Minus One Problem Quotes

I'm not supposed to date you, Jenny."
"That's what you said before."
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "I didn't think this was going to be a problem. I mean, I'm pretty good at not letting someone become important to me. I have to be if I want to make it to L.A."
"I understand."
He laughed. "How nice of you to understand, since you're the one making it a struggle for me! It would be so easy to make you important. ~ Elizabeth Chandler

The happiness for which our souls ache is one undisturbed by success or failure, one which will root deeply inside us and give inward relaxation, peace, and contentment, no matter what the surface problems may be. That kind of happiness stands in need on no outward stimulus. ~ Billy Graham

There will be a winner. There will a president-elect. But there will not be a defeated people. Tomorrow, we are only one country, only one Venezuela. Tomorrow in the country there are many problems that we have to resolve. Problems do not wait. ~ Henrique Capriles Radonski

There is just one problem, Captain," the President said quietly. "I can't order you to undertake such a covert project. It's dangerous, could get you court-martialed and is probably illegal."
"But you could ask me as a favor, Mr. President," Brock replied.
FDR grinned again, his signature broad smile putting a wonderful sparkle in his eye. "Would you do this for me, as a personal favor, young man?"
Brock nodded emphatically. "Yes, sir. It would be an honor. ~ Derek Hart

I first of all have a problem with the term 'avant-garde'. Because it is a military term, it means the guard that runs before the rest of the soldiers. And if I want to see myself presented in military terms, I don't want to be part of that. I want to be one of the deserters. I want to be in the woods, maybe. ~ Blixa Bargeld

Education, you know, means broadening, advancing; and if you limit a teacher to only one side of anything, the whole country will eventually have only one thought, be one individual. I believe in teaching every aspect of every problem or theory. ~ John T. Scopes

When in doubt, vary, change, solve the problem, seize the opportunity, experiment, try something new (consistent, of course, with the core ideology) - even if you can't predict precisely how things will turn out. Do something. If one thing fails, try another. Fix. Try. Do. Adjust. Move. Act. No matter what, don't sit still. ~ Jim Collins

Maybe Laura's real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die - if not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name. ~ L.L. Barkat

When was it exactly that I became... this? By small degrees, I suppose. One act presses hard upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then one day we look up and fine we are... this. ~ Joe Abercrombie

We want to do a lot of stuff; we're not in great shape. We didn't get a good night's sleep. We're a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

She moved in for a better look.It was a portrait of Bob Marley,a pretty good one,actually.No Woman, No Cry ... that's right.No teenage girls either.All right,ten points if you'Re a poet,minus twenty-five if you're in a band and minus fifty if you're into the ganja. ~ Sheri Meshal

India does not have a problem of people grabbing share from a fixed pie. India is one of the few nations where the pie is getting bigger. ~ Arundhati Bhattacharya

his survival was threatened day by day. Minute by minute. It was impossible to picture a spoiled, beautiful man like Christopher Phelan contending with danger and hardship. Hunger. Loneliness. Beatrix stared at her friend pensively, their gazes meeting in the looking glass. "What is your favorite song, Pru?" "I don't have one, actually. Tell him yours." "Should we discuss this with Audrey?" Beatrix asked, referring to Phelan's sister-in-law. "Certainly not. Audrey has a problem with honesty. She wouldn't send the letter if she knew I hadn't written it." Beatrix made a sound that could have either been a laugh or a groan. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Changing Your Opinion
Think back to the low self-esteem statements you identified with, bearing in mind that, no matter how you came by your low opinion of yourself, you can change it. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." You own your self-image, and you can feel about yourself whatever you choose to feel. Throughout this book, there are exercises to help you change how you feel about yourself. And in the next chapter, we'll look at some ways to set social goals. For now, try repeating what Mrs. Roosevelt said: "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." Give yourself credit for seeking help with your social problems. You care about yourself, and that counts for a lot.
Social anxiety and low self-esteem go hand in hand. In fact, many people simplify so-called "shyness" as a self-esteem problem. The reality is, however, that poor self-esteem is a by-product of social anxiety. It is the social anxiety that comes first, not the other way around! Social failures cause anxiety, which causes avoidance, which causes low self-esteem. As a person's confidence dwindles, the fears become greater, until eventually the individual simply stops trying. With fewer and fewer opportunities for social interaction, there are also fewer opportunities to receive positive feedback. This combination of factors perpetuates low self-esteem, which cannot be replaced with a healthy self-image until the avoidant behavior c ~ Jonathan Berent

Dr. Lerner explains that we all have patterned ways of managing anxiety. Some of us respond to anxiety by overfunctioning and others by underfunctioning. Overfunctioners tend to move quickly to advise, rescue, take over, micromanage, and get in other people's business rather than look inward. Underfunctioners tend to get less competent under stress. They invite others to take over and often become the focus of family gossip, worry or concern. They can get labeled as the "irresponsible one" or "problem child." Dr. Lerner explains that seeing these behaviors as patterned responses to anxiety, rather than truths about who we are, can help us understand that we can change. ~ Brene Brown

When Turkey began approaching the EU, I wasn't the only one who worried that the dark stain in Turkey's history - or rather the history of the Ottoman Empire - could become a problem one day. In other words, what happened to the Armenians in World War I. That's why I couldn't leave the issue untouched. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Royce sighed. The sigh was new. "You don't know this woman. This isn't your problem."

