Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Quotes

The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue, -- that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments. The agents which the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst, it was the one fly that helped to spoil the ointment. Then, amid all this crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and foe. He had emerged from slavery.

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.

If you are unable to understand the cause of a problem it is impossible to solve it.

As an engineer I'm constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.

Human slavery was the precondition for the rise of higher education in America.

In approaching this problem [school desegregation], we cannot turn the clock back...

He missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow

We cannot solve a problem until we understand the full extent of the problem.

The Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble. While many young Negroes are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind.

When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level.

I'm the kid that tried to take Latin in school because I felt if I could understand the root of everything, then I could understand why it worked. That was what took me into engineering. And the reason I stayed is, engineering teaches you to solve problems. It teaches you to think.

Unless you understand the history of a situation, you can't ever hope to solve problems.

I don't know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

Learning to fly an airplane taught me a way of thinking, an approach to problem-solving that was applicable and effective. Pilots are very methodical and meticulous, and artists tend not to be.

Every problem can be solved as long as they use common sense and apply the right research and techniques.

The problems of puzzles are very near the problems of life.

It's the people who have an incentive to find the problem who usually find the problem.

I'm very good at deconstructing. I'm a very good troubleshooter for why something is unlikely to work. And most everything is unlikely to work.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

What began to weigh heavily upon me was that at the same time I was struggling to get my scholars and their families to believe in themselves, I was part of an educational system that despite its best intentions, only reinforced their failures.

Amnesia best describes America's official stance regarding slavery

When you educate a negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.

The study of history is in the truest sense an education, and a training for political life.

In the South the white men used to call all Black men “boy” until they got to be old enough to call them “uncle.” It was sex-the feat of sexual competition. When they used to get liquored up and talk they would always say, “The schoolroom leads to the bedroom” to justify school segregation.

The solution of one problem always brings a few more problems to the surface to be solved, which were hidden underneath the theory of transmission.