Quotes About Complexity

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can't make snap decisions. You can't have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

As long as you can throw people a curveball, that's what you're looking for. Because the minute they can define you, the minute they think they know exactly who you are, is when it starts to wear thin.

It is difficult to portray grey characters because there is a very thin line between being nasty and slightly negative.

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.

Space is certainly something more complicated than the average person would probably realize. Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.

I like my country, but I don't think like an Italian. It's a complex, complicated difficult country to make things happen in.

Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.

I think Phil Dick was particularly interesting in that, first of all, he was a very modern man and a very modern thinker, but I don't know what demons drove him.

Latin America seemed to be a land where there were only dictators, revolutionaries, catastrophes. Now we know that Latin America can produce also artists, musicians, painters, thinkers, and novelists.

I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

I have no patience for anyone who thinks they've figured things out, no patience for people who think they're right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated to conform to any of our rigid ideas of what it should be like.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

When I play a good guy, I try to explore them and figure out what shapes them and makes them interesting. When I'm playing a bad guy, I try to explore everything that makes them good. No one ever really thinks that they're a bad guy.

To become a celebrity, a name - and I've actually met some that speak of themselves in the third person - it's scary. They become an object, not a human, complex, questioning thing where the cells are always changing.

To start your life as a character of 120 years when you are in your late thirties, and then go back in time about 20 years later to play the same character who is your own age then, its very complicated, but very interesting.

I like Thomas Jefferson, though he intimidated me. I thought he would have been very tough to be around. I don't know if he had such a sense of humor.

The fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves doesn't devalue what he wrote.

It is more likely that more than a century will pass before we know the structure of the chemical atoms as thoroughly as we do our solar system.

He knows the tax code as thoroughly as the pope knows the Lord's Prayer.

When you're a girl, you have to be everything, You have to be dope at what you do, but you have to be super sweet, and you have to be sexy, and you have to be this and you have to be that and you have to be nice, and you have to - it's like, I can't be all of those things at once. I'm a human being.

Intersectionality is not easy. It's not as though the existing frameworks that we have - from our culture, our politics, or our law - automatically lead people to being conversant and literate in intersectionality.

Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.

That rockabilly sound wasn't as simple as I thought it was.