Quotes About Complexity

As I found while leading special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, if the problem is interconnected, your organization must be, as well.

Our bureaucracy had excelled at compartmentalizing intelligence - we had a 'need to know' system - but by 2004, it was impossible to foresee what elements of our organization would and would not need to know a given piece of information.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.

Faulkner was almost oriental. I never got into Faulkner.

When you take something apart, you get a great sense of what it took to originally put it together.

I was originally going to become a biochemist, but it just got way too complicated.

Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well.

There's something really unique about 'Orphan Black' is that it has a lot of female leads, so it's about a lot of women's stories, but it's not women's stories in terms of trying to find a guy or keep a guy; it's about entirely other things.

Once upon a time, fashion was complex, and ostentatious was considered better.

You just look at the world, and you see things unraveling, and you say, 'I wonder what we ought to do?' Things are seldom crystal clear.

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

I think sometimes what people miss about black people is that we're complicated, that we are indeed messy, that we do our best with what we've been given. We come into the world exactly like you. It's just that there are circumstances in the culture that are dictated and put on our lives that we have to fight against.

I went into the sciences very early on, but to me, economics pervades so much more of our lives and our existence.

I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.

Ours was not a normal or easy life.

Ours is a colourful and diversified world. It is also a complex one.

We're all one thing, and we're all just enacting different aspects of ourselves all the time.

There isn't just one black experience out here.

I want to show people that there's a side of myself other than just the outrageous comedian.

It's not easy for an outsider to understand this industry.

To an outsider, understanding an NFL playbook is like trying to read Japanese.

Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they don't even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing.

The experiences and feelings I have are starting to outweigh the words available to explain them.