Quotes About Complexity

We are the sum of all our parts

For four years he lived in Brooklyn, and four years in Brooklyn are a geologic age -- a single stratum of grey time. They were years of poverty, of desperation, of loneliness unutterable. All about him were the poor, the outcast, the neglected and forsaken people of America, and he was one of them. But life is strong, and year after year it went on around him in all its manifold complexity, rich with its unnoticed and unrecorded little happenings.

had almost said of mankind.

It may be satisfying to castigate the likes of Geithner and the heads of Lehman Brothers and AIG, but safety experts like Perrow know it is far more productive to design better systems than to hope for better people.

The complexity of the society we have created for ourselves envelops us so completely that, instead of being dizzied, we take it for granted.

Los dispositivos digitales evitan errores pequeños pero preparan el terreno para grandes errores».

La culpa no es de las leyes de la física, sino del sencillo hecho de que, a veces, lo que los modelos dejan fuera es más importante que lo que incluyen.

Anyone who insists that running a modern economy is a matter of plain common sense frankly doesn't understand much about running a modern economy.

It's so damn complex. If you ever think you have the solution to this, you're wrong and you're

Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things...I just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones -- that kind of love.

He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.

I hated him for making me stop hating him

They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French—this was all too damned complicated, it required some reading—but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons. I

Mrs. Kooshof's intolerance for complexity, for the looping circuitry of a well-told tale, symptomizes an epidemic disease of our modern world. (I see it daily among my students. The short attention span, the appetite limited to linearity. Too much Melrose Place.)

Every vegetable, every bit of protein on the list had a provenance more complex than a minor Rembrandt.

The theory lies in the complexity of the cases.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

The more we analyze, the more ambiguous things become.

Personhood then is also in the mesh-- it may look solid from a distance, but as we approach it we discover that it is full of holes

The ecological thought affects all aspects of life, culture, and society.

We are living textbooks on global warming and nuclear materials, crisscrosssed with interobjective calligraphy.

The idea that there are multiple worlds because there are multiple lifeforms and that no one world or scale is the right one means that efficiency is only efficient from a particular standpoint. For example, the idea of sustainability implies that the system we now have is worth sustaining.

Simplicity, clarity, complexity, and ambiguity are not mutually exclusive states in language; the sensitive typographer is one who can manifest these states in the right mix by controlling the elements at his or her disposal.

To live in a world fairly dripping with technology and yet have no concept of how or why any of it worked—it seemed incomprehensible.