Critical Issues Quotes

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

People know more about baseball players' contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our children's lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, 'Do you want to bring a child into this world?' That's pretty dire.

Instead of more talk about salmon and high-speed rails, more criticism of the Supreme Court or more praise for the Soviet's Sputnik mission - President Obama should use his State of the Union Address to tell the American people the truth about the fundamental financial challenges our country faces.

No easy problems ever come to the President. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them.

Mr. Trump needs to show how he will address the critical issues on the minds of Americans: national security and economic opportunity for hardworking American families. Americans need to see more vision and less trash talk.

So when we're really addressing issues like poverty, you can't do that without addressing the real driver of some of those, which is stable homes, families. So that's why to me those issues are important. They're not frivolous. They're critical economic issues.

The most difficult issues—the toughest decisions—are the ones that invariably end up on the President’s desk.

Is it really that important? It's just television, for God's sake. It's not medicine or something.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid—in which case all comment is superfluous—or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

There are no painless solutions to this problem, but we’ve got to solve it.

I feel it's important to talk about the complex issues affecting us.

Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has been the critical decisive vote on many issues that go to the heart of who we are as a nation.

If you are able to state a problem - any problem - and if it is important enough, then the problem can be solved.

In the absence of wake-up calls, many of us never really confront the critical issues of life.

As surgeon general I always seemed to be issuing a "Surgeon General's Warning" about one thing after another that threatened the health of the American people: cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, AIDS, Reye's syndrome, violence, and a host of others. In each case I had to be certain that the science behind the health warning was impeccable and able to withstand the critics who sought to dismiss the warnings. But I also needed to ensure that the science made sense on a personal level. I had to listen to the American people as well as to talk (sternly) to them.

Jokes aside, let us turn to serious matters.

I hope that we can continue this cooperation on other critical issues related to America's future technological competitiveness. We must work together to encourage the creative talents that have made our country the world leader in technology.

What are the important problems of your field?

The most successful people in life are the ones who settle their critical issues early and manage them daily.

The subject we talk of is the eye of England: if there be a speck or two in the eye, we endeavor to take them off; he would be a strange oculist, who should pull out the eye.”

Most people in Iraq talk of democracy and don’t know what it is … Most do not know what Human Rights is. We need a lot of training… Time is critical.

What I wanted was for everyone listening to understand that these things mattered - not necessarily for me, but in this particular forum they mattered in terms of whether of not we were getting a person who should sit on the Supreme Court.

We currently have a government planning to go to Mars, heal broken marriages, and build bridges to nowhere - and also one that cannot wage a war competently, cannot respond to a hurricane adequately, and cannot enforce borders. Is it too much to ask that it get the basic things right before embarking on grandiose schemes?

We are the greatest country in the world but we are facing serious issues.

Peace congresses often start by dealing with some of the less important questions in excessive detail, so at the end there is no time to discuss the most important problems.