Quotes About Solutions

Detroit is a fascinating place, because things are so bad there that the dystopia has almost become utopian. People know they can't rely on the state, that public infrastructure is broken, and they've taken their own measures. People are growing their own food and selling their produce to local stores and restaurants. It's certainly not a fix-all; Detroit's problems are too deep-rooted for quick-fix solutions. But it's a hopeful sign. Detroiters are crafting their own solutions rather than being passive in the face of the city's and state's actions and inactions.

Most "original" ideas aren't completely original, but instead are the result of two basic methods for generating ideas: problems in search of solutions and solutions in search of problems.

It's endlessly interesting to be organizing and hearing possible solutions or thinking of possible solutions and how to put efforts together. It makes everything else boring, actually.

I tell my graduate students [at Bard College], ‘There are two ways to change the world: through policy, or through sustainable business.’ With sustainable business, individuals build solutions within the current system… Sustainable business asks, ‘How would nature do this?’

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

Many times when I stop working on a problem consciously, my mind continues to work on it below the surface. Often solutions come on me quite by surprise. I've learned over time to allow that to happen, rather than to feel that I can simply solve the problem by continuous, grueling effort.

State problems should involve state solutions.

Imagination is actually a form of computation. Imagination gives calculated and instinctive solutions for the future.

Getting over those unexpected hurdles may not be exactly enjoyable, but ultimately I believe that such challenges and the solutions we find give us more confidence.They teach us with common sense and determination we can turn what looks like a disaster into a triumph.

I DECLARE God is going before me making crooked places straight. He has already lined up the right people, the right opportunities and solutions to problems I haven't had. No person, no sickness, no disappointment, can stop His plan. What he promised will come to pass.

Most problems are caused by solutions.

Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.

Ever more people are alert to the challenge of global poverty and global warming. We know that solutions are at hand. We will not sleepwalk into catastrophe. We have the capacity to forsee and forestall, and I believe we will find the will to act

Lasting solutions are always difficult to come to. But they will have to persevere. I've been repeating ad nauseam that we in Burma we are weak with regard to the culture of negotiated compromises, that we have to develop the ability to achieve such compromises.

Political debate is of no interest to me. What I want are practical solutions.

It's much more effective to allow solutions to problems to emerge from the people close to the problem rather than to impose them from higher up.

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.

We use the Air Force analogy: there were expensive things they had to do to get a cockpit suitable for a lot of pilots, like wraparound windshields, but their initial solutions, when they realized average didn't work, were adjustable seats. How in the world did they not already have adjustable seats in their planes? We're looking for adjustable seats for education, for basic things that we can do.

We tend to think of politics as bad, full of dirty tricks, negative ads, big campaigns, but I am here to explore the original meaning of politics, which is positive and has to do with balancing competing interests and looking for solutions.

I will work on myself, since the work on myself is going to be the highest thing I can do for it all, since I understand that as man up-levels his own consciousness, he sees more creative solutions to the problems that he's confronting.

Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.

I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that's a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there's a culture of poverty. I know that I've seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they're systematically deprived, whether it's getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we're talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too.

If simple, painless solutions to public problems existed, they would have been found long ago.

I am afraid that I think both the near future environmental reality and political landscape are not looking good - and they are connected. The best tool we have for advancing environmental solutions is our democracy, and we can't currently access it because it has been so thoroughly hijacked by big corporate interests.

I have come to believe that politicians are in the business of 'marketing' their product to the public, by exaggerating threats and over-selling government solutions.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Liberals do not appear to address potential solutions with anything like the far right's aura of God-given self-confidence.

The greatest achievements in the science of this [twentieth] century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, it is likely that the twentieth century will be looked back at as the time when science provided the first close glimpse of the profundity of human ignorance. We have not reached solutions; we have only begun to discover how to ask questions.

I am working hard to provide solutions to meet a most pressing goal: preserving our way of life for our kids and grandkids.

The American people are a non-ideological people. They very much are looking for common-sense, practical solutions to the problems that they face. Oftentimes they've got contradictory senses of various issues and policy positions and I don't think that either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party necessarily capture their deepest dreams when those parties are described in caricature or in policy terms.

Everything has happened before - not once, but over and over again. We may not be able to solve our problems through what are pompously called "the lessons of history," but at least we should be able to recognize the issues and perhaps avoid some of the solutions that have failed in the past. And we can take heart in our own dilemma by realizing that other people in other times have survived worse.

I was blown away when I figured out that none of the great integrative moves that I studied came as a result of starting with a blank sheet of paper - as many innovation coaches suggest. Integrative solutions came directly from mining the existing models for the best of their nuggets. So I never start with a blank sheet of paper anymore.

Look for solutions, not problems.

It's just that it's mind-boggling to me how many people I encounter every day who are struggling to subsist on a diet of bad advice about fake solutions to nonexistent problems.

I'm a technological optimist in that I do believe that technology will provide solutions that will allow the world in 2050 to support 9 billion people at an acceptable standard of living. But I'm a political pessimist in that I am concerned about whether the science will be appropriately applied.

There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.

Eventually, we need to have computers that work differently from the way they do today and have for the past 60-plus years. We're capturing and generating increasingly massive amounts of data, but we can't make computers that keep up with it. One of the most promising solutions is to make computers that work more the way brains work.

The time horizon may be too long for sole reliance on market solutions - but perhaps the inventiveness of the financial services industry will prove me wrong that point!

My father always told me, 'Don't waste energy worrying about things you can't control. Spend your energy focusing on solutions'.

The best solution would be better strategies for more rapid economic growth and getting people jobs and increases in income. You should simply be clear about matching problems and solutions. If the problem is someone can't find a job because they don't have the skills and they need some retraining, extending emergency unemployment isn't going to solve that. You need the job training programs or the skills bills that come out of the House and are sitting in the Senate.

Jesus moved in a very poor world. People were seeking their own solutions. Many were helped - not that Jesus was helping - they were helped. And Jesus says again and again: "It is your faith that has healed you." When you have faith, compassion can pour into you. When you have faith, you are open to compassion.

The solutions to the problems of the distraught lower strata of society are problems that can only be solved in the context of an overall political, cultural, economic development.

Liberals have created, and the minority leadership has exploited, a community of dependent people, unaware of the true route to prosperity and happiness: self-reliance and self-investment. Instead, people are told that American is unjust, unfair, and full of disadvantages. They are told that their only hope is for government to fix their problems. What has happened is that generations of people have bought into this nonsense and as result have remained hopelessly mired in poverty and despair -- because the promised solutions don't work. And they will never work -- they never have.

The main point is that I think if we want the Earth to survive and everybody to have a positive future, we have to stop thinking in terms of religions and races. We have to face that we are all on the planet Earth together, and we have to figure out how we all survive. It makes no sense if we are all driving hybrid cars, but China pumps massive amounts of CO2 in the air. If we don't start working together and find solutions - if every country thinks only in terms of, "First we, then the other nations" - then we will fail.

True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.

I spend most of my time in my head. You can always work out solutions and satisfactions there. Maybe you can't actually bring them about, but there's usually a pleasant pillow of time between imagining you can, and realizing you cannot.

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.