Quotes About Challenges

When the solution to a given problem doesn't lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong.

Even in the best of times, life aboard a seventeenth-century privateering ship was a challenging and claustrophobic experience. The fact that a community of a hundred or more people could survive on the open seas for months at a time, in a vessel with dimensions not much larger than a tennis court, should go down as one of the great achievements in our long history of creating life-sustaining habitats in fundamentally inhospitable environments.

Semmelweis was derided and dismissed not just for daring to propose that doctors wash their hands; he was derided and dismissed for proposing that doctors wash their hands if they wanted to deliver babies and dissect corpses in the same afternoon. This

We tend to think of grand organizations like corporations or empires coming about through deliberate human planning: designing the conceptual architecture for each imposing structure, brick by brick. But the shape an institution ultimately takes is not so much designed in advance by a master engineer as it is carved away by challenges to its outer boundaries, the way a coastline is partly formed by an endless battering of much smaller waves.

But the finest minds of the era were also devoted to an equally pressing question: What are we going to do with all of this shit?

The United States is in a tough spot.

Here, we want to break that mission statement down into smaller chunks, dividing up the impossible into a long series of difficult but doable goals that, if accomplished, render said impossible much more probable.

Flow is an alternative path toward mastery, but, like any path, not without its pitfalls. There's a serious dark side to flow

Spending time with her father was like showering with a cheese grate - it got more painful each time.

Todo el mundo le había rechazado, obstaculizado o se había opuesto a él.

A great principle of moral advancement, on par with Love thy neighbor and All men are created equal, is the one on the bumper sticker: Shit happens.

The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.

Eisner, together with the historian Randolph Roth, notes that crime often shoots up in decades in which people question their society and government, including the American Civil War, the 1960s, and post-Soviet Russia.33

Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right.

Each of the pathways to nuclear terrorism, when examined carefully, turns out to have gantlets of improbabilities.

Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.")

The African AIDS dip is a reminder that progress is not an escalator that inexorably raises the well-being of every human everywhere all the time.

No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better

To acknowledge that the lives of the lower and middle classes of developed countries have improved in recent decades is not to deny the formidable problems facing 21st-century economies.

Beneficial historical developments often create losers together with the winners, and the apparent economic losers of globalization (namely the lower classes of rich countries) are often said to be the supporters of authoritarian populism. For

Recall that intelligence is the pursuit of goals in the face of obstacles.

Not every problem is a crisis, a plague, or an epidemic, and among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them.

A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with "Love thy neighbor" and "All men are created equal," is the one on the bumper sticker: "Shit happens.

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, You gotta understand, It's just our bringin' up-ke, That gets us out of hand. Our mothers all are junkies, Our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!