Quotes about problems
page 34

“Science and technology have a simple and persuasive message: the world's problems are soluble by ingenuity and material innovations; the world's riddles, such as the origins of the universe, can be unravelled by the scientific mind. But while science's achievements have been remarkable, they have not been revolutionary in probing human nature. In some ways the measurable problems analysed by science and technology are more easily dissected than human problems. The moon is more easily explored than the typical mind and heart.”

Geoffrey Blainey book A Short History of Christianity

A Short History of Christianity (2011)

World, Way, Nature, Universe

“How many great problems have gone unsolved because men didn't know enough, or have enough faith in the creative process and in themselves, to let go for the whole mind to work at it?”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon (1966)

Men, Faith

“Nothing irritates us [Fascists] so much as to be taken for pillars of order. Nothing so exasperates us as the people who come to us through fear of Communism. Those good people [who are fearful of all social change] will have to realize, and we shall soon make them realize, that the weight of the social problem is now on our shoulders and that they would be wiser to fear us than to fear Communism.”

Alessandro Pavolini (1903–1945) Italian politician and writer

Foreign Policy Congress in Milan, June 1938. Quoted in "The decline of the intellectual" - Page 189 - by Thomas Molnar - 1994.

People, Fear, Communication, Change

“We are told that we have to accept the Treaty of Rome. I have read the Treaty of Rome pretty carefully, and it expresses an outlook entirely different from our own. It may be that I am insular, but I value our Parliamentary outlook, an outlook which has extended throughout the Commonwealth. That is not the same position that holds on the Continent of Europe. No one of these principal countries in the Common Market has been very successful in running Parliamentary institutions: Germany, hardly any experience; Italy, very little; France, a swing between a dictatorship and more or less anarchic Parliament, and not very successfully. As I read the Treaty of Rome, the whole position means that we shall enter a federation which is composed in an entirely different way. I do not say it is the wrong way. But it is not our way. In this set-up it is the official who really puts up all the proposals; the whole of the planning is done by officials. It seems to me that the Ministers come in at a later stage—and if there is anything like a Federal Parliament, at a later stage still. I do not think that that is the way this country has developed, or wishes to develop. I am all for working in with our Continental friends. I was one of those who worked to build up NATO; I have worked for European integration. But that is a very different thing from bringing us into a close association which, I may say, is not one for defence, or even just for foreign policy. The fact is that if the designs behind the Common Market are carried out, we are bound to be affected in every phase of our national life. There would be no national planning, except under the guidance of Continental planning—we shall not be able to deal with our own problems; we shall not be able to build up the country in the way we want to do, so far as I can see. I think we shall be subject to overall control and planning by others. That is my objection.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1962/nov/08/britain-and-the-common-market in the House of Lords on the British application to join the Common Market (8 November 1962). 1960s

Life, Way, Thinking, Reading

“Menæchmus, a pupil of Eudoxus, and a contemporary of Plato, found the two mean proportionals by means of conic sections, in two ways, (α) by the intersection of two parabolas, the equations of which in Cartesian co-ordinates would be x2=ay, y2=bx, and (β) by the intersection of a parabola and a rectangular hyperbola, the corresponding equations being x2=ay, and xy=ab respectively. It would appear that it was in the effort to solve this problem that Menæchmus discovered the conic sections, which are called, in an epigram by Eratosthenes, "the triads of Menæchmus."”

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

Achimedes (1920)

Way, Effort, Appearance

“It's not the microwave that's the problem, it's what people put into them. I know people lead busy lives but they should try to sit their children down at the table once a week and cook them simple food.”

Raymond Blanc (1949) French chef

In Nicola Woolcock, " Celebrity Chef Dishes Microwave Mothers http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1358173/Celebrity-chef-dishes-microwave-mothers.html", Daily Telegraph (2 October 2001).

Children, People, Food, Business

“A learning strategy is comparable in kind with a performance strategy. Each sort of strategy entails decomposing goals into subgoals and applying mental subroutines to achieve the subgoals concerned. The necessary difference between learning strategies and performance is in the domain upon which they operate. Whereas the performance strategy solves problems posed by states of the (usually symbolic) environment, the learning strategy solves the problems posed by deficiencies in the current repertoire of relevant performance strategies; the solutions produced by a learning strategy are performance strategies.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: Conversation, Cognition and Learning (1975), p. 261 as cited in: K.V. Wilson (2011) From Associations to Structure. p. 200.

Learning

“We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)

People, World, Fear, Hope

“You will begin to succeed with your life when the pains and problems of others matter to you.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

In an interview with The News Magazine, Nigeria, on his charitable activities - "Why I Cater For The Poor" http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10442557/TB-Joshua-Interview---Why-I-Cater-For-The-Poor (December 17 2007)

Life, Pain

“The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1930s, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), p. 696, as cited in Social Cognitive Psychology: History and Current Domains (1997), David F. Barone, James E. Maddux, Charles R. Snyder . p. 20

Freedom

“A population ecology perspective on organization-environment relations is proposed as an alternative to the dominant adaptation perspective. The strength of inertial pressures on organizational structure suggests the application of models that depend on competition and selection in populations of organizations. Several such models, as well as issues arising in attempts to apply them to the organization-environment problem, are discussed.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 929; Article abstract

Dependency

“Whatever our constitutional arrangements and no matter how well off we are, there will always be a need for Scotland's citizens to talk about their problems. Therefore, we will always need independent, reliable and accurate advice to help guide them at certain points in their lives.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Citizens Advice Bureaux (August 15, 2007)

Help

“Our country is in serious trouble. We don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time. When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn't exist, folks. They beat us all the time. When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically. The U. S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems.”

