Jean-Baptiste Say Quotes

The best way to address a problem is at its initial stages.

It took us about a day and a half to find out what had gone wrong.

Are our problems moving faster than our ability to solve them?

Do not speculate; get data and calculate.

Whence it is evident that the remedy must be adapted to the particular cause of the mischief; consequently, the cause must be ascertained, before the remedy is devised.

Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it.

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

You don't fix the problem until you define it.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Don't fight the problem, decide it.

When you hire a plumber because no hot water is coming out of the kitchen sink faucet, you need to go to the water heater, not the faucet.

It is easy to say that something should be done. However to say what, when and how is more difficult.

Errors using inadequate data are much like those using no data at all.

If you are a U. S. senator, you can give an ideological response to a serious problem and probably never be held accountable for it. Whereas the [state] governors are dealing with the real world—they have to run things, to make them work.

No government at any level has all the answers.

Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place?

Let us study our misfortunes and go back to the causes.

I can solve every problem a year later.

The earlier you start to solve a problem, the less draconian the solution needs to be.

It is axiomatic in politics that the earlier one addresses a problem, the more the alternatives and the easier the solutions.

Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided. More often it is a crisis invited.

It appears to me one of those questions which present great inconveniences whichever way it is decided.

It is one thing to diagnose a problem; it is another to resolve it.

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics; they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

If we politicians cannot solve the problems of the economy, terrorism and the environment, then we shall have failed in our duty.