Quotes About Complexity

The living body is intelligent beyond our understanding; it is incomprehensibly intelligent.

I wish there were easy answers to people's health questions. There aren't. There are answers, all right, but they are not easy.

2,074 pages isn't nearly enough to cover health care for America.

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.

The historian amputates reality.

The ifs and buts of history...form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet.

Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

History is various and sinuous and no essential part of the human spirit is ever wholly absent from it.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

Any historical narrative is a bundle of silences.

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

Religion is the most widely debated and least agreed upon phenomenon of human history.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

With my work, I try to delve into the several layers that compose the edifice of history, to take the shadows cast by this model of uniform development to try and understand what lies behind it.

Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it's just a few idiots. Isn't. It's the country.

History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.

Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

History in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes among which we have now and then met with a few virtues, and some happy times.