for every form of success. The striving for equality is, in other words, based in ressentiment in Nietzsche’s sense, the state of mind that Max Scheler identified as the principal motive behind the socialist orthodoxy of his day. It is one of the major problems of modern politics, which no classical liberal could possibly solve, how to govern a society in which resentment has acquired the kind of privileged social, intellectual, and political position that we witness today.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

Hostility, Way, Motivation, Sense

“I was dealing with a political story where much of the action took place on the floor of the U. S. Senate, and one of the edicts that came down from the Mt. Sinai of advertisers row was that at no time in a political drama must a speech or a character be equated with an existing political party or current political problems. So several million viewers were treated to an incredible display of senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics, saying not a single thing germaine to the current political scene.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Rod Serling on Arena, American Masters.
Other

Time

“Theory should be ever more demanding of our empirical resources. Simultaneously, data should be ever more demanding of the empirical relevance of theory and of the theorist's expertise in working imaginatively on problems of the world, rather than on stylized problems of the imagination.”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

Source: "Theory, experiment and economics," 1989, p. 168.

World, Imagination

“I'm not anti-Muslim, I'm not anti-immigration; I'm saying we've got big problems in our cities. It's not very smart to make the problem bigger by letting in millions more immigrants from rural Muslim cultures that don't assimilate.”

Pim Fortuyn (1948–2002) Dutch politician

"Holland's high-camp hero of new politics" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/netherlands/1393177/Hollands-high-camp-hero-of-new-politics.html, The Telegraph (4 May 2002).

“I rarely speak about God. To God yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But open discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

In a 1978 interview with John S. Friedman, published in The Paris Review 26 (Spring 1984); and in Elie Wiesel : Conversations (2002) edited by Robert Franciosi, p. 87

God, Silence

“As regards George Bush, I've met him thirteen times. We know each other from way back. He was in charge of the CIA and knew Zaire's problems backwards. He received me at his home in Maine with his mother, wife and children and grandchildren. I met him again recently at the funeral of Emperor Hirohito. He is an intelligent, open and sensitive man, with strong convictions.”

Mobutu Sésé Seko (1930–1997) President of Zaïre

Mobutu, on his friendship with George H. W. Bush. Meredith, p. 308

Children, Way, Home, Intelligence

“After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it has become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expectations are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its excessive popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they desist where it does not apply or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part of our intellectual armory. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had. The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of production does not explain everything, not even everything human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise.”

Clifford Geertz book The Interpretation of Cultures

Source: The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), p. 3-4

Truth, Law, Motivation, Idea

“One of the greatest problems today is about the people who would rather be right than be President. I have a solution for that. You can be Left and President: that way you can eat your cake and halve it too. Or you can stay in the middle of the road and get run over.”

Gracie Allen (1902–1964) American actress and comedienne

Source: How to Become President (1940), Ch. 1 : Government jobs pay big money

People, Way

“One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 1

Time, Reading

“If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

As quoted in Baseball's Greatest Quotes (1992) by Paul Dickson; cited in "Game Day in the Majors" at the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/robinson/jrgmday.html

“The failure of the social sciences to think through and to integrate their several responsibilities for the common problem of relating the analysis of parts to the analysis of the whole constitutes one of the major lags crippling their utility as human tools of knowledge.”

Robert Staughton Lynd (1892–1970) American sociologist

R.S. Lynd (1939) Knowledge of What? p. 15, cited in Karl William Kapp (1976), The nature and significance of institutional economics http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1976.tb01971.x/abstract. in: Kyklos, Vol 29/2, Jan 1976, p. 209

Failure, Knowledge, Thinking, Science

“Only a few years ago one could observe, at least among German psychologists, a quite pessimistic mood. After the initial successes of experimental psychology in its early stages, it seemed to become clearer and clearer that it would remain impossible for experimental method to press on beyond the psychology of perception and memory to such vital problems as those with which psychoanalysis was concerned. Weighty 'philosophical' and 'methodological' considerations seemed to make such an undertaking a priori impossible.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. v.

