Quotes about problems
page 33

“What is the whole problem as it effects the working classes of this country? It is all contained in one word—employment. Cheap food, a higher standard of living, higher wages—all these things, important as they are, are contained in the word employment. If this policy will give you more employment, all the others would be added unto you. If you lose your employment, all the others put together will not compensate you for that loss.”

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

Speech in Liverpool (27 October 1903), quoted in The Times (28 October 1903), p. 6.
1900s

Food, Loss, Country

“The perception of you is one thing. You're this famous person, and now you're this famous person who's a bombshell. So all of a sudden, that's the only way I get jobs. So I have to become the part. And they're telling you this is the way to do it. One director actually said to me, "I want to hear you talk dumber and faster." … He thought it was funny for the girl to be dumb. I finally said, "That's it, man — I can't do this anymore." I'd go to meetings during the filming of a movie, and the directors would ask, "What do you think of the script?" I'd say, "It has a lot of problems." They were confused. That's not what they wanted from me. … So I was not very popular. At one point I said, "I don't want to do this — it's not my dream." And so I said, "I'm going to start a company. I am going to create projects for me. I'm going to create projects for other Latin women."”

Salma Hayek (1966) Mexican-American actress and producer

Because I got to a point where I was whining all the time. I was miserable. I was desperate
O interview (2003)

Women, Dreams, Way, Girl

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

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter II, "Religion", pp. 143-4.

Mathematics

“So intimate is the union between Mathematics and Physics that probably by far the larger part of the accessions to our mathematical knowledge have been obtained by the efforts of mathematicians to solve the problems set to them by experiment, and to create for each successive class phenomena a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature. Sometimes the mathematician has been before the physicist, and it has happened that when some great and new question has occurred to the experimentalist or the observer, he has found in the armory of the mathematician the weapons which he needed ready made to his hand. But much oftener, the questions proposed by the physicist have transcended the utmost powers of the mathematics of the time, and a fresh mathematical creation has been needed to supply the logical instrument requisite to interpret the new enigma.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

As quoted in The Century: A Popular Quarterly (1874) ed. Richard Watson Gilder, Vol. 7, pp. 508-509, https://books.google.com/books?id=ceYGAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA508 "Relations of Mathematics to Physics". Earlier quote without citation in Nature, Volume 8 (1873), page 450. Also quoted partially in Michael Grossman and Robert Katz, Calculus http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=216746186|Non-Newtonian (1972) p. iv. ISBN 0912938013.

Mathematics, Question, Nature, Knowledge

“You must pursue facts for their own sake, but penetrated with a vivid sense of the problems of your own time. This is not a principle of perversion, but a principle of selection. You must have some principle of selection, and you could not have a better one than to pay special attention to the history of the social problems which are agitating the world now, for you may be sure that they are problems not of temporary but of lasting importance.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 32

World, History, Sense, Time

“He is a cool cat. I was surprised when he had a heart problem…People think my film with Mani, ‘Nayakan’, is my best work. To an extent it's true. But I'd like to think my best is yet to come.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

About Mani Ratnam, his son-in-law
Aamir's choice of films makes Kamal Haasan happy

People, Cats, Thinking, Heart

“That’s the problem, we do get used to things.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 226.

“I did all the problems a little different from the rest of the class.”

Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (1902–1978) Dutch physicist

in an interview http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4640_1.html by Thomas Samuel Kuhn on December 5, 1963, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA

“I have been reading about the problems of youth. You know, with all the criticism that was levelled at von Schirach and his Hitler Jugend, it is forgotten that he did a fantastic thing with Germany's young. He kept them busy, he kept them out of trouble. In those years we did not have to concern ourselves with the worry of youths taking drugs, getting involved in crime, and sexual permissiveness. We did not have burning of national flags and draft cards. We had a healthy youth with healthy minds, all pulling together to build a nation. That is what we need today. We need to get them back on the right track.”

Rudolf Hess (1894–1987) German Nazi leader

When his Prison Director replied with: "But surely, you were doing all this for a different purpose. You were building a super-race for war, for conquests. Today youth is rebelling because we made a mess of the world." Hess retorted: "Maybe, but they won't make a better world with drugs."
Prisoner #7: Rudolph Hess (1974)

Youth, Business, Reading

“In 1929 Oskar Klein stumbled into an apparent paradox when trying to describe the scattering of a relativistic electron by a square potential using Dirac’s wave equation. … In order to capture the essence of the problem without entering into unnecessary complication we will study Klein’s paradox in the context of the Klein– Gordon equation.”

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé Spanish physicist

Source: An Invitation to Quantum Field Theory (2012), Ch. 1 : Why Do We Need Quantum Field Theory After All?

Study

“A. D. Hall's (1962) classic account of the methodology was based on his experience with the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Hall sees systems as existing in hierarchies. In systems engineering, plans to achieve a general objective must similarly be arranged in a hierarchy, with the systems engineer ensuring the internal consistency and integration of the plans, The methodology itself ensures the optimization of the system of concern with respect to its objectives. This requires a number of steps, the most important being problem definition, choosing objectives, systems synthesis, systems analysis, systems selection, system development, and current engineering. With Hall, the system of concern is usually a physical entity.”

