Politics is less than perfect because we are less than perfect. We therefore need to approach it with some modesty. Politics is not like mathematics, where clear premises and deductive reasoning can lead to exact answers.
My experience of American politics is that people raise issues, and they get addressed in an effective but imperfect way. But that's sort of the American system: Mind the problem and worry it, and then we attack it with overwhelming power and put it away - and that's the end of that problem.
No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.
No Utopia is Utopia for everyone
It is not possible to remake the world. You can fix parts, but you can't remake the world.
In all political regulations, good cannot be complete, it can only be predominant.
No given measure and no given set of measures will work a perfect cure for any serious evil.
If mankind were to resolve to agree in no institution of government, until every part of it had been adjusted to the most exact standard of perfection, society would soon become a general scene of anarchy, and the world a desert.
What is ugly about life is that it so often only provides uneasy half solutions that are so seldom pure and tragic ones.
We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.
It is the misfortune of those who are concerned in conducting human affairs that, however pure and capacious their own conceptions may be, they must accommodate themselves to the circumstances with which they are environed and use the instruments that are within their reach.
The declaration of rights [Bill of Rights] is, like all other human blessings, alloyed with some inconveniences and not accomplishing fully its object. But the good in this instance vastly outweighs the evil.
Engineering isn't about perfect solutions; it's about doing the best you can with limited resources.
I didn't know how to necessarily make good robots and I was scared of failing to make good robots, so I thought I might as well make bad robots to kind of alleviate the pressure of that.
If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.
I don't know that I could draw one that's perfect. But I'd rather by approximately right than precisely wrong, and it would be precisely wrong to turn it down.
You can't please all of the people all of the time; you can only please some of the people some of the time.
Our options oftentimes on foreign policy are not a choice between a good one and a bad one. It's a choice between two less-than-ideal options. And you're trying to figure out which is the least harmful of the two. And I think that's something we should be encouraged by, not something that we should be critical of.
When you come through a business education, a lot of what they teach you is to make decisions through analysis, and logic and rationale, and I'm a big believer in that. But I also believe in the power of instinct. The truth is you're never going to have a perfect answer or view of how it is going to work.
I have some ideas on how to fix that. They're not very good ideas, but at least they're ideas!
There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.
Drafting a treaty is much like drafting a law, and I doubt if the members of this committee could point to a single law whose text they would all agree is absolutely perfect, totally without a flaw. The successive drafts of a treaty get better and better …. Even the final text that is signed and ratified will have flaws, but it will be accepted if it is seen by a strong consensus as substantially better than no treaty at all.
