Quotes About Complexity

Those who wonder why the American tax code is so complex, convoluted, and constantly changing fail to appreciate what a wonderful tool it is for extortion.

Complexity is a useful and lucrative method of legal extortion for politicians

According to Waggoner, the trouble is that complicated laws enrich those who make the laws while making the rest of society poorer.

System thinking is a discipline of seeing whole.

When much is known, procedural planning approaches work perfectly well. When much is unknown, they do not.

There is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.

There is a heuristic "rule of thumb" in modeling dynamical systems: do not attempt to encompass in your model more than two hierarchical levels.

Randomness is a general model that scientists use for things they do not understand.

For example, the populations of both the Roman Empire and Han China grew to 50–60 million people at the peak. This is the point when we surpassed the social insects. During the past two millennia no other animal anywhere has rivaled human societies in size and complexity. ·Ã¢â'¬Â¢· In

the startling line in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, where Captain Hook is described: "The man isn't wholly evil; he has a thesaurus in his cabin.

On Becoming a Person, "is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up.

dolphins are not the benevolent mammals we'd like them to be; those beaming faces hide the minds of assassins.

In a civil war… every side is wrong. It's hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.

I didn't choose to get entangled in my domestic life, my boxer's clinch with Kathy. And if you think I did or do, it's because you're morbidly young. You've failed to pass from adolescent freedom into the land which I inhabit: married to a woman who is economically, intellectually, and even this, too, even erotically my superior.

Jak z?o?ymy wszystko, co wiemy, to widzimy tylko, ?e co? tu nie gra. Ale jak pi?knie i ciekawie nie gra.

And did not like what he saw. Beneath the doctor's suavity there lay a coldness, something fixed and hard. This was no ordinary person, and Erickson felt uneasy.

Es como la fábrica totalmente automatizada que se repara a sí misma. ¿Sabe a lo que se refiere la palabra «retroalimentación»?

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.

Good and Evil are names for what people do, not for what they are...stopped believing there was a power of good and evil. That they were outside of us...People are too complicated for labels.

Who are you? the woman said at last. Lyra Silver— No, where d'you come from? What are you? How do you know things like this? Wearily Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout Scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.

Lyra bent over the open vessel and found the concentrated fragrance of every rose that had ever bloomed: a sweetness and power so profound that it moved beyond sweetness altogether and out of the other side of its own complexity into a realm of clear and simple purity and beauty. It was the smell of sunlight itself.

When you stopped believing in God, he went on, did you stop believing in good and evil? No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.