Mike Jackson (1951) systems scientist

Michael C. Jackson (1992) Systems Methodology for the Management Sciences. p. 74; About A.D. Hall (1962)

Optimism

“The materials presented in this book have been developed in industry for use in meeting a wide variety of practical industrial problems. They have been used in several factories both as the "plan of attack" for organizing new quality-control programs and as text material for in-service training courses.”

Armand V. Feigenbaum (1922–2014) American businessman

Source: Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration. 1951, p. vii-viii

Books, Training

“You can ask the question about these ancient topics, such as perfect numbers and amicable numbers… and ask, are these good problems… I'd like to give a small amount of evidence… that they are… [S]tudying them helped us develop all of elementary number theory and from elementary number theory we developed the rest of number theory, and also you can argue that from elementary number theory came algebra..”

Carl Pomerance (1944) American mathematician

"Paul Erdős and the Rise of Statistical Thinking in Elementary Number Theory" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cU0g9dI1S8&t=9m40s (July, 2013) Erdős Centennial Conference, Budapest.

Question, Help

“Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book I, Chapter 1, p. 44
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

“In my talks with the African Nationalist leaders…I regarded it as my duty to remove from their minds any idea or any hope they might have had that Rhodesia's constitutional problems were going to be solved by an assertion of military power on our part, whether for the purposes of suspending or amending the 1961 Constitution, of imposing majority rule tomorrow or any other time—or for that matter of dealing with the situation that would follow an illegal assertion of independence. To quote the words I used to them: If there are those who are thinking in terms of a thunderbolt hurtling from the sky and destroying their enemies, a thunderbolt in the shape of the Royal Air Force, let me say that thunderbolt will not be coming, and to continue in this delusion wastes valuable time, and misdirects valuable energies.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons (1 November 1965) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1965/nov/01/rhodesia. Rhodesia declared independence 10 days later. Prime Minister

Hope, Quotes, Idea, Thinking

“Finnish society could not serve as a blueprint for the United States. National differences matter. Ours is a society driven by money, blessed by huge private philanthropy, cursed by endemic corruption and saddled with deep mistrust of government and other public institutions. Finns have none of those attributes. Nor do they tune in to American individualism. Groupthink seems to be fine with most Finns; con-formity is the norm, risk-taking is avoided — a problem now, when entrepreneurs are so needed. I was bothered by a sense of entitlement among many Finns, especially younger people.”

Robert G. Kaiser (1943) American journalist

2000s, "Why can't we be more like Finland?" (2005)

Money, People, Sense

“When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. […] The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. […] The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after.”

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

You and Your Research (1986)

Way, Error, Tree, Study

“The leaders of the large firms dominated by the manufacturing conception saw the key problem as low prices. This meant that they were intent on controlling prices by cutting production. But once prices were stabilized, they were cautious about increasing production for fear that prices would again collapse. Since their competitors had roughly equal production capacities and costs, all would lose by too rapid an increase in production.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 117

Fear

“In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Some More -isms" (p. 32)
Modern Philosophy (1995)

“The foolish thing was trying to solve the problem all by myself. But the deeper I get tangled up in this mass of dreams and memories the more I realize that emotional problems can't be solved as intellectual problems are.”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon (1966)

Dreams, Memory

“Ten percent of all the boys in schools are now threatened or injured with a weapon at school. One out of ten. The number of students caught with a firearm increased 29 percent in one year. "Natural selection"? If the strongest survive, well then if that guy's bigger than me, I better bring a gun to even the odds. This evolution theory is not just dumb, folks, it's dangerous. It removes all morality. There's no such thing as right and wrong. Might becomes right. Textbooks say you're an animal and share a common heritage with earthworms. Could it possibly be that what we are teaching kids is causing this problem in our schools?”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

School, Guy, Boy, Nature

“Yet the ultimate problem is more fundamental. I have long believed that the death penalty is in all circumstances a barbaric and inhuman punishment that violates our Constitution. Even the most vile murderer does not release the state from its constitutional obligation to respect human dignity, for the state does not honor the victim by emulating the murderer who took his life. The fatal infirmity of capital punishment is that it treats members of the human race as non-humans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded.”

William J. Brennan (1906–1997) American judge

Writing in Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence (1997).

Life, Death, Penalty

“It is characteristic of the design of scientific research that exquisite attention is devoted to methodological problems that can be solved, while the pretense is made that the ones that cannot be solved are really nothing to worry about. On the one hand, biologists will apply the most critical and demanding canons of evidence in the design of measuring instruments or in the procedure for taking an unbiased samples of organisms to be tested, but when asked whether the conditions in the laboratory are likely to be relevant to the situation in nature, they will provide a hand-waving intuitive argument filled with unsubstantiated guesses and prejudices because, in the end, that is all they can do.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Sex, Lies, and Social Science (1995)

Nature

“I'm never uncomfortable being naked. I don't have a problem with my body.”

