Quotes about trouble
page 12

Diana, Princess of Wales photo
Victor Villaseñor photo
Eric Hobsbawm photo

“Happiness ( a term which caused its definers almost as much trouble as its pursuers) was each individual's supreme object; the greatest happiness of the greatest number was plainly the aim of society”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Source: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 13, Ideology: Secular

Gabriele Münter photo
Paul McCartney photo

“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

"Yesterday", from Help! (1965)
Lyrics, The Beatles

Anthony Burgess photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“Well, they’re going to elect that Stupid Hoover, and he’s going to have some trouble. He’s going to have to spend money, but it won’t be enough. Then the Democrats will come in. But they don’t know anything about money.”

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

To Secret Service agent Edmund Starling, as quoted in The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself https://books.google.com/books?id=1PdtAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22+Well,+they%E2%80%99re+going+to+elect+that+Superman+Hoover,+and+he%E2%80%99s+going+to+have+some+trouble.+He%E2%80%99s+going+to+have+to+spend+money,+but+it+won%E2%80%99t+be+enough.+Then+the+Democrats+will+come+in.+But+they+don%E2%80%99t+know+anything+about+money.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiz78rvs-3MAhVG8j4KHYm9AxAQ6AEIKjAC#v=onepage&q=%22know%20anything%20about%20money%22&f=false (2014), by James Grant

Donald J. Trump photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Roger Ebert photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
George William Russell photo
Albert Einstein photo
David Brin photo
Larry the Cable Guy photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Eugène Delacroix photo
William H. Gass photo
Wassily Leontief photo
William H. McNeill photo
Stanley Baldwin photo

“I have seldom spoken with greater regret, for my lips are not yet unsealed. Were these troubles over I would make a case, and I guarantee that not a man would go into the Lobby against us.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1935/dec/10/debate-on-the-address in the House of Commons (10 December 1935) on the Abyssinian crisis.
1935

Stanley Holloway photo

“It caused quite a stir when the Captain arrived
To ‘find out the cause of the trouble’
And every man there, all excepting Old Sam,
Was full of excitement and bubble.”

Stanley Holloway (1890–1982) English stage and film actor, comedian, singer, poet and monologist

Sam, Sam, Pick Oop Tha' Musket

Hillary Clinton photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“The habit of using ardent spirit, by men in public office, has occasioned more injury to the public service, and more trouble to me, than any other circumstance which has occurred in the internal concerns of the country, during my administration. And were I to commence my administration again, with the knowledge which from experience I have acquired, the first question which I would ask, with regard to every candidate for public office, should be, "Is he addicted to the use of ardent spirit?"”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Attributed by an unnamed "distinguished officer of the United States Government" in the Sixth Report of the American Temperance Society, May, 1833, pp. 10-11 http://books.google.com/books?id=h_c0wbAOQ5kC&pg=PA237&dq=%22The+habit+of+using+ardent+spirit%22.
Later variant: Were I to commence my administration again,... the first question I would ask respecting a candidate would be, "Does he use ardent spirits?"
Attributed

Ann Coulter photo
Bernard Cornwell photo
Steven Brust photo
Oskar R. Lange photo
Jean-François Millet photo

“In the morning we saw that the sea was rough, and people said there would be trouble.... Fifty men volunteered to go at once, and followed the old sailor without a word. We descended the cliffs to the beach, and there we saw a terrible sight : several vessels rushing, one after the other, at fearful speed, upon our rocks. Our men put three boats out to sea, but before they had rowed ten strokes one boat sank, another was upset by a huge breaker, while a third was thrown upon the beach.... The sea threw up hundreds of corpses, as well as quantities of cargo... Then came a fourth, fifth and sixth vessel, all of which were lost with their crew and cargo alike, upon the rocks. The tempest was furious... The next morning.... As I was passing by a hollow in the cliff, I saw a large sail spread, as I thought, over a bale of merchandise. I lifted the sail and saw a heap of corpses. I was so frightened that I ran home, and found my mother and grandmother on their knees, praying for the shipwrecked sailors.”

