David Petraeus 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.

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.

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

However much a president wishes it, a national problem cannot be knocked out with a single punch. A president must work with the problem as much as against it, turn it into a solution if she can.

There are no instant solutions.

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

We keep saying, 'No more 'band aid' solutions.'

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.

Problems of 35 years cannot be resolved in a short period of time.

There is no silver bullet. I know people in Washington want grand solutions for everything.

All problems in the world today are multilateral, and all these one-on-one agreements simply aren't going to do it.

We can not cure great and inveterate evils at once

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

There are no simple solutions to today’s problems.

I don't think there's ever a silver bullet to any problem. There are always several answers and solutions to a problem.

We can't solve all of our problems in a short time.

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

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.

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 must] deal with all of the contributing factors to gun violence as a whole, because it's like a leaky bucket - if you've got a bucket with six holes shot through it, [and] you plug up five, you've still got a leaky bucket.

We must evaluate the political sympathies of other states and the effect war may have on them. To assess these things in all their ramifications and diversity is plainly a colossal task. Rapid and correct appraisal of them clearly calls for the intuition of a genius; to master all this complex mass by sheer methodical examination is obviously impossible. Bonaparte was quite right when he said that Newton himself would quail before the algebraic problems it could pose.

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.

If you go deep into a problem, you'll find most all of the time that there are yet more problems to be solved from the ground up.

A one-size-fits-all approach will not solve our complex border problems.

Wisdom makes a slow defense against trouble, though a sure one in the end.