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

Interview with Billy Bush for Access Hollywood, 16 April 2009

“All of us are mere mortals and must consult. The spectacle of Parliament and the antics of our politicians serve only to distract us from the very real problems that we face as a nation.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

NAPF convention, 17 December 2005

“One of the problems that we have in the human rights community is that special interests often forget the interests of other victims, and there’s competition among victims expressions that are unnecessary.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

UN expert on democracy highlights importance of free expression, information http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=46355&Cr=information&Cr1=#.Um9rdr_3DjA. 2013

Communication, Forgetting

“The true line is not between “hard” natural science and “soft” social sciences, but between precise science limited to highly abstract and simple phenomena in the laboratory and inexact science and technology dealing with complex problems in the real world.”

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

Source: 1980s and later, Models of my life, 1991, p. 302.

World, Nature, Science

“It is sheer nonsense to expect that any human being has yet been able to attain such insight into the problems of society that he can really identify the central problems and determine how they should be solved. The systems in which we live are far too complicated as yet for our intellectual powers and technology to understand.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. x

Understanding

“…. most of our textbooks and commentaries on leadership and the mastery of the moral problem in battle are written by senior officers who are either wholly lacking in combat experience or have been for long periods so far removed from the reality of small arms action that they have come to forget what were once their most vital convictions and impressions.”

S.L.A. Marshall (1900–1977) United States Army general and Military historian

Author's note. p. 9-10.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

Reality, Forgetting

“Maybe it's the remnants of my religious upbringing, but I do try and insert a sense of social justice into the work … for instance, to me, Mansfield Park is a story about servitude and slavery. Other people may have a problem with that, but that's how I read the book and so that's how I shot the movie.”

Patricia Rozema (1958) Canadian film director

As quoted in Weird Sex and Snowshoes : And Other Canadian Film Phenomena (2001) by Katherine Monk, p. 150

People, Books, Justice, Sense

“When I was in high school, I ate the kind of stuff that the average, unhealthy American kid loves to eat. … The changes I've made are for future health as well as current physical performance and well-being. I'm no longer that kid who stuffed himself with whatever food came his way. With luck and a little education, I've made the necessary changes in time to avoid the health problems that a kid like that inevitably faces. Yes, deep down inside, that kid is still there, wanting to hang out with his pals at the nearest burger joint. But I can look forward as well as back. And what I'm looking forward to is the opportunity to take the road to wellness.”

Tony Gonzalez (1976) American football and basketball player

The All-Pro Diet: Lose Fat, Build Muscle, and Live Like a Champion (Rodale Books, 2009), Introduction https://books.google.it/books?id=wNrj-ITuL7gC&pg=PR11.

Love, Health, Education, School

“All experience has taught us that solving a complex problem uncovers hidden assumptions and ever more knowledge, trade-offs that we didn't anticipate but which can make the difference between meeting a deadline and going into research mode for a year, etc.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: is CLOS reall OO? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/917737b7cc8510e3?dmode=source&output=gplain (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Knowledge

“The attack on economics sprang rather from a dislike of the application of scientific methods to the investigation of social problems. The existence of a body of reasoning which prevented people from following their first impulsive reactions, and which compelled them to balance indirect effects, which could be seen only by exercising the intellect, against intense feeling caused by the direct observation of concrete suffering, then as now, occasioned intense resentment.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

"The Trend of Economic Thinking", lecture delivered at LSE on March 1, 1933, published in Economica (May 1933)
1920s–1930s

People, Feeling, Exercises, Suffering

“No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50 thousand years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward — and so will space.”

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

Source: 1962, Rice University speech

History, Star, Light, Learning

“(The author has been writing of people striving for “this fleeting sense of being part of something greater and more unknowable than themselves”)
And entitlement strips this away from us. The gravity of entitlement sucks all attention inward, toward ourselves, causing us to feel as though we are at the center of all of the problems in the universe, that we are the one suffering all of the injustices, that we are the one who deserves greatness over all others.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 9, “...And Then You Die” (p. 206)

People, Feeling, Sense, Suffering

“The general aim of my book has been but to point out a way in which a solution of these numerous problems (behavior and development) can be attained. The nature of mental development as it has been revealed to us is not the bringing together of separate elements, but the arousal and perfection of more and more complicated configurations in which both the phenomena of consciousness and the functions of the organism go hand in hand.”

