Quotes About Intractability

It was a relief to decide you didn't have to decide. It was a relief to have faith in immutability, a relief to lose faith in your ability to change something, even when it was something you'd wish you could change. It was a relief to be imposed on intractably. Acceptance, if not brave, was at least a relief. That was the trick of it.

When we forget, or wilfully choose to ignore, the intractability of human behaviour, the complexity of human institutions, and the probability of unanticipated consequences, we do so at great risk, and often immense human cost.

You may know the intractability of a disease by its long list of remedies.

That which occludes and that which is occluded have different sources, sites of intractability, forms of appearance, and temporal effects. They derive from geopolitical locations as much as they do from conceptual grammars that render different objects observable, that shape how we observers observe our chosen observers (as Niklas Luhmann might put it), and thereby construe the proper "lessons of empire" and what count as the salient "historical facts.

While I'm not a big fan of nature, its intractability amuses me to no end. (Kinsey Millhone)

There is in these words the beautiful maneuverability of the abstract rushing in to replace the intractability of the concrete.