Quotes About Simplification

Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism.

One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas that feed and stir the masses. Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child's understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions.

We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.

the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us...

In some ways the soviets simplified who the enemy was", Havel said, "Today autocrats are more sophisticated, they stand for election while slowly undermining institutions that make democracy possible. They champion free markets while engaging with the same corruption cronyism and exploitation that existed in the past.

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life.

We see this repeatedly in the news. We get neat little packaged reports – even on complex issues. We're told who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, who the victims are, who the perpetrators are.

Classes and routines are first and foremost intellectual tools for reducing complexity. If they're not making your job simpler, they're not doing their jobs.

There are no innocuous ideologies. They're forms of pathological over simplification and they're also clubs, I mean the kind of clubs that you hit people with as well as the kind that you belong to... the advantage (to me) of being an ideologue is that I can explain everything, I can feel morally superior, and I know who my enemies are...and you know what you're supposed to do with enemies? They're not your friends, you move against them.

Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization—this simplification. If it's threatened, the great ship of state rocks.

People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other's expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. A shared belief system, partly psychological, partly acted out, simplifies everyone—in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others.

The use of single terms implicitly hypersimplifies what are in fact extraordinarily diverse and complex phenomena (that masked complexity is part of the reason that the terms come to carry so much emotional weight).

Since the ideologue can place him or herself on the morally correct side of the equation without the genuine effort necessary to do so validly, it is much easier and more immediately gratifying to reduce the problem to something simple and accompany it with an evildoer, who can then be morally opposed.

Thinkers powerfully influenced by Marx and overwhelmingly influential in much of the academy today (such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) modified the Marxist simplification essentially by replacing "economics" with "power"—as if power were the single motivating force behind all human behavior (as opposed, say, to competent authority, or reciprocity of attitude and action).

Asimismo, las creencias compartidas simplifican el mundo porque las personas que saben qué esperar de las demás pueden cooperar para domesticarlo.

Furthermore, when their social contraptions fail to fly, ideologues blame not themselves but all who see through the simplifications.

basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn't object.

Avoid context and specifics; generalize and keep repeating the generalization.

Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.

Heuristics are fast and frugal rules of thumb used to simplify complex decisions. The word has its origin in the ancient Greek word Eureka!, the cry of joy and satisfaction when one finds or discovers something.

Of all the simplifications to which the human spirit naturally inclines, unable to reconcile itself to the complexity of the real, there is none more dangerous than the attempt to integrate the whole of society in one vast, permanent action group.

The search for understanding, wherever it roams, is a search for better simplifications. Simplifications which explain more and distort less... All human understanding is based on simplifications of more complex realities.

A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.

When you buy any kind of device, put the cords, the manual, all that stuff in a labeled Ziploc bag. You avoid having a big tangle of mystery cords, plus when you get rid of the device, you can get rid of the ancillary parts, too.