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Kurt Koffka. Growth of the Mind. An Introduction to Child Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924. p. 388 (2013 edition)

Books, Way, Behavior, Nature

“The mystery, the romance, the coincidence of real life far transcends the mystery and the romance and the coincidence of fiction. I would like at the beginning of my remarks to remind hon. Members of something that has always struck me as one of the strangest and most romantic coincidences that have entered into our political life. Far away in time, in the dawn of history, the greatest race of the many races then emerging from prehistoric mists was the great Aryan race. When that race left the country which it occupied in the western part of Central Asia, one great branch moved west, and in the course of their wanderings they founded the cities of Athens and Sparta; they founded Rome; they made Europe, and in the veins of the principal nations of Europe flows the blood of their Aryan forefathers. The speech of the Aryans which they brought with them has spread through out Europe. It has spread to America. It has spread to the Dominions beyond the seas. At the same time, one branch went south, and they crossed the Himalayas. They went into the Punjab and they spread through India, and, as an historic fact, ages ago, there stood side by side in their ancestral land the ancestors of the English people and the ancestors of the Rajputs and of the Brahmins. And now, after aeons have passed, the children of the remotest generations from that ancestry have been brought together by the inscrutable decree of Providence to set themselves to solve the most difficult, the most complicated political problem that has ever been set to any people of the world.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1929/nov/07/india in the House of Commons (7 November 1929). 1929

Life, Children, People, Age

“All OO languages show some tendency to suck programmers into the trap of excessive layering. Object frameworks and object browsers are not a substitute for good design or documentation, but they often get treated as one. Too many layers destroy transparency: It becomes too difficult to see down through them and mentally model what the code is actually doing. The Rules of Simplicity, Clarity, and Transparency get violated wholesale, and the result is code full of obscure bugs and continuing maintenance problems.”

Eric S. Raymond book The Art of Unix Programming

The Art of Unix Programming: Unix and Object-Oriented Languages, Eric S. Raymond, 2003, 2014-08-06 http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/unix_and_oo.html,

“Violent crime is a solved problem - all they have to do is repeal the laws that keep those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women from arming themselves, and violent crime evaporates like dry ice on a hot summer day.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Merchants of Fear".

Women, Men, Law, Intelligence

“We must be very careful when we speak of exercising "leadership" in Asia. We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have answers to the problems, which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples. Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction…
In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to 'be liked' or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague — and for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

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

VII. Far East
Memo PPS23 (1948)

People, World, Exercises, Thinking

“You will find an allusion to some mysterious cause for a phenomenon in Stocks. It is surmised that the deferred debt is to be taken up at the next session, and some anticipated provision made for it. This may either be an invention of those who wish to sell, or it may be a reality imparted in confidence to the purchasers or smelt out by their sagacity. I have had a hint that something is intended and has dropt from 1 which has led to this speculation. I am unwilling to credit the fact, untill I have further evidence, which I am in a train of getting if it exists. It is said that packet boats & expresses are again sent from this place to the Southern States, to buy up the paper of all sorts which has risen in the market here. These & other abuses make it a problem whether the system of the old paper under a bad Government, or of the new under a good one, be chargeable with the greater substantial injustice. The true difference seems to be that by the former the few were the victims to the many; by the latter the many to the few. It seems agreed on all hands now that the bank is a certain & gratuitous augmentation of the capitals subscribed, in a proportion of not less than 40 or 50 [per cent] and if the deferred debt should be immediately provided for in favor of the purchasers of it in the deferred shape, & since the unanimous vote that no change [should] be made in the funding system, my imagination will not attempt to set bounds to the daring depravity of the times. The stock-jobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool & its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, & overawing it by clamours & combinations. Nothing new from abroad. I shall not be in [Philadelphia] till the close of the Week.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (8 August 1791)
1790s

Confidence, Imagination, Reality, Change

“Politics have always covered two distinct kinds of problems: problems of administrative routine, and those that may be called 'questions of the moment.'… A question of the moment is, indeed, a substitute for some notion, such as the idea of God, or hereditary monarchy, or national glory, that has hitherto acted as a symbol of human co-ordination. It provides no new positive certainty to replace the discredited certainty, but is what the name implies: the raising of a question which the old certainty no longer answers.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from "Poetry and Politics", reprinted in The Common Asphodel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949)

God, Idea, Question

“[Glossary of Broken Dreams] was born out of the frustration that debate culture (not only) on digital platforms has become radically fragmented and fractalized, making it hard to call it discourse. It's a Tower of Babel-like context confusion that pleases me as a nerd, but as a political being who wants society to progress, it doesn't please me at all. […] I just thought it was time for something like a political spring cleaning of concepts. Because picking up the broom and taking a chance to get rid of stuff is the only way to prevent us all from becoming social liberal hoarders. One of my examples is the concept of privacy that, at the moment, everyone coddles like a puppy. Let me say this, as a good old Neo-leftist, I'm having problems with the conservative and deeply bourgeois can of worms that the privacy debate entails. I think it's time to change our thought patterns here. Instead of trying to find ways to defend our privacy come hell or high water, we should ask ourselves why privacy is such a major concern for us? Is what we're trying to achieve here just reformist symptom-control rather than a solution to the underlying problems?”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

from an interview about Grenzfurthner's film Glossary of Broken Dreams (via Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2018/05/24/at-the-golden-calf-slaughterho.html)

Dreams, Way, Spring, Hell

“There is no national problem in the world today, which cannot be resolved by reason alone.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Dianetics : The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)

World

“As I think back on those years, I find it interesting that many people seemed to have trouble with their identities as black men. Having had to accept my blackness in the caldron of ridicule from some of my black schoolmates under segregation, then immediately thereafter remain secure in that identity during my years at all-white seminary, I had few racial identity problems. I knew who I was and needed no gimmicks to affirm my identity. Nor, might I add, do I need anyone telling me who I am today. This is especially true of the psycho-silliness about forgetting my roots or self-hatred. If anything, this shows that some people have too much time on their hands.”

