Quotes About Complexity

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

Most big popcorn movies are 'bad guy does something to good guy, good guy gets revenge on bad guy, sets the world right, and moves on.' And 'Ender's Game' is just not that simple, so it's an exciting challenge. It's a little terrifying, and let's see how audiences respond.

It was a quality of my childhood that everything had these two sides. Even though things could be really beautiful and peaceful one moment, they could also be a bit chaotic or maybe terrifying in another.

When you look at territorial disputes, there are good arguments on any sides. I think it's important that we don't take sides on legitimacy.

There aren't many people who say that Europe is a territory, or Asia is a territory - it'd be suicide. And there are even more people in America than in Europe. I think it's strange, really. I basically see it as loads of different places.

Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies.

And the terror itself is an example of the world's uncontrollability.

Putting together a counter- terrorism policy, it's very easy to look at law enforcement or defense, military action or stopping the money flows or whatever, but the really difficult part is integrating all aspects of the policy, and I think she put a lot of emphasis on that.

As a beat reporter covering the CIA and intelligence world after the terrorist attacks of 2001, I could sense that many things I couldn't see or understand were changing, expanding, getting so big they were difficult to manage.

One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you're trying to test.

Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.

As far as he could tell, he'd stopped one small bunch of bad guys killing a big bunch of bad guys and as a result the good guys got chucked out of their homes by another bunch of bad guys. Did that make him good or bad? James only knew that thinking about it gave him a headache.

Everyone is sure they know what fascism is.

Trying to describe something musical is like dancing to architecture, it's really difficult.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

According to the majority view of intelligence researchers, the core of intelligence is 'the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience'.

Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice. The Nature of Emotions (2001)

Rationality will not save us.

He shared the common human hallmark: he was simultaneously predictable and unfathomable -- a routine miracle.

The United States of America is one of the most studied but least understood nations in the contemporary world.

Economics could not be an exact science, because the number of variables was too great, and stability of variables over time could not be guaranteed. As he was to put it later, it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

I don't understand the age we live in, and what I understand I don't like.

Forget it, Jake -- it's Chinatown.

and straightforward language. The researchers concluded that when the witness spoke simply the jurors could evaluate his argument on its merits. But when he was unintelligible, they had to resort to the mental shortcut of accepting his title and reputation in lieu of comprehensible facts. And so, another paradox: experts are sometimes most convincing when we don't understand what they're talking about.