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

2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)

Stupidity, Cars, Time, Victory

“Always remember, as bad as it may be for you, it is worse for the lost. They may have it better for a while if they go along with the beast and take his mark, but that “better” will come to an end. Those who obeyed Hitler had it good, too—for a few years. The lost face some of the same problems of economic collapse, wars, earthquakes, PLUS, they will be here for the next 1,040 days of God's wrath being poured out after the rapture and THEN eternity in the Lake of Fire!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 235

God, War

“(discussing the Alfred Hitchcock film Saboteur): …I saw when I was young that, in fact, when you got to the top or toward the top of things, you found, indeed, very flawed but glamorous people, people who were, in fact, not thinking about the kinds of problems that the blind man was thinking about in 1943, not acting intuitively and bravely and in some kind of harmony with nature as that blind man in Saboteur was acting, and certainly not taking on impossible tasks. People were acting in a kind of what I’ve come to call a deutero-Hemingway way: they were preserving their own vitality by being adventurous within the media. The James Stewart character is someone who roams the world, but with a camera, not a gun, and not like Schweitzer, setting up modes of change in impossible places. He’s touring the world adventurously in the interest of preserving his masculine independence, but he’s doing it with a camera.”

George W. S. Trow (1943–2006) American writer

My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999)

People, World, Way, Nature

“If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special weight, their problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Freedom from Religion" in The Nation (19 February 2001)

Faith, Feeling, Democracy

“I suppose I want to leave a word with you tonight, that seems to have been applicable and important to everyone lately. And that is — remember Mercy, Love and Forgiveness, because this seems to be lacking, and causing and creating a lot of problems for people because it is so lacking. So remember that, first and foremost. And if you're already doing a good job at that, you think — good for you! Step it up a bit! That's your challenge. As for me, I must work on these things always too!”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"Bit of Rambling in July" (July 13, 2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15oNaXvjXg4

Love, People, Forgiveness, Thinking

“We must put our energies into solving the difficult problems, in many disciplines, which are involved in renewable sources - on which both the developed and the developing countries must eventually depend.”

Martin Ryle (1918–1984) English radio astronomer

p 500 of Electronics and Power (1982) Vol 28 Issue 7/8.

Dependency, Country

“Love and desire are both thoroughly human. Our problem with them is that they orient us toward very different goals. Love seeks control, stability, continuity, certainty. Desire seeks surrender, adventure, novelty, the unknown. In love we are searching for points of attachment, anchoring, something we know we can count on. In desire we are searching both for missing, disowned pieces of ourselves and for something beyond ourselves, outside the borders of self-recognition that, under ordinary circumstances, we protect so fiercely.Erotic passion destabilizes one's sense of self. When we find someone intensely arousing who makes possible unfamiliar experiences of ourselves and an otherness we find captivating, we are drawn into the disorienting loopiness of self/other. We tend to want to control these experiences and the others who inspire them. Thus emotional connection tends to degrade into strategies for false security that suffocate desire.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Can Love Last? (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), pp. 91-92

Love, Search, Sense, Passion

“It is one of the problems we have; people die of stigma.”

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

2010s, 2014, U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit Spousal Program (August 2014)

People

“The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

God, People, Way, Feeling

“Girl, next time he wants to know
What your problem is
Next time he wants to know
Where the anger comes from
Just tell him this time the problem's his
Tell him the anger just comes
It just comes.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Hide and Seek
Song lyrics

Girl, Time, Anger

“By their very nature the problems imposed on organizational theorists involve so many assumptions and such a mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy that virtually all conjectures and all selection criteria remain plausible and nothing gets rejected or highlighted.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, "Theory construction as disciplined imagination," 1989, p. 521; as cited in: Richard A. Swanson, ‎Thomas J. Chermack (2013), Theory Building in Applied Disciplines, p. 49

Nature

“My problem here is quite simple. Those who have plundered the national coffers in billions get to stay in Sta. Rosa or any hospital much to their comfort. Those whose crimes pale so much in comparison with Napoles – the cell phone snatchers and the street snatchers – languish in cramped and dingy jails. It’s like teaching our children that if they must steal, steal big so at least you get to be jailed in the comfort of those special cells.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Philippine Star http://www.philstar.com:8080/headlines/2014/03/08/1298283/doj-open-napoles-transfer-ordinary-jail 2014

Children

“Now the leap by which this reasoning lands us in labour as the sole constituent element of value appears to me so surprising that I am prepared to learn that the yet unpublished portions of Das Kapital contain supplementary or elucidatory matter which may set it in a new light. Meanwhile the analysis appears to be given as complete and adequate, so far as it goes, and I can, therefore, only take it as I find it and try to test its validity. But instead of directly confronting it with what seems to be the true analysis of the phenomenon of exchange, I will follow it out a little further, and we shall see that Marx himself introduces a modification into his result (or develops a half-latent implication in it), in such a way as to vitiate the very analysis on which that result is founded, and to lead us, if we work it out, to what I regard as the true solution of the problem.”

