Intractable Problems Quotes

The question for the anointed is not knowledge but compassion, commitment, and other such subjective factors which supposedly differentiate themselves from other people. The refrain of the anointed is we already know the answers, there’s no need for more studies, and the kinds of questions raised by those with other views are just stalling and obstructing progress. “Solutions” are out there waiting to be found, like eggs at an Easter egg hunt. Intractable problems with painful trade-offs are simply not part of the vision of the anointed. Problems exists only because other people are not as wise or as caring, or not as imaginative and bold, as the anointed.

All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency.

India's water challenges are intractable, messy and perennial.

I give people ideas on how to solve intractable problems.

... the most insoluble problems are those which by their very nature can have no space within them for dreams.

There are some problems on this planet that seem to be intractable.

There are sometimes problems for which there is no immediate solution, and there are sometimes problems for which there is no solution.

More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.

The problems for which I could find no solution in fact had no solution.

Sometimes, there isn't any way to compromise." - Eclipse, page 607

Honest error in the face of complex and possibly intractable problems is a far more important source of bad results than are bad motives.

A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all.

There are many people who want simple solutions, but there are none ... nor will there be.

The issues of the day have never seemed more complicated, and yet the conversations over how to solve them increasingly resemble cars passing down a divided highway. Whizzing by without a glance.