Quotes About Complexity

She could be affectionate, generous, and optimistic one day; vengeful, depressed, and irritable the next. In the colloquial language of her friends, she was "either in the garret or cellar." In either mood, she needed attention, something the self-contained Lincoln was not always able to provide.

If the spirited crowd expected a speech exalting recent Union victories, they were disappointed. In keeping with his lifelong tendency to consider all sides of a troubled situation, Lincoln urged a more sympathetic understanding of the nation's alienated citizens in the South.

As S. S. McClure well understood, the "vitality of democracy" depends on "popular knowledge of complex questions." At

If you interview five people about the same incident, and you see five different points of view, it makes you know what makes history so complicated. Something doesn't just occur. It's not like a scientific event. It's a human event.

Things are certainly kaleidoscopic," Roosevelt telegraphed.

The world was far more complicated and nuanced than his categorical moral vision had led him to believe. The ability to learn from the excesses of his egocentric behavior, to alter course, to profit from error, was essential to his growth.

beneath Lincoln's tenderness and kindness, he was without question the most complex, ambitious, willful, and implacable leader of them all.

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

Sometimes I dislike women I dislike us all because of our capacity for not thinking when it suits us...

el libro está vivo y es poderoso, fructificador y capaz de promover el pensamiento y la discusión solamente cuando su forma, intencionalidad y plan no se comprenden, debido a que el momento de captar la forma, la intencionalidad y el plan coincide con el momento en que no queda ya nada por extraer.

The point is, it seems to me that my mind is a mass of totally contradictory attitudes about everything.' 'Everyone's mind is a mass of contradictory attitudes. Why should it matter?' 'It should matter to us, surely?

You talk as if—a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can't be anything else. You can't change that.' 'Well then, I think that's the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.' 'Then I don't follow you. And I don't want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.

Yet I think we may very well see countries that take it for granted they are democracies losing sight of democracy, for we are living in a time when the great over-simplifiers are very powerful.

To my mind the whole push and thrust and development of the world is towards the more complex, the flexible, the open-minded, the ability to entertain many ideas, sometimes contradictory ones, in one's mind at the same time.

There is absolutely nothing like love for showing how many different people can live inside one skin.

My brain contains so much that is locked up and unreachable.

There are as many shades of being in love as there are graduations of colour on cards in the paint shop.

I've got a man might do. No good for me, doesn't care for a flutter, and doesn't like Art either. But he has Proust in his overcoat pocket. Come to think of it, I suppose he reads it for the dirt, so no good for you, cancel what I said.

What was the sense of loving, hating, wanting, resenting, needing, rejecting—and sometimes all in the space of an hour—when she was here, by herself, free.

That was what gospel was meant to do—make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified. It worked on me. It absolutely worked on me.

What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience

I had to say to her that it isn't just men, and it isn't just men "like that." I had to talk to her about the women I had found after I left home, women who breathed out hatred as steadily as the worst man we had ever known. I had to say that the world is a bigger, meaner, more complicated place than anyone ever told us, and the tools for dealing with it are real, but we have to invent them for ourselves, make them up as we go along.

What I loved were books that heightened the sense of life's wonders without denying the complexity and horror that sometimes accompanied those wonders.

A smile, bracketing his still mouth, spread like bane over Lymond's pale face.