Mood, Memory, Success

“One friend, one person who is truly understanding, who takes the trouble to listen to us as we consider our problem, can change our whole outlook on the world.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Elton Mayo, cited in: Edward William Bok (1947), Ladies' Home Journal.Vol. 64, p. 246

World, Understanding, Change, Personality

“When I arrived to take command of the war in June 2009, in addition to the rising violence and sense of insecurity, I found a creeping, fatalistic pessimism, as though the fight were over, the effort failed. Some pointed to history and declared the country intractable. Few countries or NGOs were leaving, but many wanted to. There was growing unease with the viability of the mission. Indeed, in those early days, as I assessed the war, I wasn't sure the mission could be done. Although I'd known it would be difficult, the situation was even worse than I'd anticipated. I was further cautioned by the fact that I would be the twelfth commander to lead the NATO effort in Afghanistan, the latest in a succession of experienced professionals. Any solution would not only be a military one; it had to encompass much more. But as we looked closer and considered a range of strategies, I concluded that it was possible. The intimidating specter of Afghanistan as an impossible challenge belied the reality. The obstacles were numerous, but the accrued problems were not insoluble, just incredibly difficult.”

Stanley A. McChrystal (1954) American general

Source: My Share Of The Task (2013), p. 277-278

War, History, Reality, Sense

“The striking parallel between the economic models that are currently under discussion and some engineering systems suggests the hope that in some way the rapid progress in the development of the theory and practice of automatic control in the world of engineering may contribute to the solution of the economic problems.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. 1

World, Hope, Way

“There isn't a single person in Israel who wants to destroy or harm Egypt. In contrast, there's a whole country that openly wants to destroy Israel, and that's Iran. That is the difference between ours and Egypt's security problems. Egypt is not threatened by anyone. Israel is threatened by the second circle. Israel has never been and will never be a danger to Egypt. […] Israel is not threatening Iran, Iran is threatening Israel. The situation is not similar.”

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

ArabYnet online chat (6 February 2006) http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3041619,00.html

Personality, Country

“Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (the whole peninsula of Indochina) present a puzzling picture, enigmatic to most foreigners and especially so to Americans. The very name Vietnam evokes deep emotions and bitter memories in our countrymen. But the tendency to blame Vietnam for our domestic ills has no foundation in fact. The problems of urban decay, racial disharmony, drug abuse, and all the rest were bound to plague us, whether or not we became involved in Vietnam. Indeed, one can argue that in the 1950s, well before we became heavily involved in Vietnam, a sense of national direction and purpose appeared to be lacking in the United States. This book looks at the Vietnam War from the perspective of a senior military professional who held important positions of responsibility during the conflict. Among other things, I will seek to bring out the lessons we have learned or should have learned from the war, and their implications for the future. The severe impact of the war on our armed forces and its almost disastrous effect on the U. S. Army will receive special treatment.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. vii-viii

War, Books, Sense, Learning

“The thing about Wagner is we’re always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites … There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can’t represent both views on stage at once.”

Daniel Barenboim (1942) Israeli Argentine-born pianist and conductor

Q&A: Daniel Barenboim http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/10044601/Proms-2013-Daniel-Barenboim-interview.html, 2 November 2012.

Way

“We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, The Assault on Reason (2007)

People, Intelligence, Knowledge

“MacKinnon is a totalitarian. She wants a risk-free, state controlled world. She believes rules and regulations will solve every human ill and straighten out all those irksome problems between the sexes that have been going on for five thousand years. As a lawyer, MacKinnon is deft and pragmatic. But as a political thinker, cultural historian or commentator on sex, she is incompetent. For a woman of her obvious intelligence, her frame of reference is shockingly small.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 108

World, Sex, Intelligence

“Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"Mean People Fail", November 2014

Hate, People, Stupidity, Idea

“NFL players are supposedly protesting police violence against blacks in America, but the facts don’t support their misguided and Quixotic quest — actually, the opposite is the case. I would love to see them protesting — actually going into the communities where they play, and confronting the problem of gang violence that has caused this uptick.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, I'd like to see MORE football player protests — NOT less (27 September 2017)

Love, Communication, Support

“I am guiding you to seek truth from the facts of the historical conditions of our society and to identify the problems. The correct solutions will come with the correct identification of the problems.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Source: Letter to his daughter (1978), p. 78

Truth

“Your system is not the most elementary, but it is one of the most elementary, and it is a way that the inner self acquaints itself with certain basic facts. It therefore provides itself with a large variety of environments in various reincarnations, with problems of various natures, and with diverse circumstances.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 472, Page 280
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 9

