Quotes About Complexity

we are all a paradoxical bundle of rich potential that consists of both neurosis and wisdom.

like most people, they know one another inside out, and not at all.

It seems to her that your family is at once utterly familiar and entirely unknown.

The blizzard of baffling and confusing instructions and information that falls upon every child everywhere assumes a Carrollian texture.

Num universo de sim ou não, branco ou negro, eu represento o talvez.

The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.

S]ocial change is not clearly linear and rarely totally beneficial or detrimental. Social change nearly nearly always produces positive and negative effects that are distributed differentially in the affected population.

Doing philosophy is largely a matter of trying to put things together, trying to get the pieces of very large puzzles to make some sense

Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

Es beweist nichts; ist jeder Beweiskraft entzogen durch das Vorteile-Nachteile-Denken, das böseste der Lebensprinzipien. Alles hat nun einmal seine Vor- und Nachteile, und schon wird das Unzumutbare zumutbar - als Nachteil der wiederum nichts als eine notwendige Eigentheit jedes Vorteils ist.

a country like China is accustomed to making difficult choices that Americans might not dream of considering

Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher.

We want to complexify our lives. We don't have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

Modernism and Fundamentalism are popular—they are two quick and easy answers to a complex question.

Vast ills have followed a belief in certainty.

people "shift the burden" of their problem to other solutions—well-intentioned, easy fixes which seem extremely efficient.

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.

most of the problems faced by humankind concerns [concerned] our inability to grasp and manage the increasingly complex systems of our world.

the essence of mastering systems thinking as a management discipline lies in seeing patterns where others see only events and forces to react to. Yet few are trained to see detail and dynamic complexity.

Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.

I have never figured out how women work but I do know that their skin color has no significance. Black or white, every last one is pretty pink on the inside and they are all impossible.

I think what we are feeling in this place is much too large for one simple soul to understand, too powerful.

James Reston, Jr.: You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes, great complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.

Love is both wonderful and foolish.