Quotes About Complexity

Europe's fragmentation puts the wider historical picture beyond reach.

Immigration is the most difficult issue I've ever dealt with, and I've dealt with some tough issues: drones, gays in the military, WikiLeaks, Guantanamo. But immigration is hardest because there are so few people willing to talk and build consensus. Everybody's firmly made up their mind. It's a polarized issue.

Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.

Most of my favorite fictional couples are distinctly different. Light and dark, good and evil, boring and wild... whatever! They're more fun to experience and definitely more fun to write. You have all these levels, and you know they're not going to react to situations the same way.

As first and foremost a character actor, I've always resisted the temptation to cure any of the people I've played or make them lovable in any way; you've just got to celebrate them for what they are.

I think a lot of writers are tempted to add complexity by over-complicating things, but always remember that most natural rules/laws are, at their core, simple. Start simple, and build from there, or you risk getting yourself and your readers tangled.

If you ask ten different people in the diamond industry about the diamond industry, they'll give you ten completely different answers that are opposing, contradicting each other. And maybe that's the thing about the diamond business.

When you've got eight or nine or ten cables running around with someone trying to operate them, it's too much.

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

When government programs aren't working, those on the Left tend to support more funding, while those on the Right want to scrap them altogether. It is better to ask whether the problem is complexity and poor design. We can solve those problems - sometimes without spending a penny.

Sometimes we tend to focus more on the personalities and the conflicts, and it really caricatures the issues.

As an actor, I tend to enjoy going to the dark side.

People tend to have a knee-jerk response to the word 'philosophy'. You imagine it's abstract and inaccessible.

If it had remained always my band, my natural tendency would have been to get more complex and arrange things more and more. That wouldn't necessarily be good for Eddie, or anyone else in the band.

We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.

There is a tendency to try to dumb everything down and turn everything into a one-paragraph press release or even less, just a slogan.

I have always had a tendency to keep enlarging problems which I personally think is the way the world works... that seeing anything one dimensionally on the kinds of political, sort of big issues of human progress is going to be a distorted view of things, which is why over my career I have gone seemingly from subject to subject to subject.

There's a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That's not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan.

I have a tendency to think that when you portray baddies in movies, they come out more human than good guys.

Y2K is showing everyone what technical people have been dealing with for years: the complex, muddled, bug-bitten systems we all depend on, and their nasty tendency toward the occasional disaster.

When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.

There's a tendency to still show women as being one way or the other - you're either soft and shy or you're really ballsy and funny, but I think that we're everything.

Yes, I've got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honour that as well.

Hamlet is a remarkably easy role. Physically it's hard because it tends to be about three hours long and you're talking the whole time. But it's a simple role and it adapts itself very well, because the thing about Hamlet is, we all are Hamlet.