Philip Wicksteed (1844–1927) English economist

Page 712.
"The Marxian Theory of Value: Das Kapital: A Criticism" (1884)

Way, Light, Learning, Appearance

“The interest in Lego may have come later. Certainly the grown-up Technic variant, with it gears and cogs and motors, fascinated me the most, and presumably some way into adolescence, as I remember constructing a colourful mechanical Wanking Machine during long periods upstairs in my room. The inevitable problem of round pegs and square holes sadly rendered this particular project fruitless, on many levels, but the manufacturers might like to take note of the idea when planning other themed kits for their teenage boy demographic.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Way, Boy, Idea

“[The] amount of search is not a measure of the amount of intelligence being exhibited. What makes a problem a problem is not that a large amount of search is required for its solution, but that a large amount would be required if a requisite level of intelligence were not applied.”

Allen Newell (1927–1992) American cognitive scientist

Source: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975), p. 122.

Search, Intelligence

“By holding firmly to a pessimistic, realistic view of what is and is not possible in a society of different ethnicities, we might have maintained the principles of a free republic, and saved ourselves much trouble and expense. In the world at large, diversity causes nothing but problems.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (2009)

World

“We had some problems with the Howard newspaper strip, which led to problems with the Howard book, which ultimately led to the lawsuit. Marvel wouldn't pay the artist to draw it. Gene Colan and I were supposed to get a percentage of the syndicate's take for the strip. The problem was, the money came in 90 days, 120 days, six months — I don't remember how long exactly — after the strips were published. So, essentially, the artist was working for nothing up until that time, and no artist can afford to do that. [In comparison with Stan Lee and 's Spider-Man comic strip, ] Stan, as publisher of Marvel, had a regular salary coming in, and John Romita, I believe, was also on staff at the time. They didn't have quite the same problem.”

Steve Gerber (1947–2008) Comic writer

Comic Book Artist #7 (reprinted in Comic Book Artist Collection Volume 3 (TwoMorrows Publishing, 2005)): "Steve Gerber's Crazy Days", p. 66

Money, Books, Time, Drawing

“…the Outsider's problem is the problem of denial of self-expression.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Four The Attempt to Gain Control

“Pardon me 4 living, but this is my world 2
I can't help that what's cool to us might be strange to u.
Pardon me 4 breathing, can we borrow some of your air?
The problem with u and your kind is that u don't know love is there.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

New Power Generation
Song lyrics, Graffiti Bridge (1990)

Love, World, Help

“Scientific progress has led philosophers to turn their attention from the explanation of physical phenomena, abandoned to science, in order to direct it towards the problem of being itself.”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

Les progrès scientifiques ont amené les philosophes à détourner leur attention de l’explication des phénomènes physiques, abandonnée désormais à la science, pour la diriger vers le problème de l’être lui-même.
La voile d'Isis: Essai sur l'histoire de l'idée de Nature (2004)

Science

“It is not in the resolution of problems that you will find happiness. If you want to find that happiness, if you want to find that joy, then find that one thing that is within inside of you. That is you, that is your reality, that is your core that can bring you that joy. This disparity has existed and existed and existed, yet people keep saying, 'No, these people don't know what they're talking about.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Auckland, New Zealand, September 10, 2000
2000s

Happiness, People, Reality, Joy

“Women should stop being or feeling that they are part of the problem and become part of the solution. We have been marginalized for a long time, and now is the time for women to stand up and become active without needing to ask for permission or acceptance. This is the only way we will give back to our society and allow for Yemen to reach the great potentials it has.”

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

As quoted in "Renowned activist and press freedom advocate Tawakul Karman to the Yemen Times: 'A day will come when all human rights violators pay for what they did to Yemen.'", in Yemen Times (3 November 2011)
2010s

Women, Way, Feeling, Time

“Vico claims that the aim of philosophy is the problem of "finding," and he identifies the theory of "finding" with "topical philosophy.” …”

Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991) Italian philosopher

Source: Rhetoric as Philosophy (1980), p. 40

“There is but one solution of the problem, and it is to obliterate absolutely all color line. Open up to the Negro as to the white man, the political offices of the country, making but one test, that of mental and moral fitness. Throw down at once the barriers which close out the Negro merely on account of his color from hotel, theater, and railway carriage. Meet your Negro brother as your equal at banquets and in social gatherings. Give him, in one word, and in full meaning of the terms, equal rights and equal privileges, political, civil, and social. I know no color line, I will acknowledge none. The time is not distant when Americans and Christians will wonder that there ever was a race prejudice.”

John Ireland (bishop) (1838–1918) Catholic bishop

[McClarey, Donald R, Father John Ireland and the Fifth Minnesota, The American Catholic, 2012-08-23, https://the-american-catholic.com/2012/08/23/father-john-ireland-and-the-fifth-minnesota/, 2018-02-04] [Source for quote doesn't list primary source., February 2018]

Color, Distant, Time, Country

“In the foreseeable future, a poor child in a remote corner of the world will be able to create a killer app, solve the P versus NP problem, formulate the Theory of Everything, and find a cure to cancer and other diseases – all without formal education. The Internet is the teacher.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

World, Education, Disease, Teachers

“The purpose of this book is to show how economic analysis can be used in formulating business policies. It is therefore a departure from the main stream of economic writings on the theory of the firm, much of which is too simple in its assumptions and too complicated in its logical development to be managerially useful. The big gap between the problems of logic that intrigue economic theorists and the problems of policy that plague practical management needs to be bridged in order to give executives access to the practical contributions that economic thinking can make to top-management policies.”

