Quotes About Complexity

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.

A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.

Av - att vara till; att känna min syn försvagad av ett öga, min hörsel förslöad av ett öra, och min tanke, min luftiga ljusa tanke bunden i fettslyngors labyrinter. Du har ju sett en hjärna... vilka krokvägar, vilka krypvägar...

I, myself, am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.

I think I love him, but I also think that you can love people who aren't good for you.

Cada enfermedad es propia de un enfermo. Cada enfermo tiene una mente. Y cada mente es un universo infinito.

Cada desconocido anónimo de la vida real posee un mundo indescifrable, con miedos amores, actos valientes y cobardes.

Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.

I wrote code that merely did what it was supposed to do. Simon's solutions were rapid and weird—convoluted, sometimes in a pointless way, often in a way that looked pointless until you saw how elegant it was.

All of it. Lincoln, Taft, what they did. The H-bomb, the RAND Corporation, the king of Persia, the whole long con of it all.

The more Chaotic I am, the more complete I am.

Pursued alone, any single model will lead to distortions. It will misplace the accent, and thus entail consequences that are not valid.

To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear.

In Wahrheit hat sehr vieles mit dem meisten etwas zu tun, nur nicht der Satz »Dies hat mit jenem nichts zu tun« mit Nachdenken und Differenziertheit.

Norstrom always used to say that I had two different brains working alternatively in my head: the well developed brain of a fool and the un- developed brain of a sort of genius.

Sometimes your friends are your lovers, or have been at one time.

All scriptures contain contradictions and the Qur'an is no exception.

Humans employ simplified conceptual frameworks and normative cues to make sense of and cope with the infinite complexity of the natural and social world. This is the magical devise that has made our species' amazing trajectory possible, and it relies on our unique capacity for social learning.

Reason is still our signature tool for coping with a complex reality, yet it is easily subverted by overconfidence, cognitive closure, and biases.

The United States, the West, capitalism, liberalism, and democracy were collapsed into one and castigated in this sweeping discourse as the source of all evil or at least as no better than others. In some minds they still are.

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them. . .