Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.

Being a strongman is a real test of functional strength. What can you pick up, carry and how fast can you move it. It's not a weight room strength, it takes brute strength and power to lift, carry and pull all types objects from fire engines, Mack trucks, transport planes and large stones.

Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes... to an extent, that's true elsewhere, including the United States, but it's been pretty extreme in Greece.

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

I come from a dysfunctional family, so my views of parents and parenting used to be highly mixed.

I was raised in a house where my mom was the primary breadwinner. It was a dysfunctional house, but she showed tremendous resilience.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they're going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.

In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home.

If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.

Every friendship goes through ups and downs. Dysfunctional patterns set in; external situations cause internal friction; you grow apart and then bounce back together.

The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.

My fitness approach and philosophy are based on day-to-day functionalities. These functions are bending, lifting, lunging, pulling, pushing and squatting.

My husband and I own a CrossFit Gym. Crossfit is perfect for me because it's always competitive, all the workouts are in a class environment, and it's different every day. It's a constantly varied functional fitness workout done with intensity.

Linguistics is a good way of defining the culture of a brand. The vocabulary used by sports and lifestyle brands - running, fitness, training, motorsports - is all about functionality, whereas the vocabulary of the luxury business - handbags, ready-to-wear - is all about the product.

If you can make finance more functional, make it a tiny percent better, you create a great deal of resources, which you can use for other things like education and healthcare.

What you get out of an M.B.A. programme, no matter how much experience, is functional tools and understanding in disciplines: you'll understand economics, you'll understand marketing, finance, accounting. That, M.B.A. programmes do very well.

I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.

If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you'll be going, 'you know, we're alright. We are dang near royalty.'

A challenging economy is always good for design. It unites necessity and functionality. You are forced to be creative with poor materials.

We are very proud of our design for the Transbay Transit Center. This will be a beautiful, functional and sustainable building for San Francisco.

I'm looking for best practices constantly. Apple has beautiful design, beautiful product, incredibly functional. But mostly it's about picking product, getting behind it, marketing it and introducing it to a customer. What they've done just inspires me.