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

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

Men, People, Thinking, Time

“The ribosome does amazing chemistry, but I’m not a chemist…I’ve just learnt enough to work on my problem.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Appreciate science for what it is: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

“It’s the problem with politics. Your enemies are often your allies. And vice versa.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 19 (p. 194)

“It was a biologist — Ludwig von Bertalanffy — who long ago perceived the essential unity of system concepts and techniques in the various fields of science and who in writings and lectures sought to attain recognition for “general systems theory” as a distinct scientific discipline. It is pertinent to note, however, that the work of Bertalannfy and his school, being motivated primarily by problems arising in the study of biological systems, is much more empirical and qualitative in spirit than the work of those system theorists who received their training in exact sciences.
In fact, there is a fairly wide gap between what might be regarded as “animate” system theorists and “inanimate” system theorists at the present time, and it is not at all certain that this gap will be narrowed, much less closed, in the near future.
There are some who feel this gap reflects the fundamental inadequacy of the conventional mathematics—the mathematics of precisely defined points, functions, sets, probability measures, etc.—for coping with the analysis of biological systems, and that to deal effectively with such systems, we need a radically different kind of mathematics, the mathematics of fuzzy or cloudy quantities which are not describable in terms of probability distributions. Indeed the need for such mathematics is becoming increasingly apparent even in the realms of inanimate systems”

Lotfi A. Zadeh (1921–2017) Electrical engineer and computer scientist

Zadeh (1962) "From circuit theory to system theory", Proceedings I.R.E., 1962, 50, 856-865. cited in: Brian R. Gaines (1979) " General systems research: quo vadis? http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~gaines/reports/SYS/GS79/GS79.pdf", General Systems, Vol. 24 (1979), p. 12 1960s

School, Feeling, Mathematics, Motivation

“The risk of making a decision that's wrong is so enormous that sometimes it just crushes people so that they can't make any decision at all because they're afraid of making the wrong decision. And that's exactly what McClellan's problem was.”

James M. McPherson (1936) American historian

1990s, An Exchange With a Civil War Historian (June 1995)

People, Decision

“Hayek’s theory of evolutionary rationality shows how traditions and customs (those surrounding sexual relations, for example) might be reasonable solutions to complex social problems, even when, and especially when, no clear rational grounds can be provided to the individual for obeying them. These customs have been selected by the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of social reproduction, and societies that reject them will soon enter the condition of ‘‘maladaptation,’’ which is the normal prelude to extinction.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

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

“[ Semantics can be defined as] the science of the meanings of words, [the central issue of which is] the problem of the relationship between words and designata.”

Witold Doroszewski (1899–1976) Lexicographer and linguist

As cited in Schaff (1962;6).
"Comments on Semantics", 1952

Science

“Is working harder at this the best solution to this problem?”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

“I have only one real message in this lecture, and that is: consciousness is a biological phenomenon, like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis—you know all the biological phenomena—and once you accept that, most, if not all about the hard problems of consciousness simply evaporate.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

"Our shared condition — consciousness" (May, 2013)

“He [Jean] still felt surges of generosity, and gave in to them if they didn’t cramp his style. That was it. He could be kind if kindness caused him no problems.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 206

“Don’t waste your time on penitence or guilt. Solving the problem is better!”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 15 (p. 338)

Time

“There is ample work for all in this country provided all will work. The problem of unemployment is aggravated, not wholly by the alien knocking at our gate, but by the laborer at home slamming the door of production behind him and walking out. Stopping industry will not right the matter. And in the last analysis it is the earnings of industry, which on the average are only fair, that provide alike for wages and the increase of investment on which is the sole dependence of the advance of civilization.”

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

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

Home, Dependency, Country

“The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

World, Question, Time

“Our own unresolved authority problems from our youth sometimes get transferred to our youthful patients, because we are still "covert adolescent rebels." In subtle ways, we encourage the adolescent patient to rebel towards parents, school authorities, and society in general.”

Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest

Source: Adolescence: Guiding Youth Through the Perilous Ordeal, p. 67

Youth, School, Way, Parent

“After examining the doctrinal manifestations of this single-axis framework, I will discuss how it contributes to the marginalization of Black women in feminist theory and in antiracist politics. I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “women’s experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw book Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989)

Women

“Modi has anger inside him and he has got anger for everybody not only for me. I attract that anger because he sees a threat in me. His anger is his problem, not my problem.”