"I know that."

"So why are you helping her?"

"Because that's what people do. They help each other. If you saw a man lying in the road with an arrow in him, you'd stop, wouldn't you?"

"Of course," Royce replied, "anyone would. A wounded man is easy pickings, unless you could see from your saddle that someone else has already taken his purse."

"What? No! No one would rob a wounded man and leave him to die."

Royce nodded. "Well, no. You're right. If he has a purse and you take it, it's best to slit his throat afterward. Too many people live through arrow wounds, and you don't want the bugger recovering and coming after you."

The old woman looked at Royce aghast.

Now it was Hadrian's turn to sigh. "Don't mind him; he was raised by wolves. ~ Michael J. Sullivan

The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution. ~ Anton Chekhov

I still don't know what sort of world this is, she thought, But whatever world we're in now, I'm sure this is where I will stay. Where we will stay. This world must have its own threats, its own dangers, must be filled with its own type of riddles and contradictions. We may have to travel down many dark paths, leading who knows where. But that's okay. It's not a problem. I'll just have to accept it. I'm not going anywhere. Come what may, this is where we'll remain, in this world with one moon. ~ Haruki Murakami

Look, this isn't about the ring or when I ever made a hamburger, which, for your information, was my senior year of college."
"Right, when you almost caught our kitchen on fire."
"And you dated one of the firefighters for six months. You're welcome. Back to my problem. ~ Rachel Hauck

His existence had always been comfortable, he had always held a clear picture of himself, his duties, and his place in a world. He saw that world as a place so full of turning gears he had no hope of comprehending how things fit together, so why even try?
Now things were different, however. Now he wasn't just looking out from inside of the clockwork. Instead, he was actually seeing the final motion of the escapement - the ticking hands of the clock itself.
And it was a doomsday clock.
Both his feline and human instincts told him to let it be. It was not his problem, or his place to interfere. If the living world was destined to fall, let it happen, let it pass into history once and for all. Who was he to try to save it?
But on the other hand, if the living world were lost, then there would never again be great cats to furjack ... and couldn't it be that hearing the actual ticking of the clock gave one the responsibility to stop it? ~ Neal Shusterman

This unstable character of man, this going from one extreme to the other, arising as it does out of his narrow vision and petty mind, reveals certain basic moral tensions within which human conduct must function if it is to be stable and fruitful. These contradictory extremes are, therefore, not so much a "problem" to be resolved by theological thought as tensions to be "lived with" if man is to be truly "religious," i.e., a servant of God. Thus, utter powerlessness and "being the measure for all things," hopelessness and pride, determinism and "freedom," absolute knowledge and pure ignorance - in sum, an utterly "negative self-feeling" and a "feeling of omnipotence" - are extremes that constitute natural tensions for proper human conduct. It is the "God-given" framework for human action. Since its primary aim is
to maximize moral energy, the Qur'ān - which claims to be "guidance for
mankind" - regards it as absolutely essential that man not violate the balance of opposing tensions. The most interesting and the most important fact of moral life is that violating this balance in any direction produces a "Satanic condition" which in its moral effects is exactly the same: moral nihilism. Whether one is proud or hopeless, self-righteous or self-negating, in either case the result is deformity and eventual destruction of the moral human personality. ~ Fazlur Rahman

There is a pre-existing harmony in everything. The problem is the human being. It may be true that one single Incarnation of God may not he able to bring that peace and harmony in the entire world. It's only because of that harmony that they could create in the world and in people's mind that the world still exists and that there is always a balance. Otherwise, things could be much worse. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi

Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers...a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon... Proudhon in effect took the specifics of bourgeois legal and economic relations and treated them as universal and foundational for the development of an alternative, socially just economic system. From Marx's standpoint, this is no alternative at all since it merely re-inscribes bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society. This problem is still with us, not only because of the contemporary anarchist revival of interest in Proudhon's ideas but also because of the rise of a more broad-based liberal human rights politics as a supposed antidote to the social and political ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx's critique of Proudhon is directly applicable to this contemporary politics. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's view, a serious error. ~ David Harvey

First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. ~ Aaron Sorkin

Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the passive voice - how it can obfuscate meaning, deaden vitality, and abandon the task of assigning agency or responsibility - I find the grammar of justice maddening. It's always "rendered," "served," or "done." It always swoops down from on high - from God, from the state - like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in Earth's final hour. It is not, apparently, something we can give to one other, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck. The problem may also lie in the word itself, as for millennia "justice" has meant both "retribution" and "equality," as if a gaping chasm did not separate the two.

