Quotes About Complexity

Do I want a character who just has the best motives and the best intentions, zero flaws, and is doing things for the right reasons? No!

All we hear about Africa in the West is Darfur, Zimbabwe, Congo, Somalia, as if that is all there is.

In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.

I think in terms of being a good presenter, it's not as simple as having been out in a war zone. Actually the news is far broader than that.

We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in lots of sugar, and we'll get fat and sick. Confine our movement, and we'll get weak and antsy. Give us some manageable problems with which to grapple, and we'll cheer up.

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

What we want is never simple.

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

Chicago - a facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade every type of dubiousness.

Canada has no cultural unity, no linguistic unity, no religious unity, no economic unity, no geographic unity. All it has is unity.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

Nothing is pure and entire of a piece. All advantages are attended with disadvantages. A universal compensation prevails in all conditions of being and existence.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of everything.

A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.

He is . . . like many other geniuses, a greater friend to the bottle, than the bottle is to him.

Whatever is good to know is difficult to learn.

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

The worst of faces still is human.

She is neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring.

Probably no man ever had a friend he did not dislike a little; we are all so constituted by nature that no one can possibly entirely approve of us.

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.

How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?