Quotes About Complexity

The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad.

I think the most appealing characters for the audience are the ones that you never know whether to root for them or whether to hate them. That's what keeps people drawn to their television sets.

Television is much more complex, brain-challenging and involved than it used to be. It's almost impossible to watch a television show from 15 years ago; it's just too boring. I think modern television shows, with their intricate plots, are stimulating our minds. This is one reason IQs have been going up.

I just don't think you can lump television shows together.

Dealing with actors is incredibly complex because they oftentimes are like pieces of clay. They want to be told how you want it done. You have to then decide if you want to be the teller or if you want to give them agency.

I don't mind telling a dark side.

A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming - telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.

I'm not necessarily interested in telling the story of people who are super likable.

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

That's the mantra I use when the team tells me something is too complicated. People keep saying, 'We need more prioritization.' I say, 'Guys, what you want is less work. And that is not going to happen.'

I would say, as loving as I am... I am definitely an extremely temperamental man who has a very large temper.

We contrast the urban and the natural, but that's a contemporary myth. We're animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as "natural" (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, beyond counting.

Complexity demands resilience, and that's what panarchy offers. Resilience in the face of complexity is a challenge even when you apply rigorous intelligence and integrity to develop a coherent and flexible strategy.

I hardly have the words to analyse why I like or love a piece of music – I have words, of course, but a layman's words, I don't really know what a cadence is, let alone a Phrygian cadence or an augmented sixth.

We try too hard to figure out why these guys kill when it's really not possible to identify all of the factors that cause an individual to become a serial murderer. Think of the billions of things that have gone into developing who you are. I'm not just talking genetics and upbringing—think of all the things you've experienced every day of your life that have shaped who you are. That's why there's no template for these guys.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite.

Paradox is the only basket large enough to hold truth:

It is not that you know nothing about war, young man. It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.

No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

All this is true, and if it were all, how beautiful, how touching, how glorious it would be. But it is not all. There is another side.

There are always loose ends in real life.

I believe two different kinds of will can exist at the same time in one person. Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it.