If you really want to know what justice is, don't only ask questions and then score off anyone who answers, and refute him, roars Thrasymachus to Socrates in The Republic. You know very well that it is much easier to ask questions than to answer them. Give an answer yourself and tell us what you say justice is. When justice is done, writes Anne Carson, the world drops away. This does not seem to me a happy thought. I am not yet sure I want the world to drop away. ~ Maggie Nelson

Besides that, when elsewhere the harvest of wheat is most abundant, there it comes up less by one-fourth than what you have sowed. There, methinks, it were a proper place for men to sow their wild oats, where they would not spring up.
[Lat., Post id, frumenti quum alibi messis maxima'st
Tribus tantis illi minus reddit, quam obseveris.
Heu! istic oportet obseri mores malos,
Si in obserendo possint interfieri.] ~ Plautus

My first agent dissuaded me from calling myself 'Cumberbatch.' I had six months of not very productive time with her, so I changed agents. The new one said, 'Why aren't you using your family name? It's a real attention-grabber.' I worried, 'How much is it going to cost to put my name in lights?' But then I decided that's not my problem. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch

I don't recall God ever saying you couldn't be 'cool'. It's only a problem if you esteem 'coolness' above that which is righteous and true, which is, when we give it its way, really what many of us do. 'Coolness' is too transient to be of any real and meaningful, lasting significance, and it is often in great conflict with one being one's honest, most vulnerable self. That, and in reality, some of the coolest people are actually those who least concern themselves with being 'cool' anyway, those who make 'trying to be cool' less evident. ~ Criss Jami

One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality. ~ Art Spiegelman

It seems that the problem with government as an institution is uniformly bad, worldwide. It may be the ONLY thing that binds all nations together - the incompetence of all of their governments ... The unions are the mafia, which is the CIA, which is the Catholic Church, which is the government, which is what's the difference? It's corrupt! It's the same guys pulling these strings, you know? One day he pulls the string and this lamp comes out, the next say he pulls the string and there's a missile coming out. ~ Frank Zappa

But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I am Born," you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect. Why is young David fatherless? Because, Dickens tells us, his father died of a delicate constitution. Yes, but where did this mortal delicacy come from? Dickens doesn't say, so we're left to speculate. A congenital defect, perhaps, inherited from his mother, whose own mother had married beneath her to spite her cruel father, who'd been beaten as a child by a nursemaid who was forced into service when her faithless husband abandoned her for a woman he chanced to meet when his carriage wheel broke in front of the milliner's where she'd gone to have her hat trimmed. If we begin there, young David is fatherless because his great-great-grandfather's nursemaid's husband's future mistress's hat needed adornment. ~ Hillary Jordan

Love begets wisdom, thus it is, as often misconceived, more than vain layers of tenderness; it is inherently rational and comprehensive of the problem within the problem: for instance, envy is one of the most excused sins in the media of political correctness. Those you find most attractive, or seem to have it all, are often some of the most insecure at heart, and that is because people assume that they do not need anything but defamation. ~ Criss Jami

Anyone who can solve the problems of water will be worthy of two Nobel prizes - one for peace and one for science. ~ John F. Kennedy

Of course we all want to make compromises for our spouse. That's part of the bargain of marriage, after all. But when compromise gets into sacrifice, then that's when the territory becomes dangerous, because that's when resentments build up. And the problem with navigating this territory is that there is no map, because what's compromise for one person might be the most terrible sacrifice for another. ~ Gabrielle Donnelly

Zane turned his attention to the bus. Phoebe got a bad feeling when she caught sight of the worn sandals, tie-dyed T-shirts and woven hats on the next couple to disembark.
"Hey," the man said. "I'm Martin Lagarde and this is my wife, Andrea."
The woman, a thirtysomething brunette with freckles and glasses, shook hands with Zane.
"We're so excited to be here. Martin and I just love being in the outdoors. We've hiked all over, and last year we did a week at a meditation retreat in Hawaii, but we've never done anything like this." She continued to pump his hand as her expression turned earnest. "We really want this opportunity to be one with the land. To experience a different kind of life. The Old West." She finally released Zane's hand. "We're vegetarians. I hope that won't be a problem."
Zane considered them for a moment, then said, "Not for me." He jerked his head toward the compartment beneath the bus that the driver had opened. "Collect your gear and head inside. Chase will show you where you'll bunk tonight."
"Sure thing," Martin said.
He held up his hand for a high five. When Zane simply stared at him, Martin grabbed Zane's wrist and pulled it until it was level with his shoulder, then slapped his hand against Zane's.
When he walked away, Zane turned to look at her. "Two starving kids and tree-hugging vegetarians. I'm going to kill Chase. ~ Susan Mallery

That's the problem with Peter," said Theresa.
"Only the one?" said Peter. ~ Orson Scott Card