Quotes About Complexity

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

I am quite a cheerful, dark person. On the outside, I'm optimistic but I expect the worst to happen.

There's so much saint in the worst of them, and so much devil in the best of them, that a woman who's married to one of them, has nothing to learn of the rest of them.

There are many different kinds of radioactive waste and each has its own half-life so, just to be on the safe side and to simplify matters, I base my calculations on the worst one and that's plutonium.

We live in the best place on earth but at times the worst.

For me, there is a real line between something being the worst thing in the world and the best thing in the world.

If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

As important as it is to learn how to deal with different kinds of people, truly toxic people will never be worth your time and energy - and they take a lot of each. Toxic people create unnecessary complexity, strife, and, worst of all, stress.

America needs a strong, rational, positive, practical conservative movement. It needs that bulwark against liberal delusion and hubris. It needs a voice that says we are imperfect, that life is complex, that government can create need even as it meets need, that you can't fix everything, and freedom is worth some danger and sorrow.

My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.

Opera is complex for those who perform it, but also for those who listen to it. It takes more time, more patience and more spirit of sacrifice. All this is well worth it because opera offers such deep sensations that they will remain in a heart for a lifetime.

No endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect.

In Tom Cone's work nothing is easy.

I don't really have a lot of fun playing just straight good guys. It's not my thing. It's like Tom Hanks territory.

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.

I go feminine, I go masculine. I am both, actually. I think the male side is a bit stronger in me, and I have to tone it down sometimes. I'm not like a normal woman, that's for sure.

My favorite film is 'The Empire Strikes Back.' My writing, and my personal taste in movies and books, tends toward works with a darker tone, and 'Empire' fits that the best of all the movies.

With everything I do, I strive for a balance of tone, where it's not just one thing.

In India we have hundreds of skin tones and don't we need to show that?

There is not one New York but thousands - mixed-up conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues.

I have always loved really dense, complicated stories with lots of layers, tons of obscure literary references, and a plethora of inside jokes.

What I really want to do is create great roles for women. And I'm not talking Nicholas Sparks romance. I think women's roles have gotten ghettoized in these sort of places... I'm thinking women in action, comic books, or like the Tony Soprano of women. We need some complex roles.

You have antiheroes in dramas, like Tony Soprano. But it's a little bit harder in comedy. You don't see it quite as much.