Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Quotes

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

At CARE, a leading humanitarian organization, we recognize people live their lives in a holistic manner. Issues such as health care, education and economic empowerment cannot be addressed in a vacuum. Thus, effective programs need to tackle the multiple root causes of poverty.

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

The evils which are complained of can not be eradicated at once; the work must be gradual.

There are no simple solutions to today’s problems.

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.

One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried.

People were concerned about national security, and that precluded us from having the opportunity to break through on the issues that we cared most about - the economy, education and health care.

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

Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call 'issue ownership.'

One of the critical issues that we have to confront is illegal immigration, because this is a multi-headed Hydra that affects our economy, our health care, our health care, our education systems, our national security, and also our local criminality.

If you don’t understand how problems came to be, how are you going to know how to fix them?

I am not running for president in order to put Band-Aids on our problems.

We have restored order and established domestic tranquility. We have fed the starving, clothed the naked, and ministered to the sick. We have improved the sanitary condition of the island. We have stimulated industry, introduced public education, taken a full and comprehensive enumeration of the inhabitants

We fix symptoms but almost never deal with the underlying cause. We put out fires but we don’t prevent them.

You can’t fix the things that bother you the most by passing a law.

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.

Our world needs to move from managing crises to preventing them in the first place. Too often, the world responds too late and too little.

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.

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.

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.

Rather, my perceptions about how we solve problems in health care or education span across a whole range of areas. And I want to try to capture that complexity.

It's a conversation that nobody really likes to have, and it seems that we never can get to a solution with it and something horrific happens. We all stand back and say, "How could we let that happen?" and then it goes away and we move on.