Arundhati Bhattacharya Quotes

Whether the task is fixing health care, upgrading K-12 education, bolstering national security, or a host of other missions, the U.S. is better at patching problems than fixing them.

I think very often problems are so big, people approach problems from the bottom up: 'If only I do this little bit, then hopefully there will be some sort of snowball effect that will be bigger and bigger.' I'm much more in favor of the top-down approach to problem-solving.

There's an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

Temporary solutions often become permanent problems.

It is rarely the quick fix that goes the farthest. So don't get tempted by political cycles and the lure of electoral wins.

Patched-up diplomatic solutions designed to answer the needs of the moment rarely last, and as they unravel they can actually make things worse.

No given measure and no given set of measures will work a perfect cure for any serious evil.

We periodically note that there are no silver bullets, there are no magic formulas, there's no single action or component of the overall... comprehensive civil-military approach.

We have to be about finding long-term solutions to our biggest challenges.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves.

It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past.

Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages.

There are no instant solutions.

Correcting what has been for centuries a condition of absolute chaos is not the work of short-winded people.

No conventions and covenants can remake human nature in a day.

The fundamental belief of CoreCause is to focus on a preventative rather than recovery stand point. Most of the worlds crises are the effects of a 'core cause' that if addressed would solve the problem entirely.

We have perfected the art of finding problems without fixing real-world issues. We focus too much on complexity, not harm.

Better jobs and housing are only temporary solutions. They are aspects of tokenism and don't go to the heart of the problem.

The belief that it is useless to employ partial and palliative means against radical evils, because they only remedy them in part, is an article of faith never preached unsuccessfully by meanness to simplicity, but it is none the less absurd.

Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic character. If anything, partial 'solutions' serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes.

You want to put a band-aid on something that needs stitches.

The trouble with quick and dirty is that dirty remains long after quick has been forgotten.

Traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.

When a decision is made to cope with the symptoms of a problem, it is generally assumed that the corrective measures will solve the problem itself. They seldom do. Engineers cannot seem to get this through their heads. These countermeasures are all based on too narrow a definition of what is wrong. Human measures and countermeasures proceed from limited scientific truth and judgment. A true solution can never come about in this way.