Rahul Gandhi (1970) Indian politician

NewIndianExpress, NewIndianExpress http://www.newindianexpress.com/elections/karnataka-polls-2018/2018/may/10/prime-minister-narendra-modi-sees-threat-in-me-says-rahul-gandhi-1812856.html 2018

Anger

“There are two ways of confronting the country's problems. One is through a management style based on adventurism, instability, play-acting, exaggerations, wrongdoing, being secretive, self-importance, superficiality and ignoring the law. The second way is based on realism, respect, openness, collective wisdom and avoiding extremism.”

Mir-Hossein Mousavi (1941) Iranian politician and architect

As quoted in "Ahmadinejad lashes out at Iran's ex-presidents", CNN (4 June 2009) http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/03/iran.election.debate/index.html

Wisdom, Secret, Law, Way

“The major challenges facing humanity today are global – climate change, accessible fresh water, ever decreasing bio-diversity and over population. These problems call for global solutions and these solutions will require co-operation on a global scale unparalleled in history. Peace is the essential prerequisite to create the environment to achieve the levels of co-operation necessary.”

Steve Killelea (1949) Australian businessman

Peace and Sustainability: Cornerstones to survival in the 21st century http://www.visionofhumanity.org/images/content/Documents/2007%20GPI%20Final%20Discussion%20Paper.pdf (2007)

Peace, History, Water, Change

“We don't want any Vietnamese in Cambodia…. We will be very glad if you solve our problem. We are not opposed to hot pursuit in uninhabited areas. You would be liberating us from the Viet Cong. For me only Cambodia counts. I want you to force the Viet Cong to leave Cambodia. In unpopulated areas, where there are not Cambodians,- such precise cases I would shut my eyes.”

Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) Cambodian King

Said to presidential emissary Chester Bowles (January 10, 1968), as quoted by Henry Kissinger (2003) Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War, page 67.

“As the author describes it, it is the conversation of a “common man” with other common men. Intricate, distant and sacred questions of Religion, Reality, Dharma and Divinity are not for me. …. such has been my belief from the outset. It was not my good fortune to have had transcendental experiences, concentration on religious austerities, or the philosophical knowledge to qualify me for the exposition of abstruse problems.”

D. V. Gundappa (1887–1975) Indian writer

The Gita for Every Man

Men, Religion, Question, Knowledge

“…the general problem has received little attention and there is an opportunity for a meaningful contribution to the field.”

Adam Steltzner (1963) American aerospace engineer

On the solution to input force estimation in his thesis; " Input Force Estimation, Inverse Structural Systems and the Inverse Structural Filter https://search.proquest.com/docview/304536848 (1999)

“I am still far from being the type of the positively new women who take their experience as and working women contemporaries, were able to understand that love was not the main goal of our life and that we knew how to place work at its center. Nevertheless we would have been able to create and achieve much more had our energies not been fragmentized in the eternal struggle with our egos and with our feelings for another. It was, in fact, an eternal defensive war against the intervention of the male into our ego, a struggle revolving around the problem-complex: work or marriage and love? We, the older generation, did not yet understand, as most men do and as young women are learning today, that work and the longing for love can be harmoniously combined so that work remains as the main goal of existence. Our mistake was that each time we succumbed to the belief that we had finally found the one and only in the man we loved, the person with whom we believed we could blend our soul, one who was ready fully to recognize us as a spiritual-physical force. But over and over again things turned out differently, since the man always tried to impose his ego upon us and adapt us fully to his purposes. Thus despite everything the inevitable inner rebellion ensued, over and over again since love became a fetter. We felt enslaved and tried to loosen the love-bond. And after the eternally recurring struggle with the beloved man, we finally tore ourselves away and rushed toward freedom. Thereupon we were again alone, unhappy, lonesome, but free–free to pursue our beloved, chosen ideal… work. Fortunately young people, the present generation, no longer have to go through this kind of struggle which is absolutely unnecessary to human society. Their abilities, their work-energy will be reserved for their creative activity. Thus the existence of barriers will become a spur.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Love, Life, Women, Men

“I think the basic misconception is to speak of the so-called “best” allocation of resources. What is the best? In common economics it is defined as what would be if we knew everything. Economists operate with the fictitious assumption that all the relevant data is known, but this is totally unrealistic. Nobody knows all the data. What we have is widely dispersed knowledge, which cannot be concentrated in one mind. To call the situation—which would use all the knowledge available—“optimal” is nonsense because it is by definition a non-achievable solution. Our problem is not the full utilization of all knowledge but the best use we can achieve with any known institutional structure. In that sense, some oligopolistic (and even monopolistic situations), represent the best possible utilization of knowledge that we can achieve. Even the action of a monopolist can be extremely beneficial.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1960s–1970s, A Conversation with Professor Friedrich A. Hayek (1979)

Optimism, Knowledge, Thinking, Sense

“In object-oriented analysis, we seek to model the world by identifying the classes and objects that form the vocabulary of the problem domain, and in object-oriented design, we invent the abstractions and mechanisms that provide the behavior that this model requires.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 141

World, Behavior

“The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 64.

