Quotes About Challenge

We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.

The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.

You may be right after all, I said to him in the kitchen. You may be right, but you'll never win. I think the opposite, he smiled, stirring the pot from which a wonderful aroma of rogan josh arose. We may turn out to be wrong, but we have already won.

We have journeyed to a place from which it looks unlikely that we can return, at least not without some kind of serious rupture with the past - social, political, economic and ideological.

De repente, los comunistas se encontraron en la extraordinaria posición, que los críticos calificaron de absurda, de tener que gobernar a un pueblo y al mismo tiempo fomentar la revolución.

I know it ain't easy. But finally you got to let the hope of easy just go and think about what you need to do. How you can just be right. For yourself and most of all for that child.

People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.... Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.

To become a doctor, you spend so much time in the tunnels of preparation--head down, trying not to screw up, just going from one day to the next--that it is a shock to find yourself at the other end, with someone shaking your hand and offering you a job. But the day comes.

And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

Tears wet my eyes. I'm a surgeon. I like solving things. But how do I solve this?

The problem is that the wise course is so frequently unclear. For a long while, I thought that this was simply because of uncertainty. When it is hard to know what will happen, it is hard to know what to do. But the challenge, I've come to see, is more fundamental than that. One has to decide whether one's fears or one's hopes are what should matter most.

I'm in dread of what would happen if she becomes too hard for me to care for," he said. "I try not to think too far ahead. I don't think about next year. It's too depressing. I just think about next week." It's the route people the world over take, and that is understandable. But it tends to backfire. Eventually, the crisis they dreaded arrived

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered. The

I had little hope of succeeding.

operation I believe that with enough will and effort I can beat the odds.

The rest of the night went no better.

That's how a doctor earns money, she told me. It's a war with insurance, every step of the way.

I never made it to the other side.

Culture has tremendous inertia," he said. "That's why it's culture. It works because it lasts. Culture strangles innovation in the crib." To combat the inertia, he decided they should go up against the resistance directly—"hit it hard," Thomas said.

Thinking about averting plane crashes in 1935, or stopping infections of central lines in 2003, or rescuing drowning victims today, I realized that the key problem in each instance was essentially a simple one, despite the number of contributing factors.

Alice insisted the accelerator had got stuck. She thought of herself as a good driver and hated the idea that anyone would think that the problem was her age. The body's decline creeps like a vine. Day to day, the changes can be imperceptible. You adapt. Then something happens that finally makes it clear that things are no longer the same. The falls didn't do it. The car accident didn't do it. Instead, it was a scam that did. Not long after the car accident, Alice

And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained? In

But somewhere along the way things started to go wrong.

two months before he left the hospital. Weak and debilitated, he lost his limousine business and his home