Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.

Encouragement to all women is – let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let’s see if we can’t prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.

I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

That’s the biggest gift I can give anybody: ‚Wake up, be aware of who you are, what you’re doing and what you can do to prevent yourself from becoming ill.‘

If two smart, intelligent, clever guys sit together on a table, and you both want the same, where can be the problem? We all want to be successful.

If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

I used to worry about every little thing, trying to figure out every problem. Well, I realize now how foolish that was. I was no more in control of my life than the man on the moon.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

Employers and business leaders need people who can think for themselves – who can take initiative and be the solution to problems.

I am a normal guy from the Black Forest, and I do not compare myself with the geniuses.

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

There’s an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Sometimes if you got a problem deep rooted in your life, it takes a little bit of time to overcome it in that area.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

If I’ve got a problem with one of my clients that needs to get solved, guess what I’m going to do? I’m going to call them up, and I’m going to say, ‚Hey, here’s what’s going on. This is the situation. This thing went sideways. I didn’t expect it. Now it’s going to take me some more time to get you what you need.‘ But I’m going to do that upfront.

Solutions are not the answer.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime. I’ve came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.

It’s not about changing people; it’s sometimes about changing a situation. How can we build an even better situation for them?

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.

I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

Journalists are usually quite jealous people, especially of intellectuals who are supposed to be in fashion.

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

As long as you blame someone or something else – something outside you that’s bigger than you are – as the source of your problems, the problems won’t get solved.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

I’ve seen how the issues that come across a president’s desk are always the hard ones – the problems where no amount of data or numbers will get you to the right answer.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

I’m of the school of thought where if you can’t sort something out for yourself then no one can help you.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.