People

“We can't have the president of the United States acting like the drug dealer in chief, giving clean packs of money to a … state sponsor of terror. Those 500-euro notes will pop up across the Middle East. …. We're going to see problems in multiple (countries) because of that money given to them.”

Mark Kirk (1959) former U.S. junior senator from Illinois

Responding to reports that the Obama administration paid $400 million in cash of an agreed settlement to a 35-year case in international court to Iran. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/21/politics/mark-kirk-obama-drug-dealer-iran/ (August 21, 2016)

Money, Country

“The problem of destroying enemy rockets in flight has been successfully solved in our country.”

Sergei Biriuzov (1904–1964) Soviet military commander

Quoted in "Military Deception and Strategic Surprise" - by John Gooch, Amos Perlmutter - 1982

Country

“Unless we realize that the essence of Nazism is also an attempt to solve a universal problem of Western civilization - that of the industrial society - and that the basic principles on which the Nazis base this attempt are also in no way confined to Germany, we do not know what we fight for or what we fight against… The war is being fought for the structure of industrial society--its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Future of Industrial Man (1942), p. 107-108

War, Way, Universe, Fight

“There is a problem that is specific to financial markets. In most fields of research, when someone makes an important finding, they publish it. In the case of prices, they set up a firm and sell advice about their discovery. If they can make money from it, they will. So the research into market dynamics is a closed field.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

New Scientist interview (2004)

Money

“No problem, kaja" Lara nodded with exaggerated obeisance. "You may lead, so long as we may follow.”

David Weber (1952) author

"Great kaja! Kill them all!"
"Honorverse", Crown of Slaves (2004)

“A series of things have come up since then that have made the problem incredibly grimmer…. The ozone hole… acid rain…. Three hundred million people have starved to death since THE POPULATION BOMB was written. The famines weren’t as large as agriculturists thought they would be… due to the spread of… Green Revolution technology into the poor countries…. What makes us nervous right now is that we’re faced with again having to do something desperate to increase our food production greatly…. In 1965 we knew exactly how to do it, the question was could we deploy it fast enough—Today we have nothing left to deploy—that’s very scary…. As a species we’re not able to live on our income; we’re living on our capital, our deep rich agricultural soils are being destroyed, water is being overpumped, and our biodiversity, our life support system—we’re already far beyond what we can support.”

Paul R. Ehrlich (1932) American scientist and environmentalist

KQED Radio City Arts and Lectures, San Francisco 1996

Life, Death, People, Food

“There's always a temptation, in the middle of a long struggle, to seek the quiet life, to escape the duties and problems of the world, and to hope the enemy grows weary of fanaticism and tired of murder. This would be a pleasant world, but it's not the world we live in. The enemy is never tired, never sated, never content with yesterday's brutality. This enemy considers every retreat of the civilized world as an invitation to greater violence.”

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

2000s, 2005, Address to the National Endowment for Democracy (October 2005)

Life, World, Hope

“My voice likes rock music. My problem is, I can do a lot of things, but I have to find my own voice.”

Lucy Lawless (1968) New Zealand actress

Jamie Sotonoff (October 5, 2007) "The soulful side of a warrior princess", Daily Herald, p. 18.

Music

“With puppets, I don't think you should try to duplicate what humans do. It can cause problems.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

Interview with Associated Press (1984)

Thinking

“First, most producers are employees of firms, not owners. Viewed from the vantage point of classical [economic] theory, they have no reason to maximize the profits of firms, except to the extent that they can be controlled by owners. Moreover, profit-making firms, nonprofit organizations, and bureaucratic organizations all have exactly the same problem of inducing their employees to work toward organizational goals. There is no reason, a priori, why it should be easier (or harder) to produce this motivation in organizations aimed at maximizing profits than in organizations with different goals. If it is true in an organizational economy that organizations motivated by profits will be more efficient than other organizations, additional postulates will have to be introduced to account for it.”

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

Simon (1991) "Organizations and Markets:" in: Journal of Economic Perspectives. 5 (2 Spring 1991): p. 28.
1980s and later

Motivation

“Well, take it from an old hand: the only reason it would be easier to program in C is that you can't easily express complex problems in C, so you don't.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: new to lisp (3rd time lucky) http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/ef9b57ecc5555931 (Usenet article). Usenet articles

“Isn’t it desperately sad that, at a time when we face formidable problems – poverty, HIV/AIDS, conflict – that the Anglican Communion can invest so much energy on disagreements about human sexuality? A communion that used to boast that one of its distinctive characteristics was something called comprehensiveness, that our communion, the Anglican Church, included just about everybody. Even if you had the most weird theology you could come in, you were allowed. And now we, who used to be held up in admiration by many because of this inclusiveness, are now spending time working out how we can excommunicate one another. God looks on and God weeps. God weeps.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

"And God Smiles," sermon preached at All Saints Church, Pasadena, California (6 November 2005)

God, Sadness, Time

“This makes it all the more important that our fallible ideas be examined as all ideas are in the realm of reason, not as some doctrinal or racial heresy. None of us — none of us have been appointed by God or appointed God. And if any of us has, then my question is why hasn't he or she solved all these problems.”