Joel Dean (1906–1979) American economics wrtier

Preface
Managerial Economics, 1951

Books, Departure, Business, Thinking

Rob Pike (1956) software engineer

Rob Pike (2004) in interview http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1153211&tid=189 at slashdot.com, Oct 18 2004

Beauty, Way, Nature

“There is but one special interest that we should be working for, and that would solve just about all of our problems, and that is our liberty.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Speech on the Patriot Act, 2003 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O7D7nDF0U8 2000s, 2001-2005

“If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Wanted, A New Pleasure
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

Life, Pleasure, World, Beauty

“In 1993 Osama bin Laden began speaking in detail to Muslim and Western journalists about his beliefs, goals, and intentions, and began publishing commentaries on these matters in the media…. While bin Laden's words have not been a torrent, they are plentiful, carefully chosen, plainly spoken, and precise. He has set out the Muslim world's problems as he sees them; determined that they are caused by the Unites States; explained why they must be remedied; and outlined how he will try to do so. Seldom in America's history has an enemy laid out so clearly the basis for the war he is waging against it.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

Through Our Enemies' Eyes (pp. 45-6).
2000s

War, World, History

“You're basing your laws and your whole outlook on natural life on mythology. It won't work. That's why you have all these problems in the world. Name them: India, Pakistan, Ireland. Name them-all these problems. They're all religious problems.”

Jack Kevorkian (1928–2011) American pathologist, euthanasia activist

Quoted in "Years of Minutes"‎ - Page 339 - by Andy Rooney - 2004
2000s, 2004

Life, World, Law, Nature

“The fundamental problem posed by modernization is whether human animals can adjust as readily to longevity, affluence, and peace as they have in the past to shortgevity, poverty, and war.”

Marion J. Levy Jr. (1918–2002) American sociologist

Marion J. Levy Jr., cited in: Frances Carol Locher, ‎Ann Evory (1978), Contemporary Authors: A Bio-bibliographical Guide to Current Writers. p. 371

War, Peace, Past, Animals

“The things you hear now about European unemployment -- that there are structural problems, that real wages have failed to adjust, that there are inflationary fears -- are the same things that were said during the early 1930. It is well established that government spending began to pull Germany out of its slump in 1935. There is no known reason why spending for peace can't do as well at getting the economy going as spending for war.”

Lawrence H. Summers (1954) Former US Secretary of the Treasury

Lawrence Summers in: David Warsh (April 27, 1986) "It Did Happen Here, Too", Boston Globe, p. A1.
1980s

War, Fear, Peace

“I began studying the political history of race in America. Having worked in Congress and at the White House, I have some familiarity with the nature of politics and how politicians think. I thought I could use this knowledge to illuminate this one aspect of the race problem in America in ways that might help us better deal with its long, sordid history. What quickly jumped out at me is a fact that seems obvious in retrospect, but which I had never really thought about. Virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat. Before the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. It was based largely in the south and almost all of its leaders were slave owners, including Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson, considered by Democrats to be co-founders of their party.”

Bruce Bartlett (1951) American historian

Source: 2000s, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past (2008), p. viv

War, Way, History, Nature

“Anyone who intends to present a new story must approach the problem in a new way and speak so persuasively that the tale brings pleasure to people.”

Marie de France Milun

Ki divers cunte veut traitier,
Diversement deit comencier
E parler si rainablement
K'il seit pleisibles a la gent.
"Milun", line 1; p. 97.
Lais

People, Pleasure, Way

“The study of race differences in intelligence is an acid test case for psychology. Can behavioral scientists research this subject with the same freedom, objectivity, thoroughness, and scientific integrity with which they go about investigating other psychological phenomena? In short, can psychology be scientific when it confronts an issue that is steeped in social ideologies? In my attempts at self- analysis this question seems to me to be one of the most basic motivating elements in my involvement with research on the nature of the observed psychological differences among racial groups. In a recent article (Jensen, 1985b) I stated:I make no apology for my choice of research topics. I think that my own nominal fields of expertise (educational and differential psychology) would be remiss if they shunned efforts to describe and understand more accurately one of the most perplexing and critical of current problems. Of all the myriad subjects being investigated in the behavioral and social sciences, it seems to me that one of the most easily justified is the black- white statistical disparity in cognitive abilities, with its far reaching educational, economic, and social consequences. Should we not apply the tools of our science to such socially important issues as best we can? The success of such efforts will demonstrate that psychology can actually behave as a science in dealing with socially sensitive issues, rather than merely rationalize popular prejudice and social ideology.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

p. 258
Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), pp. 438-9

Education, Behavior, Intelligence, Motivation

“Strategy making needs to function beyond the boxes to encourage the informal learning that produces new perspectives and new combinations… Once managers understand this, they can avoid other costly misadventures caused by applying formal techniques, without judgement and intuition, to problem solving.”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Mintzberg (1994), (partly) cited in Douglas C. Eadie (1997) Changing by design: a practical approach to leading innovation in nonprofit organizations. p. 128

Understanding, Learning, Box

“Yes, but I tend not to advertise too much that people should be less certain about their altruism, since it's hard to see how that could be good for me regardless of what my values are or ought to be. I make an exception of this for people who might be in a position to build [a friendly artificial intelligence], since if they're too confident about altruism then they're likely to be too confident about many other philosophical problems, but even then I don't stress it too much.”