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) French painter

Quote c. 1870; cited by Julia Cartwright in Jean Francois Millet, his Life and Letters, Swan Sonnenschein en Co, Lim. London / The Macmillian Company, New York; second edition, September 1902, p. 22
taken from Millet's youth-memories, about the years he lived as an boy close to the wild coast of Normandy, written down on request of his friend and later biographer Alfred Sensier
1870 - 1875

Lord Dunsany photo
Arundhati Roy photo
Ken Wilber photo
Jean Chrétien photo

“If heretics no longer horrify us today, as they once did our forefathers, is it certain that it is because there is more charity in our hearts? Or would it not too often be, perhaps, without our daring to say so, because the bone of contention, that is to say, the very substance of our faith, no longer interests us? Men of too familiar and too passive a faith, perhaps for us dogmas are no longer the Mystery on which we live, the Mystery which is to be accomplished in us. Consequently then, heresy no longer shocks us; at least, it no longer convulses us like something trying to tear the soul of our souls away from us…. And that is why we have no trouble in being kind to heretics, and no repugnance in rubbing shoulders with them.

In reality, bias against ‘heretics’ is felt today just as it used to be. Many give way to it as much as their forefathers used to do. Only, they have turned it against political adversaries. Those are the only ones with whom they refuse to mix. Sectarianism has only changed its object and taken other forms, because the vital interest has shifted. Should we dare to say that this shifting is progress?

It is not always charity, alas, which has grown greater, or which has become more enlightened: it is often faith, the taste for the things of eternity, which has grown less. Injustice and violence are still reigning; but they are now in the service of degraded passions.”

Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) Jesuit theologian and cardinal

Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), pp. 226-227

George Soros photo
Robert T. Bakker photo

“Most experts have assumed that the allosaurs, about 35 feet long, were the worst threats to the herbivores of the Jurassic, some of which were gigantic and probably able to fend off even an allosaur. But epanterias would have spelled trouble for everyone.”

Robert T. Bakker (1945) American paleontologist

As quoted in Malcolm W. Browne, Scientist Raises Question: Is Tyrannosaurus Still Rex? http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/04/us/scientist-raises-question-is-tyrannosaurus-still-rex.html, The New York Times (January 4, 1990)

Steve Keen photo

“This ascendancy of economic theory has not made the world a better place. Instead, it has made an already troubled society worse: more unequal, more unstable, and less 'efficient.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Preface, p. xiv
Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Warren Buffett photo

“The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble… We want to buy them when they're on the operating table.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_27/b3636006.htm "Homespun Wisdom from the 'Oracle of Omaha'" Businessweek (5 July 1999)
Quotes from the press

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce photo
Gene Wolfe photo
David D. Friedman photo
George Herbert photo

“354. He that hath no ill fortune is troubled with good.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Max Boot photo
Honoré de Balzac photo

“A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.
And there are terrors, fears, and hesitations — trouble and storm in the love of a woman of thirty years, never to be found in a young girl's love. At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself, or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young girl can only make moan.”

La jeune fille n'a qu'une coquetterie, et croit avoir tout dit quand elle a quitté son vêtement; mais la femme en a d'innombrables et se cache sous mille voiles; enfin elle caresse toutes les vanités, et la novice n'en flatte qu'une. Il s'émeut d'ailleurs des indécisions, des terreurs, des craintes, des troubles et des orages chez la femme de trente ans, qui ne se rencontrent jamais dans l'amour d'une jeune fille.Arrivée à cet âge, la femme demande à un jeune homme de lui restituer l'estime qu'elle lui a sacrifiée; elle ne vit que pour lui, s'occupe de son avenir, lui veut une belle vie, la lui ordonne glorieuse; elle obéit, elle prie et commande, s'abaisse et s'élève, et sait consoler en mille occasions, où la jeune fille ne sait que gémir.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. III: At Thirty Years.

