Problems - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Sure we had trouble building Space Station One - but the trouble was people.

- Robert A. Heinlein, ''Delilah and the Space Rigger'' (1949)

Why shouldn't the boy have trouble? Trouble is the normal condition for the human race.We were raised on it.We thrive on it.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Red Planet: A Colonial Boy on Mars (1949)

What is fire? It's a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1954)

When faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.

- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

Given a problem that must be solved and no possible solution, almost all individuals were forced into madness.

- Lester del Rey, Pstalemate (1971)

There are those who see social/economic/ecological problems as malfunctions which can be corrected by simple repair, replacement or streamlining - a kind of linear outlook where even innovations are considered to be merely additive. Then there are those who sometimes hesitate to move at all, because their awareness follows events in the directions of secondary and tertiary effects as they multiply and cross-fertilize throughout the entire system.

- Roger Zelazny, ''Home Is the Hangman'' (1975)

There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.

- Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

Mankind has never solved its problems. It has just substituted larger ones.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''Why Dolphins Don't Bite'' (1980)

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982)

Tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

- Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor (1986)

What we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole.

- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

No one can solve problems for someone whose problem is that they don't want problems solved.

- Richard Bach, One (1988)

The existence of a well-defined problem does not imply the existence of a solution.

- Gregory Benford, Tides of Light (1989)