Way, Nature

“To uphold the world's words of the charter in the face of this challenge, every nation in this chamber has responsibilities. As sovereign states, we have an obligation to govern responsibly, and solve problems before they spill across borders. We have an obligation to prevent our territory from being used as a sanctuary for terrorism and proliferation and human trafficking and organized crime. We have an obligation to respect the rights and respond to the needs of our people.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

People, World

“[There is a] basic problem … of building a mathematical model of thought processes, and in particular of those aspects of thought which are concerned with information and decision processes. The perceptron is one type of model -- a set of memory devices connected in random fashion-- which has not yet achieved useful results but certainly seems to be a promising approach. The self-adaptive feedback control system which goes beyond the normal servo function of controlling its output, and in addition controls the parameters by which it controls its output is another which has already achieved pragmatic results in equipment control. It may be that the question of self-adaptation is a key to the whole question of how the human functions in a decisioning situation. For in many cases the ability of the human mind to adapt itself to a changing and complex environment is beyond our present aims in model construction.”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

p ix-x
Information and Decision Processes (1960)

Mathematics, Fashion, Question, Decision

“For the most part, these are not new lessons, but lessons learned in different circumstances and surroundings. The fact that they are not new is of course a lesson in itself — we must continually strive to benefit from past experiences and structure our management so that past related experience can be brought to bear on current problems.”

John H. Disher (1921–1988) American aeronautical engineer and NASA manager

"Skylab Lessons Learned" (22 September 1975) at NASA Office of Logic Design http://klabs.org/richcontent/Misc_Content/AGC_And_History/Skylab/Skylab_Disher.htm

Learning, Past, Parting

“Back then (in 1985) the issue of the day was nuclear testing, now we are faced with problems such as climate change, overfishing, deforestation, shipments of radioactive materials through Pacific waters and nuclear proliferation. We need to remain vigilant so that we won't become victims again.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Address to Greenpeace, Suva, 10 July 2005.

Water, Change

“My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure,” I was supposed to have said in my molecular biology days. (I believe I was sailing at the time.) I think that one should approach these problems at all levels, as was done in molecular biology. Classical genetics is, after all, a black-box subject. The important thing was to combine it with biochemistry. In nature hybrid species are usually sterile, but in science the reverse is often true. Hybrid subjects are often astonishingly fertile, whereas if a scientific discipline remains too pure it usually wilts.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

What Mad Pursuit (1988)

Understanding, Nature, Thinking, Study

“Even the humblest men have a strange reason behind greed. Every man thinks money solves problems - and every man thinks not just of himself, but his next three generations - there is a probability he will live to see those generations - and he wants to care for them in times of strife.”

Siddharth Katragadda (1972) Indian writer

page 73
Dark Rooms (2002)

Men, Money, Thinking, Time

“What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough – as they might do, for example, another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown – some one person will come forward and say, "Give me total power, and I will solve this problem." That is how the Roman republic fell…. That is how democracy dies. And if something is not done to improve the level of civic knowledge, that is what you should worry about at night.”

David Souter (1939) Judge of the United States of America

With Margaret Warner at ‘Constitutionally Speaking’ in Concord, N.H. on Sept. 14, 2012: David Souter Gets Rock Star Welcome, Offers Constitution Day Warning &#124; PBS NewsHour http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/conversation-justice-david-souter/

People, Democracy, Knowledge, Personality

“I think it is not a coincidence that people who are atheists or evolutionists frequently have a wicked lifestyle or at least a lifestyle against the plain teachings of the Bible. Therefore, evolution is an easy way for them to justify their lifestyle. The problem is one of philosophy, not one of science. They don’t want there to be a God because of their wicked lifestyle. That is their real problem.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

God, People, Way, Thinking

“I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, 'Horrible three-way civil war?”

Molly Ivins (1944–2007) American journalist

Appalling silence http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/1/2003/20, January 16, 2003. Retrieved February 1, 2007.

