Quotes About Complexity

The sheer number of standards is the biggest impediment to implementing standards

Whether or not [a] story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl. A girl or a monster or both. Not everyone in a story gets a happy ending. Not everyone who reads a story feels the same way about how it ends. And if you go back to the beginning and read it again, you may discover it isn't the same story you thought you'd read. Stories shift their shape.

Because love isn't just love. It's all the other stuff, too.

Real life is never so neat as the stories we choose to tell about it

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances . . . could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, ABSURD in the highest possible degree.

It's elementary chaos theory, or to give it its popular designation—Murphy's Law. Random changes happen all the time. Mistakes accumulate. Correcting them brings further changes. As someone smarter than me once said, evolution is smarter than you.

Orgel's rule—"Evolution is smarter than you

software development was insecurities all the way down. Even

The reason that neither he nor I could predict my life, any more than you can predict yours, is that life is not linear; it is organic.

Life is rarely a straight line moving upward across a page. Real life is more like a beautiful scribble, looping across the page. Life is complex and unpredictable, and because of our powers of imagination and creativity we are able to navigate it.

Increasing consciousness = increasing complexity.

It's easier to offer easy answers when we are not the people facing the hard questions.

Too many congregations look to their pastors for simple answers to problems that their pastors see as anything but simple. And too many pastors don't trust their congregations enough to say, "It's not that simple from my point of view and here's why.

While the Bible does speak clearly on many matters—you'd have to be deaf not to hear the condemnations of murder, stealing, adultery, greed, etc.—there are, in fact, many questions at the margins of each of these, for which there are not clear answers. If you are not a pastor it's easier to maintain the comforting illusion that these hard cases are rare. But they are not.

One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.

It's more complicated than that." TL in "The Rhetoric of Religion

Israelis are a mix of North African, Levantine, and Eastern European, which inflames the politics but does amazing things for the women.

Marriage is like signing a 356-page contract without knowing what's in it.

A masterpiece of vagueness.

The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, 'You haven't answered every question with evolution '... Well, guess what? Science can't answer every question.

Flexibility can come at the cost of increased complexity.

Versioned interfaces are a reasonable compromise when you absolutely must introduce new operations to an existing interface-based abstraction without affecting client code. They are not a long-term solution for frequently changing abstraction, because of the complexity they create both for client and framework developers.

Rarely has a new commander been presented with such daunting and complex issues on his first day in command as was George Meade. He dealt with his limitations and deprivations with a steady head and evident equanimity.

History is but a tapestry of stories, imperfectly woven.