Daily Inspiration Quote by Eric Sevareid

Sevareid’s line lands like a newsman’s squint at the shiny promises of modern life: our messes don’t merely persist despite “solutions”; they metastasize because of them. It’s a deliberately inverted proverb, a neat rhetorical trap that flips the usual storyline of progress. We like to believe problems are unfortunate glitches and solutions are clean fixes. Sevareid suggests the opposite: once you intervene, you create side effects, incentives, bureaucracies, and moral cover for the next round of intervention.

The intent isn’t anti-action so much as anti-simplicity. Coming from a mid-century journalist who watched technocracy, Cold War policy, and media-driven certainty harden into doctrine, the subtext is institutional: big systems produce big fixes, and big fixes require justification, funding, and narratives. A “solution” rarely arrives as a humble patch; it arrives as a worldview with momentum. That momentum tends to outlive the original problem, generating new dependencies and new conflicts that can’t be admitted without threatening the authority of the fix.

What makes the line work is its economy and its cynicism about human nature. “Solutions” flatter us; they let leaders claim agency and publics claim closure. But the word also smuggles in finality, as if complexity can be retired. Sevareid pricks that fantasy with one sentence. In an era that increasingly sold policy as engineering and governance as management, he’s warning that the most dangerous thing a society can do is treat its dilemmas as if they’re solvable in the same way a puzzle is.