God, War, Way, Forgiveness

“I think you just have to be comfortable in your skin. But, I'm a nudist in any case. I've never had a problem with my body and I don't really care what people think, so I have bottoms on and pretty much go topless, or also when we shoot - we did a lot of nude pictures today, too - it doesn't bother me in the slightest.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Discussing her ease with nude photo shoots, as quoted in Allure Magazine, May 2012

People, Thinking

“The notion of thumos tells us further that politics is about protection, not primarily about gain. The reason you assert in your defense protects you and people like you that are included in the argument you advance. In an assertive, political argument you assume that you are perfectly OK. You are not apologizing for your self or your soul. The problem lies in things outside you, accidents that have happened or might happen, or the faults of others besides yourself. You therefore want to be protected in your self-satisfaction.”

Harvey Mansfield (1932) Author, professor

Source: How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

People, Soul

“For Luther judgment was a real problem, because everyone gets off on judgment, according to Luther. In fact you have to put a restraining order, a gag order, on those, and that's everyone, who want to judge everyone and everything at top speed. So that when you have a rush to judgment, … it's also the rush of judgment. … I'd like us to consider the libidinal investment that Luther sees in judgment and legislates against.”

Avital Ronell (1952) American philosopher

"Kafka's Before the Law: The Law of the Father http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifz0m9PBD9E" (2011) 13:10

Speed

“Back at the Philadelphia Worldcon (which seems a million years ago), I announced the famous five-year gap: I was going to skip five years forward in the story, to allow some of the younger characters to grow older and the dragons to grow larger, and for various other reasons. I started out writing on that basis in 2001, and it worked very well for some of my myriad characters but not at all for others, because you can't just have nothing happen for five years. If things do happen you have to write flashbacks, a lot of internal retrospection, and that's not a good way to present it. I struggled with that essentially wrong direction for about a year before finally throwing it out, realizing there had to be another interim book. That became A Feast for Crows, where the action is pretty much continuous from the preceding book. Even so, that only accounts for one year. Why the four after that? I don't know, except that this was a very tough book to write -- and it remains so, because I've only finished half. Going in, I thought I could do something about the length of the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, roughly 1,200 pages in manuscript. But I passed that and there was a lot more to write. Then I passed the length of the third book, A Storm of Swords, which was something like 1,500 pages in manuscript and gave my publishers all around the world lots of production problems. I didn't really want to make any cuts because I had this huge story to tell. We started thinking about dividing it in two and doing it as A Feast for Crows, Parts One and Two, but the more I thought about that the more I really did not like it. Part One would have had no resolution whatsoever for 18 viewpoint characters and their 18 stories. Of course this is all part of a huge megaseries so there is not a complete resolution yet in any of the volumes, but I try to give a certain sense of completion at the end of each volume -- that a movement of the symphony has wrapped up, so to speak.”

George Raymond Richard Martin (1948) American writer, screenwriter and television producer

Interview with Locus magazine (November 2005)

Books, World, Way, Thinking

“One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche’s work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values.”

Gilles Deleuze book Nietzsche and Philosophy

Source: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), p. 1

“For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the Salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life — or death — that scientists know as ecology.”

Rachel Carson book Silent Spring

Source: Silent Spring (1962), p. 189

Life, Death, World, Food

“It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present, and go to that past to seek large views of what is of lasting importance to the human race.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 31

Study, Past

“I don't have a name - my family doesn't have a name. The law that Mr. Papandreou passed basically says that he considers that I am not Greek and that my family was Greek only so long as we were exercising the responsibilities of sovereign, and I had to go out and acquire a name. The problem is that my family originates from Denmark, and the Danish royal family haven't got a surname.”

Constantine II of Greece (1940–2023) former King of Greece

"King Without a Country," Vanity Fair (July 1995)

Family, Law, Exercises

“He had a distinct problem imagining minds working differently from his own.”

Glen Cook book She Is the Darkness

Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 12 (p. 314)

Imagination

“Find a fraction which, multiplied by itself, shall give 6, or… find the square root of 6. This can be shown to be an impossible problem; for it can be shown that no fraction whatsoever multiplied by itself, can give a whole number, unless it be itself a whole number disguised in a fractional form, such as 4⁄2 or 21⁄3. To this problem, then, there is but one answer, that it is self-contradictory. But if we propose the following problem,—to find a fraction which, multiplied by itself, shall give a product lying between 6 and 6 + a; we find that this problem admits of solution in every case. It therefore admits of solution however small a may be… as small as you please.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

...there is such a thing as the square root of 6, and it is denoted by √6. But we do not say we actually find this, but that we approximate to it.
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Lying