Wei Dai Cryptocurrency pioneer and computer scientist

In response https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YdfpDyRpNyypivgdu/aalwa-ask-any-lesswronger-anything#miERerX6pSgG4ac5x to the question "Do you think that most people should be very uncertain about their values, e.g. altruism?", March 2014

People, Confidence, Intelligence

“I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France. American painters have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end... Thus the fact that good European moderns [European artists who lived in the U. S. because of the Nazi-regime] are now here is very important, for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art being the unconscious. These idea interests me more than these specific artists do, for the two artists I admire most, Picasso and Joan Miró, are still abroad.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

As quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York, 1990, p. 138
1940's, Art and Architecture (1944)

Art, Idea, Understanding, Painting

“Marxism and Bolshevism, its offspring, were products of an era in European intellectual life that was obsessed with violence. No-one embraced this philosophy more enthusiastically than the Bolsheviks: ‘merciless’ violence, violence that strove for the destruction of every actual and potential opponent, was… the only way of dealing with problems.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 500

Life, Way

“Peace is not solely a matter of military or technical problems — it is primarily a problem of politics and people. And unless man can match his strides in weaponry and technology with equal strides in social and political development, our great strength, like that of the dinosaur, will become incapable of proper control — and like the dinosaur vanish from the earth.”

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

1961, UN speech

People, Peace

“Now with the big bang there is only one event that happened. So like the sun you can’t say that there are other big bangs going on that are what ours was like. The second problem is that at the big bang mathematics and physics break down. So there is no way of mathematically describing it. That is not a satisfactorily scientific approach, to ascribe something to speculations which you cannot justify using mathematics and physics.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Jayant Narlikar's Cosmology

Way, Mathematics, Sun

“Science focuses on the study of the natural world. It seeks to describe what exists. Focusing on problem finding, it studies and describes problems in its various domains. The humanities focus on understanding and discussing the human experience. In design, we focus on finding solutions and creating things and systems of value that do not yet exist.
The methods of science include controlled experiments, classification, pattern recognition, analysis, and deduction. In the humanities we apply analogy, metaphor, criticism, and (e)valuation. In design we devise alternatives, form patterns, synthesize, use conjecture, and model solutions. \
Science values objectivity, rationality, and neutrality. It has concern for the truth. The humanities value subjectivity, imagination, and commitment. They have a concern for justice. Design values practicality, ingenuity, creativity, and empathy. It has concerns for goodness of fit and for the impact of design on future generations.”

Béla H. Bánáthy (1919–2003) Hungarian linguist and systems scientist

Source: Designing Social Systems in a Changing World (1996), p. 34-35, as cited in Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Truth, World, Justice, Imagination

“That December [1992], we [Barça] lost the Intercontinental Cup match against São Paulo 2–1. It was one of the few times that I had no problems with a defeat. I've always admired the Brazilian coach Telê Santana for his vision, because it always displayed a genuine love of football.”

Johan Cruyff (1947–2016) Dutch association football player

reported in Johan Cruyff (2016). My Turn: The Autobiography.

Love, Time, Football

“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Source: Leftism Revisited (1990), p. 319

War, World, Personality

“Owing to the neglect of our defences and the mishandling of the German problem in the last five years, we seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Lord Moyne (September 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 972
The 1930s

War

“Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture. It's striking that Russian propaganda, in the criticisms it makes of us, always holds itself within certain limits. Stalin, that cunning Caucasian, is apparently quite ready to abandon European Russia, if he thinks that a failure to solve her problems would cause him to lose everything. Let nobody think Stalin might reconquer Europe from the Urals! It is as if I were installed in Slovakia, and could set out from there to reconquer the Reich. This is the catastrophe that will cause the loss of the Soviet Empire.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

night of 18-19 July 1941.
Disputed, (1941-1944) (published 1953)

World, History, Failure, Thinking

“No statistician present at this moment will have been in doubt about the meaning of my words when I mentioned the common statistical model. It must be a stochastic device producing random results. Tossing coins or a dice or playing at cards are not flexible enough. The most general chance instrument is the urn filled with balls of different colours or with tickets bearing some ciphers or letters. This model is continuously used in our courses as a didactic tool, and in our statistical analyses as a means of translating realistic problems into mathematical ones. In statistical language " urn model " is a standard expression.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. 79; Partly cited in: Norman L. Johnson and Samuel Kotz (1977) Urn Models and Their Application: an. Approach to Modern Discrete Probability Theory http://dis.unal.edu.co/~gjhernandezp/sim/hide/Urn%20Models%20and%20Their%20Application%20-%20An%20approach%20to%20modern%20discrete%20probability%20theory_Norman%20L.Johnson(Wiley%201977%20413s).pdf, John Wiley & Sons.

Mathematics, Chance

“One solution to one problem makes two problems.”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

“More and more, people see that solving any problem is a question of acquiring knowledge and having respect for the cognitive and epistemological processes involved in the human brain: use what you know, learn what you can, and if you have to guess, be aware that you do so you can go back and update your guesses when you (hopefully) learn more.”

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

People, Question, Knowledge, Learning

“Power is a very difficult problem with which to deal in the theory of organization.”

Michel Crozier (1922–2013) French sociologist

Source: The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, 1954, p. 145

“I'm a psychopath, but I don't have a problem with that.”

