Quotes About Complexity

No one is anything but a shade of grey. It's good people making bad choices.

My idea of what's good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that.

I learned the bad guys are not always bad, the good guys are not always good.

Good leadership is hard to measure on a daily basis which is why so many default to doing what's easy to measure instead.

Do you still think I'm the good guy?

Oh, well...up until now it had been a good day, in a horrible kind of way.

Large companies are very good at solving extremely complex problems in a globally optimal way.

The thing that interests me is the good and evil in everybody. I don't have conventional heroes in the films that I directed, because I believe there's good and evil in everybody.

There's no such thing as a good or bad person: there are just people who have each been or seem to have been good or bad to you, someone, or some people, thus far.

Trying to make things work in government is sometimes like trying to sew a button on a custard pie.

A large brain, like large government, may not be able to do simple things in a simple way.

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

A difficulty for every solution.

Government is like an onion. To understand it, you have to peel through many different layers. Most outsiders never get beyond the first or second layer.

No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.

I learned running the government for the Presidency, which I always thought was difficult, is even more difficult than I thought.

It actually turns out to be much harder to really understand government across state local and federal.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.

Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

Great knowledge sees all in one. Small knowledge breaks down into the many.

Each person is an enigma. You're a puzzle not only to yourself but also to everyone else, and the great mystery of our time is how we penetrate this puzzle.

Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.