We’ve Had a Problem: We Don’t Understand Our Touchstone Quotes

There is no shortage of practical wisdom in the world, handed down over thousands of years. In fact, there’s so much that it’s hard to remember. Because of that, we carve out pocket-sized slices of inspiration in the form of quotes, and these sometimes embed themselves in the human psyche, at once exemplifying and strengthening an aspect of our culture. But check the original sources and you’ll see we often miss the larger point. 

Take the case of Apollo 13 in 1970. We all think we know what was said by one of these astronauts, who was 200,000 miles from Earth, hurtling away from it at 3,000 feet per second, and who had just heard a large explosion: “Houston, we have a problem.” 

But that’s not the actual line. The real quote is much better. Here’s the transcript:

MISSION CONTROL: Thirteen, we’ve got one more item for you, when you get a chance. We’d like you to stir up your cryo tanks. In addition, I have shaft and trunnion …

ASTRONAUT SWIGERT: Okay.

MISSION CONTROL: …for looking at the Comet Bennett, if you need it.

ASTRONAUT SWIGERT: Okay. Stand by … Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.

If you listen to the recording, Swigert sounds only mildly intrigued. I’ve said “The cat’s up on the counter again” with more alarm.

The astronauts on Apollo 13 had all piloted fighter jets and held jobs flying newer planes to ensure they were not prone to pitching and yawing and, you know, breaking up in midair. This kind of person does not dwell on the past. Consequently, the tense of the phrase “we’ve had a problem”: the initial problem is over, now we focus on making a plan for repairing the damage and resuming the mission. It is no surprise that in the wider populace, the words were wrangled back into the present tense as a cry for help. To us civilians, an explosion that occurred a few seconds ago is a current problem, and so we treat ourselves to a few minutes of high panic. 

The Apollo 13 crew did survive the mission, in part because they looked only forward. 

Shakespeare’s Hamlet shows us another example of beings in a larger but also tightly bounded construction which is likewise plunging toward catastrophe:

HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one.

HAMLET: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.

ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord.

HAMLET: Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me, it is a prison.

The aphorism wrung from this exchange is “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.” But the lines spoken before and after reveal not that Shakespeare had somehow hit on a central tenet of Buddhist psychology but that knowledge colors—or permanently stains—our feelings about a situation. Hamlet is a prisoner; he knows his father has been murdered by King Claudius and he is locked inside the cell of what he knows. 

By this time in the action Hamlet has already said another famous line, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” after seeing the ghost of his father. But actually, he said more: 

HORATIO: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.

HAMLET: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The advice to welcome the strange is momentous. Hamlet’s two lines together not only give you an awesome philosophical attitude to smugly adopt but tell you how to behave before the great array of marvels encountered in a lifetime. Alas, in popular speech, poor Horatio gets cut out of all the best lines (“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio”). And unlike him, Hamlet is not afraid of reality, no matter what form it takes. 

Our perspective on fear was directly reset by Franklin Roosevelt on day one of his presidency. But a fresh listen shows he wasn’t just spouting some standard-issue encouragement during the Great Depression (Roosevelt tells the nation: We got this). He gives a justification for Americans to be brave, and then explains how fear short-circuits the very impulse to solve problems:

FDR: This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

It’s astronaut logic, though his tone is fiery as he calls out the invisible enemy in our midst.

A little over thirty years later, Martin Luther King would say, “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair,” and a few seconds later, he would start describing a dream. What do we all remember of this dream? For many it is this image: “…one day … little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” 

Here’s where the speech turns:

MLK: And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood… 

There we see that Dr. King’s dream is a dream within a dream, a reminder of our shared purpose, where we all seek the way toward the promise built into the churning but delicately balanced machinery of democracy.  

Dr. King leaves us on a high. But one of the most storied quotes in American history has aged less well and seems hopelessly quaint to modern ears: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” 

It’s tough when your call to service is followed by Vietnam and Watergate. Since John F. Kennedy first said this line at his inauguration in 1961, it’s gotten harder to ask people for more than they are already giving. In the intervening years the word ask itself has hardened into a noun, as in, The ask is to do something for your country.. . Many would now say that’s a big ask.

Once again, there’s more to it. Kennedy first declares that the trumpet is summoning us for a struggle “against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” Shortly afterwards he says:  

JFK: In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.

I had always believed this last line was a simple plea for us to be better citizens generally. But the words just before it point us to a much larger task: a global fight for good in a tense and unstable world, a struggle in which we all have the privilege to participate. Who doesn’t want to take down tyranny? Or poverty, at least? 

And that’s the point. The ask is not about the problems we’ve had. It’s about rededicating ourselves to the dream.