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

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

God, Idea, Question

“The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

"Freeman Dyson: Mathematician, Physicist, and Writer". Interview with Donald J. Albers, The College Mathematics Journal, vol 25, no. 1, (January 1994)

Mathematics

“We are a nation divided which is obvious. The problem is, the division is keeping this monarchy in place.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, ACTIVISM

“Nature has put itself the problem of how to catch in flight light streaming to the Earth and to store the most elusive of all powers in rigid form. The plants take in one form of power, light; and produce another power, chemical difference.”

Robert Mayer (1814–1878) German physicist

in Die organische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem Stoffwechsel, [Julius Robert von Mayer, Die Mechanik der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, Cotta, 1867, 53-54]
Original: Die Natur hat sich die Aufgabe gestellt, das der Erde zuströmende Licht im Fluge zu erhaschen, und die beweglichste aller Kräfte, in starre Form umgewandelt, aufzuspeichern. Zur Erreichung dieses Zweckes hat sie die Erdkruste mit Organismen überzogen, welche lebend das Sonnenlicht in sich aufnehmen und unter Verwendung dieser Kraft eine fortlaufende Summe chemischer Differenzen erzeugen.

Nature, Light

“It takes a certain amount of courage to tackle very hard problems in science, I now realise. You don't know what the timescale of your work will be: decades or only a few years. Or your approach may be fatally flawed and doomed to fail. Or you could get scooped just as you are finalising your work. It is very stressful.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan interview: 'It takes courage to tackle very hard problems in science

Courage, Science

“Within a year of eating no meat, my health problems all started to go away. Not only did I feel better physically, but I felt better knowing that there was one answer to many of the different ills afflicting both ourselves and our environment. Everything revolved around the fork.”

Howard F. Lyman (1938) American activist

Source: Mad Cowboy (1998), Ch. 4: From the Farm to the Capital, p. 81

Health, Feeling, Affliction

“If we accept values as given and consistent, if we postulate an objective description of the world as it really is, and if we assume that the decision maker's computational powers are unlimited, then two important consequences follow. First, we do not need to distinguish between the real world and the decision maker's perception of it: he or she perceives the world as it really is. Second, we can predict the choices that will be made by a rational decision maker entirely from our knowledge of the real world and without a knowledge of the decision maker's perceptions or modes of calculation. (We do, of course, have to know his or her utility function.)
If, on the other hand, we accept the proposition that both the knowledge and the computational power of the decision maker are severely limited, then we must distinguish between the real world and the actor's perception of it and reasoning about it. That is to say, we must construct a theory (and test it empirically) of the processes of decision. Our theory must include not only the reasoning processes but also the processes that generate the actor's subjective representation of the decision problem, his or her frame.”

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

H.A. Simon (1986), " Rationality in psychology and economics http://www.kgt.bme.hu/targyak/msc/ng/BMEGT30MN40/data/JoBus-86-rationality-HSimon.pdf," Journal of Business, p. 210-11” 1980s and later

World, Knowledge, Decision

“Now, if your boss is a sadist, then you have a big problem. In that case, fire your boss and get a new job.”

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

Trump: How to Get Rich (2004)
2000s

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

John Steinbeck book Sweet Thursday

Source: Sweet Thursday (1954), Ch. 20

Sleep, Night

“Solving the value-loading problem is a research challenge worthy of some of the next generation’s best mathematical talent. We cannot postpone confronting this problem until the AI has developed enough reason to easily understand our intentions.”

Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Source: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 12

Mathematics, Understanding

“It is clear that we have to pay more, it is the simple option, not always affordable, ("but simple," said in actual recording) but the ways to solve the problem are many.”

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

Понятно, что надо больше платить, это самый простой вариант, не всегда возможный,(но простой) но способов решения проблемы много
On human capital flight, in address to Committee for Education, Science and Technology (26 October 2004).
2000 - 2005

Way

“Bush, a technical advisor to Roosevelt, published in 1945 an article in Atlantic Monthly which highlighted problems in the growth of knowledge, and proposed a technological solution based on his concept of memex, a multimedia personal computer: "Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose…The difficulty seems to be not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." (Bush, 1945) The world brain has continued for over fifty years to provide an active objective for the information systems community (Goodman, 1987), and memex is often quoted as having been realized fifty years later through the World Wide Web”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Berners-Lee, Cailliau, Luotonen, Nielsen and Secret, 1994
First paragraph
Convergence to the Information Highway (1996)

Secret, World, Quotes, Communication