James Marsters (1962) American actor

Interview With The Vampires: Shedding light on the tough triangle that gives Buffy The Vampire Slayer its bite. by Tim Appello (Jul 25 '98) http://www.morethanspike.com/articles.php?ID=146

“The art of the future will give form to our scientific convictions; this is our religion and our truth, and it is profound and weighty enough to produce the greatest style and the greatest revaluation of form that the world has ever seen. Today, instead of using the laws of nature as a means of artistic expression, we pose the religious problems of a new content. The art of our time will surely have profound analogies with the art of primitive periods long past, without of course, the formalistic similarities now senselessly sought by many archaist artists [Marc rejects abstraction of Cubism, among others]. And our time will just as surely be followed in some distant, ripe, late European future by another period of cool maturity, which in its turn will again set up its own formal laws and traditions. [written at the front of World War 1.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

near Verdun, 1915]
Source: 1915 - 1916, 100 Aphorisms', Franz Marc (1915), p. 446

War, Truth, World, Religion

“This book reports the findings from a study of job motivation based on a fresh approach to this problem. It is an important study, since the analyses and interpretations of the authors suggest that a breakthrough may well have been made to provide new insights into the nature and method of operation of job attitudes.”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Source: The motivation to work, 1959, p.vii: Preface ; lead paragraph

Books, Motivation, Nature, Study

“Part of America's industrial problems is the aim of its corporate managers. Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products or service…The Japanese corporate credo, on the other hand, is that a company should become the world's most efficient provider of whatever product and service it offers. Once it becomes the world leader and continues to offer good products, profits follow.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Source: Out Of The Crisis (1982), p. 99

Money, World, Business, Thinking

“One troublesome aspect is the place of rational expectations macroeconomics in the often political debate over Keynesian economics. At least implicitly, many people feel that what's bad for the rational expectations viewpoint is good for the Keynesian one, and vice versa. But it is hard to see how the problems in using the rational expectations approach to explain monetary nonneutrality can alleviate the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of the Keynesian model.”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Robert J. Barro, "Rational Expectations and Macroeconomics in 1984" (1984).

People, Feeling

“Our national history has presented various phases of this problem. Slavery showed one; the complexities of interstate commerce have kept others constantly in mind. On the day the Constitution was finished, probably more people would have seen seeds of conflict and dangers to the Union in future commercial relations than in slavery. But commerce became a source of strength, while slavery be- came a cause of division. It brought the Union into danger; and in the end was destroyed itself. Where there was sincere acceptance of the dual sovereignty theory, where the States sought to do their full part, and accepted the de- terminations of the National Government as to the rest, the plan worked. Where the States sought more from the Federal authority than it could give, and resisted national demands — then came dissension and, at length, war.”

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

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

War, People, History, Future

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

Jane Wagner (1935) Playwright, actress

Other material for Lily Tomlin

Grass

“It's not a problem to put it up, It's a problem to take it down.”

Rafic Hariri (1944–2005) Lebanese businessman and politician

Talking about the posters that appeared everywhere in Lebanon, of Hafez al-Assad, 1993. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/15/international/middleeast/15hariri.html?_r=0

“The philosophy of science is concerned with how you decide if a scientific finding is correct or true. You have to establish criteria to determine if the finding or theory is valid. Validity is a fundamental problem in the philosophy of science, but the fundamental problem in the philosophy of scientific administration is the question of value. Two scientific activities are equally valid if they achieve results that are true. Now, how do you decide which activity is more valuable? The question of value is the basic question that the scientific administrator asks so that decisions can be made about funding priorities.”

Alvin M. Weinberg (1915–2006) American nuclear physicist

Interview http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev28-1/text/wbgbar.htm by Bill Cabage and Carolyn Krause for the ORNL Review (April 1995).

Question, Decision, Science

“How will you construct the gun that will stand this strain? … you will enter the shell and detonate the explosive and start off at 7 miles a second. That is, you get a blow 50 times as hard as if struck by a Big Bertha shell. Clearly, you are flattened like a pancake. The bump is equal to a fall from a height of many thousands of miles …. This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments …. all these errors could be easily avoided by correlative meetings of groups of different scientists investigating all kinds of cosmic problems. This is the work the Correlative Science Society, established by the Royal Botanic Society, has been attempting to do with most encouraging results.”

A.W. Bickerton (1842–1929) British scientist

From Scholar-Errant: A biography of Professor A.W. Bickerton, by R.M. Burdon, Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1956, quoting an article by Bickerton in the Daily Mail, who was then apparently commenting on a plan by some Russian scientists to be launched to the moon from a large gun, a la Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon:

Error, Idea, Science, Time

“Peaceful coexistence cannot be limited to the powerful countries if we want to ensure world peace. Peaceful coexistence must be exercised among all states, regardless of size, regardless of the previous historical relations that linked them, and regardless of the problems that may arise among some of them at a given moment.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Address to the United Nations (1964)

World, Peace, Exercises, Country

“Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945, p. 252, quoted in Leonard Silk (1976) The Economists. New York: Basic Books. p. 208

