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Home > Financial Quotes > Problems and Obstacles

Financial Quotes

Problems and Obstacles Quotes

  • "Going for a walk, letting our minds wander and having a really good rummage around in our mind is a very good problem-solving technique. Don’t go out with blinkers on. Walk around and see what captures your attention. It’s a great way to help us bust out of our usual mindset."
    Mark Millard, British psychologist
    Source: Quoted in the Independent (London) (October 26, 2010)
  • "I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men."
    Paul R. Krugman (1953–), US economist
    Source: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (2008)
  • "Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal."
    E. Joseph Cossman (1918–2002), US salesman and entrepreneur
    Source: Quoted in How to Turn Your Million-Dollar Idea into a Reality (Pete Williams, 2007)
  • "There is a time in the life of every problem when it is big enough you can see it, but small enough you can still solve it."
    Mike Leavitt (1951–), US politician
    Source: Speech (May 16, 2005)
  • "If you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day will be wonderful."
    Mark Twain (1835–1910), US writer
    A “frog” being any unpleasant or difficult task that you would rather put off
    Source: Quoted in Eat That Frog (Brian Tracy, 2002)
  • "The worst possible thing … was to lie dead in the water with any problem. Solve it, solve it quickly … If you solved it wrong, it would come back and slap you in the face, and then you could solve it right."
    Thomas J. Watson, Jr (1914–1993), US president of IBM and ambassador to the Soviet Union
    Source: Quoted in “The Businessmen of the Century,” Fortune (November 22, 1999)
  • "Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me."
    Charles Franklin Kettering (1876–1958), US businessman and engineer
    Source: Quoted in Strategy + Business (1997)
  • "Satisfactory under-performance is a far greater problem than a crisis."
    Christopher Bartlett (1945–), Australian business writer
    Source: The Individualised Corporation (cowritten with Sumantra Ghoshal, 1997)
  • "The greatest risk lies in not knowing what you don't know. In a fast changing marketplace such as the Internet, this trap seems to be so open and so wide."
    William (Walid) Mougayar (1959–), US consultant and management theorist
    Referring to the challenge to managers of traditional industries of the new economy.
    Source: Opening Digital Markets (1997), Introduction to 2nd edition
  • "We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time."
    Steve Jobs (1955–2011), US cofounder, chairman, and CEO of both Apple and Pixar
    Source: Interview, “The Next Insanely Great Thing,” Wired (February 1996)
  • "Problems can only be solved by the people who have them. You have to try and coax them and love them into seeing ways in which they can help themselves."
    Sir John Harvey-Jones (1924–2008), British management adviser, author, and chairman of ICI
    On his approach as a Mr Fix-It for troubled businesses.
    Source: Independent on Sunday (London) (March 11, 1990)
  • "I need problems. A good problem makes me come alive."
    Tiny Rowland (1917–1998), British entrepreneur, co-CEO, and managing director of Lonrho
    Source: Sunday Times (London) (March 4, 1990)
  • "My door is always open—bring me your problems. This is guaranteed to turn on every whiner, lackey, and neurotic on the property."
    Robert F. Six (1907–1986), US airline executive
    Source: Quoted in Money Talks (Robert W. Kent, ed, 1986)
  • "Work only on problems that are manifestly important and seem to be nearly impossible to solve. That way you will have a natural market for your product and no competition."
    Edwin Land (1909–1991), US inventor and founder of Polaroid Corporation
    Source: Physics Today (January 1982)
  • "It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment."
    Freeman Dyson (1923–), British-born US physicist
    Source: Disturbing the Universe (1979)
  • "One must think until it hurts. One must worry a problem in one's mind until it seems there cannot be another aspect of it that hasn't been considered."
    Roy Herbert, Lord Thomson (1894–1976), Canadian-born British media entrepreneur, founder and chairman of the Thomson Organisation
    Source: After I Was Sixty (1975)
  • "I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated."
    Poul Anderson (1926–2001), US science fiction writer
    Source: New Scientist (September 25, 1969)
  • "Problems are only opportunities in work clothes."
    Henry J. Kaiser (1882–1967), US industrialist
    Source: Quoted in obituary, New York Times (August 24, 1967)
  • "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
    Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), US behavioral psychologist
    Source: The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966)
  • "Every solution of a problem raises new unsolved problems."
    Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902–1994), Austro-Hungarian-born British philosopher of science
    Source: Conjectures and Refutations (1963)
  • "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."
    G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), British novelist, poet, and critic
    Source: The Scandal of Father Brown (1935)
  • "That is the trouble with prosperity—it hides the defects of a business."
    Harvey Firestone (1868–1938), US founder of Firestone Tire and Rubber
    Source: Men and Rubber (cowritten with Samuel Crowther, 1926)
  • "Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which one has overcome while trying to succeed."
    Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), US educator and political scientist
    Source: Up from Slavery (1901)
  • "Any problem can be solved using the materials in the room."
    Edwin Land (1909–1991), US inventor and founder of Polaroid Corporation
    Source: Attributed
  • "Beware of the danger signals that flag problems: silence, secretiveness, or sudden outburst."
    Sylvia Porter (1913–1991), US journalist and finance expert
    Source: Attributed

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