Quotes About Complexity

There's as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't. People are much more complicated than that. It's true of everybody.

Each of us, A CEll Of Awareness... imperfect, and incomplete. Genetic blends, with uncertain ends.

We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.

We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.

Ich meine damit eine Geschichte. Aber nicht irgendeine Geschichte. Ich denke an große Erzählungen – Erzählungen, die tief und komplex genug sind, um Erklärungen hinsichtlich der Herkunft und der Zukunft eines Volkes zu bieten; Erzählungen, die Ideale aufstellen, Verhaltungsregeln vorgeben, die Quellen von Autorität benennen und durch all dies eine Dimension von Kontinuität und Sinnhaftigkeit erzeugen.

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean "ecological" in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change.

all theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification.

Theirs was a "language" that denied interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued the irrelevance of history, explained nothing, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence.

I had read the official reports. I knew by then that official reports were never enough to explain John Vann. There was always more to his story.

Men she thought, could make a clean break with a woman, could leave in the way Parveen's husband had. Or could even be left, like George and determine to make a life another way. It was women who longed to retain ties and connections, to mix things up in complicated ways.

I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world.

It's funny about 'passing.' We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.

Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.

To make a faithful picture, come as close as possible to copying the object as it is.' This simple-minded injunction baffles me; for the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms, a complex of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool and much more. If none of these constitute the object as it is, what else might? If all are ways the object is, then none is way the object is. I cannot copy all these at once; and the more nearly I succeeded, the less would the result be a realistic picture.

Nothing is black or white.

I can't interfere with my own past! Because that would mean I'd be interfering with my own past- to stop myself from interfering with my own past! THEN where would we be?!" - 6th Doctor

Worry about right and wrong wasn't a concept he embraced. Right and wrong were ephemerals; they changed from every angle, from hour to hour, depending on which side of any of a thousand borders a soldier was born.

there really is no such thing as 'the future', singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.

the state of the future will need to function more like the human immune system

Goodness provokes bitchiness. It's mathematical. It's somewhere in the human genes. Any number of lovely poeple are married to horrible ones. Read Middlemarch (Book 989, George Eliot, Penguin Classics, London) if you don't believe me. There's something in me that just can't let it be. Goodness is a tidy bow you just can't help wanting to pull loose.

That's the thing about boys. Maybe just Irish boys. Boys have No Go Areas, they have an entire geography of places you can't go because if you do they'll crack open, they'll fall apart and you won't be able to put them back together, not ever. Girls know this. We know. Even love can't reach some places.

La mente umana, anche una mente minuscola, aborrisce l'ambiguità

reasons too deep to be fished.