Systemic Challenges Quotes

Changing things is not easy, and I say this without any irony. It is not that someone does not want to, but because it is a hard thing to do. Take Obama, a forward-thinking man, a liberal, a democrat. Did he not pledge to shut down Guantanamo before his election? But did he do it? No, he did not. And may I ask why not? Did he not want to do it? He wanted to, I am sure he did, but it did not work out. He sincerely wanted to do it, but did not succeed, since it turned out to be very complicated.

First of all we have to recognize that despite all the problems - and in some cases failures - that this regime has been much more successful, much more resilient, than people had anticipated.

I look at the problem of the twenty-two million Afro-Americans as being a problem that's so broad in scope that it's almost impossible for any organization to see it in its entirety.

Afghanistan has other enormous challenges as well, including a political system that is still very much developing, although there has been some progress in the past several years.

A Dalit needs Jupiter's escape velocity to achieve success.

For a woman to direct a movie in Hollywood, she has to go through so many layers of rejection by the powers that be - I suppose including myself - that it is harder to get to that point. So you can't just create something. And I think there is a whole unconscious mountain.

I made the wrong decision myself in my career. I tried to battle against the system. I should have never done that, but I didn't have anybody else who showed me how to do it before. I did everything on instinct.

Everything that we believe in and count on is really in question right now. Our safety net, public education, housing, health care, so many things that are fundamental to a healthy democracy, are under attack. So I think, in general we've got a lot of work to do.

Democracies have to be careful that they do not become so process-driven.

The problems of financing the universities and their intellectual freedom, threatened by political and bureaucratic interference, are problems which are invariant under the ism transformations: socialism, communism, capitalism, or any other ism or ology.

What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain...To contemplate its girth and its circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible. The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways.

No single institution or effort can effectively create solutions for societal problems.

Many problems are so complex that even if we had the money to fix them, we wouldn't know how to do it. Fixing inner-city schools, reducing obesity, creating peace in the Middle East are just a few examples.

I would say this, I'll go back to those black ladies I was talking about who love them some Barack and love Michelle even more - and by the way, they are not middle-aged anymore, because I'm now middle-aged. So they're a little bit older. As fervent as they were, as excited and happy as they were when I was elected, they had to go to work the next morning. They still had trouble paying those bills. They might have still had a son who was in trouble with the law or couldn't get a job because of a felony record. They didn't stop being grounded.