“If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be the precursors of social change. They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves and in their struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the culture as well”

“If we could eliminate the concept of town and return to live in small villages, all world problems were solved.”

“The day you are not solving problems or are not up to your butt in problems is probably a day you are no longer leading. If your desk is clean and no one is bringing you problems, you should be very worried. It means that people don't think you can solve them or don't want to hear about them. Or, far worse, it means they don't think you care.”

“Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have- how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering.”

“You may not always have a comfortable life and you will notalways be able to solve all of the world's problems at oncebut don't ever underestimate the importance you can havebecause history has shown us that courage can be contagiousand hope can take on a life of its own.”

“Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.”