Quotes About Complexity

Crazy Jane is a complex individual who always has a lot brewing. She tries to hold things together on the surface, which is something that we all try to do. She uses these different personalities to try to cope with life.

The Constitution is no simple contract, not because it uses a certain amount of open-ended language, but because its language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, altogether, all at once.

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

Without a computer, every point on a structure has to be calculated with reference to everything else. But by using a PC, I can create complex curves that don't have radii or centers.

Prime Minister Cameron says he wants to be the greenest government ever, but the definition of green is immature... I don't deny for a moment that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but there are so many other factors that affect climate. It is more complicated than the computer models that we are using. What the truth is, nobody knows.

What's interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It's either a utopia or it's misery. The real truth is that there's going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.

Everyone's a mixed bag. I'm a utopian social anarchist, but I'm also a pragmatist.

People tend to think I'm funny and fluffy, but I can switch on a sixpence from extreme happiness to utter despair. I'm aware that doesn't make it easy for people sometimes.

I used to look down on the world for being corrupt, but now I adore it for the utter magnificence of that corruption.

With everything that is complex, we learn. If you don't learn, then it's an utter and abject failure. If you do learn, and you're able to apply that to the next situation, then you take away a measure of success.

I remember thinking, when I was playing Hedda Gabler, that several sequences of the play were utterly absurd.

'Hamlet' is so modern; 'Coriolanus' is utterly alien to our consciousness, and that makes it difficult for us.

Clearly, some of the reason people embrace alternatives and reject vaccines is that they are angry and mistrustful of government and of pharmaceutical conglomerates. More than that, we pay too much for health care, it's not good enough, and the system is too complex. We need alternatives.

I think the only universal thing is one individual. If you talk about a country or a nation or a culture, it's so vague. I mean what is a nation? A nation is full of nice and bad and long and tall and short and thin people. It's not like everybody is the same.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate.

I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?

It is hard to know what you are talking about in mathematics, yet no one questions the validity of what you say. There is no other realm of discourse half so queer.

People look at you, and they think they know you. They think they can place you in a certain category by what they think they know about you. But there's so much more to all of us than what we know and what we see at face value.

To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.

I'm a member of a very complex and richly valued race.

Why did civilization make things seem so much more difficult?

neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.