“This is a common criticism: the idea that the atheist is guilty of a literalist reading of scripture, and that it’s a very naive way of approaching religion, and there’s a far more sophisticated and nuanced view of religion on offer and the atheist is disregarding that. A few problems with this: anyone making that argument is failing to acknowledge just how many people really do approach these texts literally or functionally - whether they’re selective literalists, or literal all the way down the line. There are certain passages in scripture that just cannot be read figuratively. And people really do live by the lights of what is literally laid out in these books. So, the Koran says “hate the infidel” and Muslims hate the infidel because the Koran spells it out ad nauseam. Now, it’s true that you can cherry-pick scripture, and you can look for all the good parts. You can ignore where it says in Leviticus that if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night you’re supposed to stone her to death on her father’s doorstep. Most religious people ignore those passages, which really can only be read literally, and say that “they were only appropriate for the time” and “they don’t apply now”. And likewise, Muslims try to have the same reading of passages that advocate holy war. They say “well, these were appropriate to those battles that Mohammed was fighting, but now we don’t have to fight those battles”. This is all a good thing, but we should recognize what’s happening here: people are feeling pressure from a host of all-too-human concerns that have nothing, in principle, to do with God: secularism, and human rights, and democracy, and scientific progress. These have made certain passages in scripture untenable. This is coming from outside religion, and religion is now making a great show of its sophistication in grappling with these pressures. This is an example of religion losing the argument with modernity.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris in interview by Big Think (04/07/2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zV3vIXZ-1Y&t=6s 2000s

Death, God, Hate, War

“I had been taking Prevacid for about four years and my body built up a resistance to it, to the point where it wasn't doing anything anymore… I had a night of drinking in London followed by a full day and night of drinking on a day off in Dublin, because what else is there to do in Ireland but drink? That, coupled with a show where I had monitor problems, and I pretty much trashed my voice.”

David Draiman (1973) American singer and songwriter

Life Is Sweet For Disturbed — Apart From A Little Acid Reflux http://www.webcitation.org/64qCyHxIX, Jon Wiederhorn di MTV, 16 November 2005)

Drink, Night

“Empirical problems of a nonlinguistic sort are not solved by linguistic considerations, but it is important that the two kinds of problems not be confused and that nonlinguistic problems be expressed in such a form as aids their empirical solution.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 57

“I asked at another address to think for themselves, and find out for themselves, how to get over their difficulties. The difficulties are always there-they will always be there, and I am glad that there are difficulties, for they excite the imagination and the intellect, and you can then find out the means by which you can solve the problem”

Bidhan Chandra Roy (1882–1962) Former Chief Minister of West Bengal, India

In page=89
Remembering Our Leaders: Mahadeo Govind Ranade by Pravina Bhim Sain

Imagination, Thinking

“As for Picasso, the specialist was amazed by the rapidity of his understanding. The tradition he came from had prepared him better than ours for a problem to do with structure. And Berthe Weil was right when she treated those who compared him/confused him with, a Steinlen or a Lautrec as idiots. He had already rejected them in their own century, a century we had no intention of prolonging. Whether or not the Universe was endowed with another dimension, art was going to move into a different field.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Art, Understanding, Universe

“Our country's really in bad, big trouble. We have a lot of trouble. A lot of problems. And one of the big problems, I talk about, divisiveness. I think that a lot of people will appreciate … I'm not doing it for that reason. I'm doing it because it's time to go in a different direction.”

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

2010s, 2016, November, New York Times Interview (November 23, 2016)

People, Thinking, Time, Country

“Heisenberg now approached the problem from a new philosophical angle. He discarded all models, pictures and parables, and made a clear distinction between sure knowledge we gain from observation of nature and the conjectural knowledge we introduce when we use models, pictures and parables. Sure knowledge… can only be numerical, so that Heisenberg's results were inevitably mathematical in form, and could not disclose anything about the true nature of physical properties or entities.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Mathematics, Nature, Knowledge

“I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success — I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.”

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

Triumph of the Nerds (1996)
1990s

Success, Parting

“It had always been one of my convictions that Jews and Arabs could live together. Even as a child it never occurred to me that Jews might someday be living in Israel without Arabs, or separated from Arabs. On the contrary, for me it had always seemed perfectly normal for the two people to live and work side by side. That is the nature of life here and it always will be…. though Israel is a Jewish nation, it is, of course, not only a Jewish nation… I begin with the basic conviction that Jews and Arabs can live together. I have repeated that at every opportunity, not for journalists and not for popular consumption, but because I have never believed differently or thought differently, from my childhood on. I am not afraid of Arabs. I feel I can live with them. I believe I understand their problems. I know that we are both inhabitants of this land, and although the state is Jewish, that does not mean that Arabs should not be full citizens in every sense of the word.”

Ariel Sharon (1928–2014) prime minister of Israel and Israeli general

Ariel Sharon, ‎David Chanoff (2002) Warrior: An Autobiography p. 343, 542-3
2000s

Life, People, Feeling, Understanding

“[My position] is not designed to win votes. It is designed to address itself to what I think is a problem of crisis proportions. I believe that when you are facing that kind of emergency, you have to be willing to prescribe some pretty tough action. I think the American people are ready for some straight answers... When you are confronted with a genuine emergency, then I think you have to look at the interest of the country first.”

John B. Anderson (1922–2017) American politician

Issues and Answers (9 March 1980)

People, Thinking, Country

“All my adult life I have seen British governments driven off their virtuous pursuit of low inflation by market problems or political pressures. I was under no illusions when I took Britain into the ERM. I said at the time that membership was no soft option. The soft option, the devaluer's option, the inflationary option, that would in my opinion be a betrayal of Britain's future.”

John Major (1943) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Robin Oakley, "Major rejects devaluation as betrayal of the future", The Times, 11 September 1992.
Speech to the Scottish CBI, 10 September 1992, six days before Black Wednesday when the Pound was forced out of the ERM.
1990s, 1992

Life, Betrayal, Time, Future

“The most important questions of life… are indeed for the most part only problems of probability.”

