Intractable Quotes

#1. The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological-social-psychological-economic system . We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.

Donella Meadows

#2. Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.

Muhammad Yunus

#3. My goals over the decade include to develop new drugs to treat intractable diseases by using iPS cell technology and to conduct clinical trials using it on a few patients with Parkinson's diseases, diabetes or blood diseases.

Shinya Yamanaka

#4. The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.

Hilary Mantel

#5. We get the worrywart, the hypochondriac, the money-grubbing miser, the intractable negotiator ... Some would say certain of these refer to the stereotypical, or 'stage' Jew. But objectively speaking, the only crime in humor is an unfunny joke.

Alan King

#6. The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).

George Steiner

#7. Truth is, I'm a good Catholic girl. The faith has always been elusive, but the guilt is intractable.

Janet Evanovich

#8. War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.

Mark Kingwell

#9. Ethnic and religious conflict remain the most intractable and dangerous problems in the world today.

John Shattuck

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

Ben Bernanke

#11. And to me, that's why the civil rights era is about the future, not about the past, because it's great lessons of how citizens can organize to call on the patriotic heritage of the country to tackle some of our most intractable problems and we need to do that again.

Taylor Branch

#12. Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.

Ernest Gellner

#13. The light sleeps under the skin
of the rive stone.
What brings out the fire in the feldspar
the tiger in the agate
the rose in the quartz
is the persistence of desire.
The intractable will of light invisible things!

Jaime L. An Lim

#14. Even victims of atrocious brutality and intractable pain may retain a longing, sometimes even a zest, for life.

Carl Sagan

#15. Getting C programmers to understand that they cause the computer to do less than minimum is intractable. ... Ask him why he thinks he should be able to get away with unsafe code, core dumps, viruses, buffer overruns, undetected errors, etc., just because he wants speed.

Erik Naggum

#16. We academics - I am an academic - we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes.

George M. Whitesides

#17. The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

Sol Luckman

#18. We came together [with King Hussein of Jordan] because of a shared sense of idealism, of the value of service to a community far greater than ourselves, and the conviction that each and everyone of us can meaningfully contribute to solving even the most seemingly intractable problems.

Queen Noor Of Jordan

#19. Then again, as those who suffer from it know, intractable depression creates a planet all its own, largely impermeable to influence from others except as shadow presences, urging you to come out and rejoin the world, take in a movie, go out for a bite, cheer up.

Daphne Merkin

#20. It was the premise of conference organizers that the Church's continued hostility toward women threatened both their religious lives and, due to its intractable ban on artificial birth control, their physical lives.

Tom Robbins

#21. Ah, the intractable Canadian problem: Winter and finery are basically incompatible.

Russell Smith

#22. The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious
that is, a disease not understood
in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

Susan Sontag

#23. Data Jujitsu: the art of using multiple data elements in clever ways to solve iterative problems that, when combined, solve a data problem that might otherwise be intractable.

D.J. Patil

#24. When a problem seems intractable, it is often a good idea to try to study "toy" versions of it in the hope that as the toys become increasingly larger and more sophisticated, they would metamorphose, in the limit, to the real thing.

Doron Zeilberger

#25. To elevate the goals of humankind, to achieve high moral purpose, to realize major intended change, leaders must thrust themselves into the most intractable processes and structures of history and ultimately master them.

James MacGregor Burns

#26. How does it happen that the most intractable types always rise to the top?

Jack McDevitt

#27. I had no illusions that now, in some final and dramatic flash of revelation, we would understand one another. We were done. It was a fact of my life
intractable and sad
that our relationship had been a failure. Still, with her prognosis came one last chance to be her daughter. [p. 163]

Dani Shapiro

#28. Aouda fastened her great eyes, "clear as the sacred lakes of the Himalaya," upon him; but the intractable Fogg, as reserved as ever, did not seem at all inclined to throw himself into this lake.

Jules Verne

#29. I always stayed in tune with my own ambitions and attitudes and I'm still my intractable old self, for better or worse.

LeRoy Neiman

#30. I am sometimes accused by my peers of printing my pictures too dark. All I can say is that it goes with the mood of melancholy that is induced by witnessing at close quarters such intractable situations of conflict and joylessness.

Don McCullin

#31. He knew well the singularly strange sensation of loving one's family to distraction, and yet not feeling quite able to share one's deepest and most intractable fears. It brought on an uncanny sense of isolation, of being remarkably alone in a loud and loving crowd.

-Anthony's thoughts

Julia Quinn

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

Richard Gere

#33. We often discuss housing refugees, but not how you help return refugees back to their home countries. As a result, in a post-disaster or post-conflict situation, we end up with intractable refugee camps that end up staying for decades.

Cameron Sinclair

#34. I guess intractable right-wing ideologues are my mortal enemy.

Janeane Garofalo

#35. The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'

Camille Paglia

#36. It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the "cooler," and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest.

Upton Sinclair

#37. In Egypt, the cats ... afford evidence that animal nature is not altogether intractable, but that when well-treated they are good at remembering kindness.

