Quotes About Complexity

We only know a tiny proportion about the complexity of the natural world. Wherever you look, there are still things we don't know about and don't understand. [...] There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.

Insanity is applying a singular dimensional answer to a multi dimensional experience.

We now enter the Twilight Zone of psychology. Hundreds of theories of personality exist, but no one has yet successfully identified, or even defined, what personality is (Hall and Lindzey, 1957). Thus, there exists a myriad of psychological tests that measure something, but no one seems to quite know what it is.

I'm not mad about movies, there are too many people involved in the making of them, and they lack a definitive creative focus.

Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.

the semantics of words is an intellectual mess.

One of the great paradoxes of social engineering is that it seems at odds with the experience of modernity generally. Trying to jell a social world, the most striking characteristic of which appears to be flux, seems rather like trying to manage a whirlwind.

How can a man be so brave and so stupid, so gentle and so cruel, so warming and so detestable -- all at the same time?

You're a cruel, cold-gutted, heartless bastard but you've got majesty, no doubt about that.

By the study of Boltzmann I have been unable to understand him. He could not understand me on account of my shortness, and his length was and is an equal stumbling block to me.

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

Worrying about complications before ruling out the possibility that the answer was simple would have been damned foolishness.

I don't think there is a right or wrong anymore. Only horrible and not-quite-so-horrible.

Brenda frowned, then focused on Thomas. "You're—we're—doing the right thing." "I don't think there is a right or wrong anymore," Thomas said, hearing the numbness in his own voice. He desperately wanted sleep. "Only horrible and not-quite-so-horrible.

the character of American civilization is a bundle of contradictions,

the legal and political debate surrounding the just management of plurality will continue well into the future.

My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

Words go together in zillions of ways. Some ways go deep, and some ways go shallow.

Veliko bolj udobno se po?utimo, ?e je nekaj abstraktno ali zavito v simbolizem, kot ?e imamo to pred nosom.

Part of me still loves. More of me doesn't.

We're actually really lucky that [physics] works, because no one knows why the thoughts in our heads should relate to the fundamental workings of the universe.

Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output…. In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.