Pierre-Simon Laplace book Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)
Context: The most important questions of life... are indeed for the most part only problems of probability. Strictly speaking it may even be said that nearly all our knowledge is problematical; and in the small number of things which we are able to know with certainty, even in the mathematical sciences themselves, the principal means for ascertaining truth—induction and analogy—are based on probabilities.<!--p.1

Life, Question, Parting

“No more useful inquiry can be proposed than that which seeks to determine the nature and the scope of human knowledge. … This investigation should be undertaken once at least in his life by anyone who has the slightest regard for truth, since in pursuing it the true instruments of knowledge and the whole method of inquiry come to light. But nothing seems to me more futile than the conduct of those who boldly dispute about the secrets of nature … without yet having ever asked even whether human reason is adequate to the solution of these problems.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

Rules for the Direction of the Mind in Key Philosophical Writings (1997), pp. 29-30 http://books.google.com/books?id=jjWPe-9NPoEC&pg=PA29

Life, Truth, Secret, Nature

“Some voices are calling on America to circle the wagons. Some are even saying that our enemies do worse, so we should respond in kind. The problem here is that this is America. This is a constitutional republic based on the rule of law and equal respect for all persons. We can’t pretend that we can bend the rules any which way.”

Michael Ignatieff (1947) professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former Canadian politician

From "Living Fearlessly in a Fearless World" Ignatieff Commencement Address to Whitman College (USA), 2004

Law, Way, Personality

“Wonder, Carlyle declared, is the beginning of philosophy. It is not wonder, but rather the social enthusiasm which revolts from the sordidness of mean streets and the joylessness of withered lives, that is the beginning of economic science. Here, if in no other field, Comte's great phrase holds good: "It is for the heart to suggest our problems; it is for the intellect to solve them…. The only position for which the intellect is primarily adapted is to be the servant of the social sympathies."”

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959) British economist

Source: The Economics of Welfare (1920), Ch. 1 : Welfare and Economic Welfare, § 1

Science, Heart

“The toughest problem a draft resister faces is not how to immigrate but whether he really wants to. And only you can answer that. For yourself. That's what Nuremberg was all about.”

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

Page 6.
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada (1968)

“They have fundamentally different problems than other people.”

Chris Murphy (1973) American politician

On Washington politicians, "Chris Murphy: ‘Soul-Crushing’ Fundraising Is Bad For Congress" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/chris-murphy-fundraising_n_3232143.html, Huffington Post, 7 May 2013.

People

“Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 4, Manipulation

“By the time of Hippocrates of Chios the scope of Greek geometry was no longer even limited to the Elements; certain special problems were also attacked which were beyond the power of the geometry of the straight line and circle, and which were destined to play a great part in determining the direction taken by Greek geometry in its highest flights. The main problems in question were three: (1) the doubling of the cube, (2) the trisection of any angle, (3) the squaring of the circle; and from the time of Hippocrates onwards the investigation of these problems proceeded pari passu with the completion of the body of the Elements.”

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

p, 125
Achimedes (1920)

Question, Time, Parting

“I always felt, in looking at [the Cuban] situation, that it was wrong. And I now know why. It came to me one night in Mexico. China is communist, the same as Cuba, and yet we have no problem trading with China. In fact, today we can't get over there quick enough. The difference is simple: China welcomes our corporations. Cuba threw them out. It's a basic decision of corporate America: We will punish Cuba because Castro stuck it to us by nationalizing everything after he came to power. What other reason could there be? China is far more powerful but we now welcome them into global trade with open arms—as we should—while we continue this bitter, hostile policy towards Cuba. It must be because there are still people alive in the corporate world who got hammered by Fidel's revolution.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 6 (p. 111)

Hostility, People, World, Decision

“Problems connected with political boundaries have frequently elicited the interest of geographers. In all countries with chronic or acute boundary problems the geographers are drawn into the general discussion, more or less as experts, and in some cases the professional geographer has actually been called upon to assist in the determination and demarcation of boundaries.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Hartshorne (1933) " Geographic and political boundaries in Upper Silesia http://piotrwroblewski.us.edu.pl/rudy/Richard_Hartshorne.pdf" in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1933), p. 195

Country

“The mismatch problem occurs as the workers required by companies for their vacancies are difficult to fill up due to shortage of talents in the labor pool. An Asian Development Bank study said labor mismatch is one of the culprits behind the country’s slow economic growth and that the mismatch may be caused by too many highly educated people chasing too few jobs in the country.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Philippine Star http://www.philstar.com/education-and-home/784501/govt-needs-redirect-skills-devt-program-address-unemployment-escudero-says 2012

People, Education, Study, Country

“The term "free software" has an ambiguity problem: an unintended meaning, "Software you can get for zero price," fits the term just as well as the intended meaning, "software which gives the user certain freedoms."”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

We address this problem by publishing a more precise definition of free software, but this is not a perfect solution; it cannot completely eliminate the problem. An unambiguously correct term would be better, if it didn't have other problems.
1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)

Freedom

“This conviction of the solvability of every mathematical problem is a powerful incentive to the worker. We hear within us the perpetual call: There is the problem. Seek its solution. You can find it by pure reason, for in mathematics there is no ignorabimus.”

David Hilbert Mathematical Problems

Mathematical Problems (1900)

Mathematics

“There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

When asked to define the economic policy of the Bush administration in a BuzzFlash interview http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/09/11_krugman.html, 11 September 2003

Quotes about problems page 34

Quotes about problems
page 34