"If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution."
— Albert Einstein

January 1, 1970

Quote Details

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Added on April 10, 2026
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Albert Einstein
Original Language: English

Sources

There is no indication that Einstein said this. According to Quote Investigator, the earliest publication of a quote similar was in a collection of articles about manufacturing in 1966, when an employee of the Stainless Processing Company wrote a piece titled "The Manufacturing Manager's Skills." The article attributed the quote to an unnamed professor at Yale, by saying, "If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the prob