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Quotes for the week of February 18, 2007 - Problems
"The measure of our intellectual capacity is the capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems." - C. W. Churchman
"Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are twelve passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?" - Gustave Flaubert
"The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown." - Carl Jung
"Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates." Dwight Eisenhower, State of the Union address, 1961
"The functions of an executive are to create and enforce policies rather than to work out problems resulting from such policies." - Louis F. Musil
"We are fortunate to live in such interesting times, we have a ringside seat for the fall of western civilization - the only problem is that it is inside the ring." - Robert A. Nelson
"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort." - Herm Albright
"Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible and wrong." - H. L. Mencken
"When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health. If everything is simply jake, then you're frightened of death." - J. P. Donleavy
"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated." - Poul William Anderson
"The primary question about life after death is not whether it is a fact, but even if it is, what problems that really solves." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it was not the small pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Noel Adams
"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace." - Thomas Mann
"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem; it is generally employed only by small children and large nations." - David Friedman
"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them." - Laurence Peter
"I don't want to be a genius - I have enough problems just trying to be a man." - Albert Camus
"If the world were extremely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. That makes it hard to plan the day." - William Allen White
"The only real problem in life is what to do next." - Arthur C. Clarke
"People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not." - Neil Postman
"My biggest problem is what to do about all the things I can't do anything about." - Ashleigh Brilliant
"There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives." - Scott Adams
"You can't run away from trouble. There ain't no place that far." - Uncle Remus
"They say a reasonable amount 'o fleas is good fer a dog - keeps him from broodin' over bein' a dog, mebbe." - Edward Westcott
"Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive." - Josephine Hart
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