Natália Correia photo

“A dark and troubled abstention:
Put a flower for me in the most secret garden
In a horizon of grace and clarity
Which was untouchable and next.A static promise in the light of the moon
Of the density which was corporal in me.
It is not the fault, it is the memory
Of the first morning of the sin
Without Eve and Adam.Only the proven fruit
And the rolled serpent
In my loneliness.”

Natália Correia (1923–1993) Portuguese writer

Uma obscura e inquieta castidade:
pôs uma flor para mim no jardim mais secreto
num horizonte de graça e claridade
intangível e perto.<p>Promessa estática no luar
da densidade em mim corpórea.
não é a culpa, é a memoria
da primeira manhã do pecado
sem Eva e sem Adão.<p>Só o fruto provado
e a serpente enroscada
na minha solidão.
Obscura Castidade (Dark Abstention).

“Once launched into some activity, conceiving of himself as an instrument of God’s will, the ascetic did not stop to ask about the meaning of it all. On the contrary, the more furious his activity, the more the problem of what his activity meant receded from his mind. … To meet the demands of the day was as near as one could come to doing the pious thing, in this—God’s—world. To trouble about meaning was really an impiety and, of course, frivolous, because futile. For the question of meaning, therefore, neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic type feels responsible, if his spiritual discipline has been successful. The recently fashionable religious talk of “ultimate concern” makes no sense either in the ascetic or in the therapeutic mode. To try to relate “ultimate concern” to everyday behavior would be exhausting and nerve-shattering work; indeed, it could effectively inhibit less grandiose kinds of work. Neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic bothers his head about “ultimate concern.” Such a concern is for mystics who cannot otherwise enjoy their leisure. In the workaday world, there are no ultimate concerns, only present ones. Therapy is the respite of every day, during which the importance of the present is learned, and the existence of what in the ascetic tradition came to be called the “ultimate” or “divine” is unlearned.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

Russ Feingold photo

“In 2001, I first voted against the PATRIOT Act because much of it was simply an FBI wish list that included provisions allowing our government to go on fishing expeditions that collect information on virtually anyone. Today’s report indicates that the government could be using FISA in an indiscriminate way that does not balance our legitimate concerns of national security with the necessity to preserve our fundamental civil rights. This is deeply troubling. I hope today’s news will renew a serious conversation about how to protect the country while ensuring that the rights of law-abiding Americans are not violated.”

Russ Feingold (1953) Wisconsin politician; three-term U.S. Senator

Following revelations that the National Security Agency was receiving phone records belonging to millions of Verizon customers on a daily basis, in [Terkel, Amanda, Watch The One Senator Who Voted Against The Patriot Act Warn What Would Happen (VIDEO), https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/07/russ-feingold-patriot-act-speech_n_3402878.html, 20 August 2018, The Huffington Post, June 7, 2013]
2013

Koenraad Elst photo
Alan Clark photo

“The trouble with Michael [Heseltine] is that he had to buy his own furniture”

Alan Clark (1928–1999) British politician

Attributed by Clark in his diaries to Michael Jopling. The full quote is "An arriviste, certainly, who can't shoot straight and in Jopling's damning phrase 'bought all his own furniture', but who at any rate seeks the cachet. All the nouves in the party think he is the real thing." https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/aug/07/bbc.politicsandthemedia
Misattributed

Dorothy L. Sayers photo

“Lord Peter Wimsey: Trouble shared is trouble halved.”

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) English crime writer, playwright, essayist and Christian writer

The Five Red Herrings (1931)

Orison Swett Marden photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo
Hannah Arendt photo
Natalie Merchant photo

“trouble me
disturb me with all your cares and you worries
trouble me
on the days when you feel spent”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Song lyrics, Blind Man's Zoo (1989), Trouble Me

Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“The trouble now is that most of the wife-beating is among the extremely poor, so that the wife by informing against her husband, takes the last crust out of her own mouth.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Interview with the Chicago Times, Feb. 14, 1881.

Cormac McCarthy photo
Molière photo

“I always make the first verse well, but I have trouble making the others.”