Claudius Aelianus

#38. I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.

Malcolm Gladwell

#39. I do not know much about gods;but I think that the river is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable ...

T. S. Eliot

#40. Scramblers deactivated, then?
Well here's some good news.
You feel no pain.
You will go straight to a hospital. Remember nothing of this place.
And every time you hear the words "parsley", "intractable" or "longitude", you will vomit uncontrollably for forty-eight hours.

Joss Whedon

#41. Resistance is implacable, intractable, indefatigable.

Steven Pressfield

#42. The most intractable problem today is not pollution or technology or war; but the lack of belief that the future is very much in the hands of the individual.

Margaret Mead

#43. No problem is so intractable that something interesting cannot be said about it.

Jeffrey Lagarias

#44. Students, like most of us, want answers, even to intractable mysteries. It is hard for anyone to come to terms with the raw truth that sometimes there just are none.

Harvey Cox

#45. The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.

Sydney Brenner

#46. The indigenous people of five continents were facing an intractable enemy from a sixth continent that was convinced that they had the right to steal the land on other

Mark Kurlansky

#47. The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.

Alain De Botton

#48. Genuine rights don't conflict - they enable us to live together without intractable conflicts.

Yaron Brook

#49. Where people of goodwill get together and transcend their differences for the common good, peaceful and just solutions can be found even for those problems which seem most intractable.

Nelson Mandela

#50. To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

Zadie Smith

#51. To look forward to whatever flowed through the doors. To save a life? Two lives? I felt proud. The burden of treating the intractable, untreatable, unplaceable, unwanted, had been replaced by the fantasy of being a real doctor, dealing with real disease.

Samuel Shem

#52. IPS cells can become a powerful tool to develop new drugs to cure intractable diseases because they can be made from patients' somatic cells.

Shinya Yamanaka

#53. STRAWMAN. Are you less Intractable than when we parted? FALK. Nay, I go my own inexorable way - STRAWMAN. Even tho' you crush another's happiness? FALK. I plant the flower of knowledge in its place. [Smiling.

Henrik Ibsen

#54. I remember when the Berlin Wall fell and suddenly intractable problems get solved.

Lucy Walker

#55. Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable ... Why prove that it had ever once been green?

Margaret Drabble

#56. I will say that Bernie Sanders are the opposite end of the spectrum from Donald Trump. We see him leading right now in the Republican Party in an intractable way.

Rachel Maddow

#57. Repetitions. The Greek is in places very ungrammatical and intractable.

Plato

#58. Innovative, bottom-up methods will solve problems that now seem intractable - from energy to poverty to disease. Science and technology, powered by the fuel of entrepreneurial energy, are the largest multipliers of resources we have to solve our many social problems.

Vinod Khosla

#59. The great conductor is always a despot by temperament and intractable in his ways ... The artist is obliged to keep his laughter and tears to himself. If they want to emerge, in spite of himself, then he must hide them or unleash them in someone else.

Nadia Boulanger

#60. The blow back from the cold war is that a weakened Russia allowed Afghanistan to become a failed state, and then all this weaponry to flow into all these other conflicts. Our greatest triumph has almost fueled our most intractable battle now.

Jon Stewart

#61. Globalization could be the answer to many of the world's seemingly intractable problems. But this requires strong democratic foundations based on a political will to ensure equity and justice.

Sharan Burrow

#62. Look carefully at any region of the world where you find intractable enmity and violence between rival groups today. I cannot guarantee that you'll find religions as the dominant labels for in-groups and out-groups. But it's a good bet.

Richard Dawkins

#63. They know little of the passions who seek to argue with that most intractable of them all, the fear that is born of love.

Mary Russell Mitford

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

Katherine Boo

#65. Whatever the history of U.S. intervention in Iraq, our priorities now should be to protect our people and defend our national security interests, not to try to resolve an intractable religious divide some 1,500 years in the making.

Ted Cruz

#66. Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Thomas Nagel

#67. With Halcyon's technology, the pool of genetic information will grow by orders of magnitude in the course of months, offering the first real chance at cures for cancer and other previously intractable diseases.

Luke Nosek

#68. There is nothing so intractable as a calendar.

Margery Sharp

#69. The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Aldous Huxley

#70. They stare at her, not seeing the woman she is or the girl she was none too long ago, but a mere puzzle. An intractable puzzle - bemusing and a little frustrating, but capable of being solved nonetheless.

Nenia Campbell

#71. If we are to develop profound theory to solve the intractable problems in our societally-critical domains ... we must learn to crawl into the life of what makes people tick.

Clayton Christensen

#72. I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and oftentimes disagreeable ... I suppose I'm larger than life.

Bette Davis

#73. Whose fine idea had it been, on the Olympian heights or deep in the bowel-dark underworld, to condemn us to the messy, intractable burden of bodies, the sheer tedium of our confinement in the flesh?

Paul Russell

#74. Even if major funding is obtained for cold fusion, conceivably the phenomenon could suffer from problems as intractable as those of hot fusion. It may never work reliably or generate enough energy to be commercially viable.

Charles Platt