Daniel H. Pink Quotes

It's very difficult to solve a lot of problems from the top down.

You may or may not agree with Obama's policy prescriptions, but they are, by and large, serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face: a failing health care system, oil dependency, income stagnation, and climate change.

What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful . . . Great designers also pursue a mission. Great designers design with mankind in mind . . . The crossroads of science and art, innovation and inspiration are what I love about design.

Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place.

I do feel that the world is entering into a period of the incredible period of reflection and introspection. A lot of people are questioning the future, and I can't help but think that's a positive thing. I'm not sure about the art world, but the design world may be able to offer some solutions. Design is about troubleshooting. As a designer, I ultimately feel like a gun for hire. Companies hire me because they've got a problem. That's kind of what it boils down to. And I think this is a moment in our history where we need different solutions.

You don't filter smokestacks or water. Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.

It's always the organizations that are resource constrained that come up with the good ideas to win.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Bill Clinton was in the line of great progressive presidents who faced the realities in his own time and applied innovative solutions to problems.

You learn pretty fast that there is no magic solution to poverty.

If you write your own tools, you can sort of see new things, design new things.

I think architects are often at their best when faced with restraints.

I have seen that traditional approaches to charity and aid don't solve problems of poverty. In fact, too often they create dependence.

I wouldn't suggest that being resourceful has anything to do with doing something illegal or unethical, but I've definitely noticed a pattern of being 'creative.'

The era of big government may be over, but the era of big challenges shouldn't be—and you can't meet big challenges with small ideas.

Action is typical of the American style, thought and planning are not; it is considered heresy to state that some problems are not immediately or easily solvable.

The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.

We are sorry for the hungry, enough to give them food, but not sorry enough to tackle the CAUSES which make hunger possible. We are sorry for the unemployed, but not sorry enough to shoulder the job of abolishing unemployment by means of A NEW AND DARING INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM.

The best people in this industry [technology] are the people who are trying to solve big problems.

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

Fortunately, economists open to new ways of thinking are finding novel ways to use supposedly irrelevant factors to make the world a better place.

All of our movies are lower budget, and that makes them more interesting, too: we have to come up with solutions other than throwing money at problems.

We are unnecessarily wasting our precious resources in wars... if we must wage war, we have to do it on unemployment, disease, poverty, and backwardness.