Molière (1622–1673) French playwright and actor

Je fais toujours bien le premier vers: mais j'ai peine à faire les autres.
'Les Précieuses Ridicules (1659), Act I, sc. xi

Lucian photo

“The trouble with theorists is, they never pay attention to the experiments!”

Valentine Telegdi (1922–2006) American physicist

as quoted by [Richard Feynman, "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!": adventures of a curious character, W. W. Norton, 1985, 0393316041, 253]
Attributed

Henrik Ibsen photo

“I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it.”

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) American artist

Source: Anne Middleton Wagner (1996) Three Artists (three Women):: Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe. p. 154.

Vytautas Juozapaitis photo
Jacob Bronowski photo
Nathanael Greene photo

“Don't go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability–whether they are easily measured or not.”

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

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: Ramage Magnus and Karen Shipp (2009) Systems Thinkers. p. 116
1990s and attributed

Robert M. Pirsig photo
Michael Chabon photo
John Byrom photo

“My spirit longs for Thee,
Within my troubled breast,
Though I unworthy be
Of so divine a Guest.”

John Byrom (1692–1763) Poet, inventor of a shorthand system

"The Desponding Soul's Wish" (also called "My Spirit Longs For Thee")
Miscellaneous Poems (1773)

Jean Henri Fabre photo

“We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn't care about China. If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble.”

Liu Chuanzhi (1944) Chinese businessman

Lenovo: Apple is losing out in China http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/604d1d54-87b9-11df-9f37-00144feabdc0.html in Financial Times Tech Hub (4 July 2010)

Thurgood Marshall photo
Bill Hicks photo
Jacques Plante photo
James Frazer photo
Eddie Mair photo

“Do you have any trouble sleeping at night? [Reply] No, sir. I sleep very well.”

Eddie Mair (1965) Scottish broadcaster

Question to the Sudanese ambassador concerning the government's complicit stance towards Janjaweed atrocities in Darfur[citation needed]
From PM and Broadcasting House

Huldrych Zwingli photo

“You should knot that a certain Franciscan from France, whose name indeed was Franz, was here not many days since and had such conversation with me concerning the Scriptural basis for the doctrine of the adoration of the saints and their intercession for us. He was not able to convince me with the assistance of a single passage of Scripture that the saints do pray for us, as he had with a great deal of assurance boasted he should do. At last he went to Basel, where he recounted the affair in an entirely different way from the reality - in fact he lied about it. So it seemed good to me to let you know about these things that you might not be ignorant of that Cumaean lion, if perchance he should ever turn your way.
There followed within six days another strife with our brethren preachers of the [different orders in Zurich, especially with the Augustinians]. Finally the burgonmaster and the Council appointed for them three commissioners on whom this was enjoined - that Aquinas and the rest of the doctors of that class being put aside they should base their arguments alone upon those sacred writings which are contained in the Bible. This troubled those beasts so much that one brother, the father reader of the order of Preachers [i. e., the Dominicans] cut loose from us, and we wept - as one weeps when a cross-grained and rich stepmother has departed this life. Meanwhile there are those who threaten, but God will turn the evil upon His enemies.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter July 30th to Rhenanus ibid, p.170-171

David Allen photo

“Defaulting to ur psyche as ur system instead of an objective one makes maintaining the system too much trouble.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

14 January 2010 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/7740792975
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Jerome K. Jerome photo
Enoch Powell photo
B.K.S. Iyengar photo
Richard A. Posner photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Van Morrison photo

“Have I told you lately that I love you?
Have I told you there's no one above you?
Fill my heart with gladness,
Take away my sadness,
Ease my troubles, that's what you do.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Have I Told You Lately
Song lyrics, Avalon Sunset (1989)

Louis Kronenberger photo

“The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.”

Louis Kronenberger (1904–1980) American critic and writer

"The Spirit of the Age", p. 18.
Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1954)

Louis Kronenberger photo

“The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.”

Louis Kronenberger (1904–1980) American critic and writer

Source: Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1954), p. 26.

Glen Cook photo
Ann Coulter photo
Tim Powers photo