Quotes About Complexity

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

I can be a cruel person.

Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.

I can multitask like crazy. I'm riddled with ADD - a blessing and a curse.

I'm drawn to damaged, complicated characters.

In Hollywood, only a female who's massively damaged is interesting.

When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.

There is no evidence that dogs have the kind of complex emotional lives and value systems that we do. It's one reason why we love them so much, in fact. They are neither "good" nor "bad." They don't hold grudges, act in petty ways, or seek revenge. They read our moods, but not our minds.

The college and university systems, at least, have become like television. There's a bit of this and a bit of that and some compulsory program with its components connected in a way that only a planner could understand.

The thing I'm most interested in is the nervous system. How do brains grow? How do genes build complicated nervous systems?

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated.

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics - greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

If there's one thing government needs desperately, it's the ability to quickly try something, pivot when necessary, and build complex systems by starting with simple systems that work and evolving from there, not the other way around.

Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear and gradual. But the Earth's systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways.

Today, you have neuroscientists working on a genetic, behavioural or cognitive level, and then you have informaticians, chemists and mathematicians. They all have their own understanding of how the brain functions and is structured. How do you get them all around the same table?

Part of me wants to be married and have everybody around the table for Christmas. But when you're married, your life becomes integrated solely with that person. There are too many characters running around inside me. Maybe they should all be married to somebody different.

You want to be able to really tackle a character and make it a fully-dimensional human being who is complicated, funny, and all the things that a person could be. If you can achieve that, you feel great. You so rarely get to do that as an actress in general, but as a black actress, it's almost never.

Economic development and poverty alleviation are so complicated that I don't think there's a single background or a single discipline that is sufficient to tackle these great human problems.

Football tactics are rapidly becoming as complicated as the chemical formula for splitting the atom.

Big government is indeed big, and like another big creature, the sauropod dinosaur, government has a primitive nervous system: The fact of an injury to the tail could take nearly a minute to be communicated to the sauropod brain.