Quotes About Complexity

There are beauties that are more palpable and explicable, and there are hidden and secret beauties… These hidden beauties are commonly by far the greatest, because the more complex a beauty is, the more hidden it is.

He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

If you take home one souvenir from this part of the tour, may I suggest that it be a suspicion of moral monists. Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places—particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation. Human societies are complex; their needs and challenges are variable.

Evolution is a design process; it's just not an intelligent design process.

That means seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that "feels unsafe"), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).

Human nature is a complex mix of preparations for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism. Which side of our nature we express depends on culture and context. When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.

intersectionalism," as Crenshaw said in her 2016 TED Talk, is that "where there's no name for a problem, you can't see a problem, and when you can't see a problem, you pretty much can't solve it."61

moral monism—the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles

Design is a word that's come to mean so much that it's also a word that has come to mean nothing.

I'm tightly wound. I'm a loose cannon. Both - I'm a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose.

Civil servants have an extraordinary genius for wrapping up a simple idea to make it sound extremely complicated.

The world is bigger and harder to understand than you think... You have to keep your mind as wide-open as your eyes, because almost nothing is what it seems.

This is our condition. We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems.

It's hard to imagine two personalities less alike than the pair who shared Ulysses Maxwell's mind. Where Lyssy was sunny and outgoing, as friendly and disingenuous as a puppy dog, Max was brooding and saturnine, with a sardonic wit and the compassion of a starving alley cat—if they hadn't occupied the same body, he'd have strangled the cheerful little bastard years ago.

Here's the truth: people, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain.

Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

Sometiimes when you look at a person all you see is the tangle and you miss the weave

Sometimes, when you look at a person, all you see is the tangle and you miss the weave.

Narrative teaches us the complexity of the moral life and the light-and-shade to be found in any human personality. Without this, self-righteousness can destroy the very perceptions and nuances, the tolerance and generosity of spirit on which society depends.

the truth that there is not one single system that can do justice to the moral life. What we need is a combination of several. Attempt to reduce them to "one very simple principle," in John Stuart Mill's phrase, and you will fail to do justice to morality itself.

My mind works on several levels at once.1

He'd been many things to me, Nathaniel had, most of them indescribable. But he never looked so much of a puppet as he did now. And already it had all gone wrong.

A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.