Top 100 Complexity The Quotes
#1. Governments don't protect people, people protect governments."
"Order is organic, it can't just be ordered up."
"The more complexity, the more unpredictability and therefore the more uncontrollability. You cannot control what you cannot predict.
Lawrence Samuels
#2. The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity ... The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity ... a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.
Milan Kundera
#3. Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.
Richard Dawkins
#4. I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#5. Coffee has ... expand[ed] humanity's working-day from twelve to a potential twenty-four hours. The tempo, the complexity, the tension of modern life, call for something that can perform the miracle of stimulating brain activity, without evil, habit-forming after-effects.
Margaret Meagher
#6. If you detect a needlessly complex style when you read, look for characters and actions so that you can unravel for yourself the complexity the writer needlessly inflicted on you.
Joseph M. Williams
#7. What's changed? I'm a dad. That's fundamental. Watching your kids grow, you go back a bit. You can watch a bug crawling around for minutes at a time
just sit and marvel at its complexity, the utter bugness of it. I've learned to do that again.
Bob Weir
#8. Reduce complexity. The single most important reason to create a routine is to reduce a program's complexity. Create a routine to hide information so that you won't need to think about it.
Steve McConnell
#9. He thought about explaining math's beauty to her, the elegance of an equation, the simplicity within the complexity. The thrill of touching truth and knowing it as ancient and unassailable, as permanent and profound.
Katie Kennedy
#10. The average teacher explains complexity; the gifted teacher reveals simplicity.
Robert Breault
#11. Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it, the user or the developer (programmer or engineer).
Larry Tesler
#12. Narrow life down to what's precious and necessary. In a world of complexity the best weapon is simplicity.
Price Pritchett
#13. Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity, the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.
Alex Lemon
#14. On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it.
Alain De Botton
#15. For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today.
Bill Bryson
#16. The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society - and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.
William H. Whyte
#17. Sudden falls can come to societies that know too little history or that have furnished their minds with easy one-note propaganda in place of the true complexity and terrible beauty of the storied past.
Dean Koontz
#18. The brain seems to be made up of a bewildering complexity of parts, and the cells within the parts seem to be characterized by an inscrutable complexity of form, extent, and relationships with each other.
Gordon Shepherd
#19. In spite of the enormous complexity of macroscopic bodies when viewed from an atomistic viewpoint, one knows from everyday experience as well as from precision experiments that macroscopic bodies obey quite definite laws.
Franz Mandl
#20. I'm kind of a sloppy feminist. Any ideology makes me a little nervous because there's some point where it doesn't allow for the complexity of things.
Kim Gordon
#21. Wordsmiths who serve established power ... castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.
John Ralston Saul
#22. If we are merely a chance product of 'random happenstance' and nothing more, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of 'random happenstance' with such methodical complexity?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#23. When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.
Nancy Gibbs
#24. There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand.
Bones The Doctor In The Photo
#25. By the moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.
Carson McCullers
#26. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.
Walter Isaacson
#27. I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.
David Christian
#28. 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.
Dan Simmons
#29. The depth of any story is proportionate to the protagonist's commitment to their goal, the complexity of the problem, and the grace of the solution.
Steve House
#30. You cannot conceive of the magnitude of this mystery." He spoke in a confidential whisper. "You cannot conceive of this complexity." He was saying these words as if he'd just discovered them. He wept. I swear it. He wept.
Anne Rice
#31. Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the cafe table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient to exult me. No letter from anyone, even in praise of my book, can stir me as much as a note from him.
Anais Nin
#32. Those swirls in the cream mixing into the coffee? That's us. Ephemeral patterns of complexity, riding a wave of increasing entropy from simple beginnings to a simple end. We should enjoy the ride.
Sean Carroll
#33. The greatness of common sense, and its title to reverence, appear in this, that it deals with vast complexity, that is, with the innumerable elements of a situation. Common sense discerns and judges a path through this knotted and tangled maze.
James Vila Blake
#34. You don't always have to show art in what's called a white box; you can have a kind of complexity within an exhibit which actually respects the art as well.
Zaha Hadid
#35. The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.
Atul Gawande
#36. The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity.
Ayn Rand
#37. I was a Spidey fan as a kid. I always liked the complexity and the teenaged angst that Spider-Man, Peter Parker, always had to deal with. It was kind of a deeper, darker storytelling that just good-guy-beats-bad-guy.
Jack Coleman
#38. Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion.
Donald A. Norman
#39. I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.
Ken Burns
#40. The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.
Thane Rosenbaum
#41. Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions.
Nikolai Gogol
#42. Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity.
Robert Fulghum
#43. If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.
Evelyn Waugh
#44. I'm wondering if every person I pass has similar depths, and if there's any way to avoid the mistake of judging them so shallowly that I'm rocked when they show their true complexity.
Brandon Sanderson
#45. We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.
Mohsin Hamid
#46. Increasing complexity on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.
Ray Kurzweil
#47. The machine was so intricate, so complicated, that he almost got dizzy looking at it. Even in its sad state of disrepair, it was beautiful.
Brian Selznick
#48. The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
Edsger Dijkstra
#49. My characteristics as a scientist stem from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art to experimental results. I like complexity and am delighted by the unexpected. Ideas interest me.
Peter C. Doherty
#50. It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#51. Sometimes idiosyncrasies which used to be irritating become endearing, part of the complexity of a partner who has become woven deep into our own selves.
Madeleine L'Engle
#52. Dropbox looks really simple to the end user and is extremely magical and just works. But under the hood, the complexity of the technology is huge. The amount of work it requires to store, scale and move this data is pretty intense.
Ruchi Sanghvi
#53. I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.
Jonathan Ive
#54. It's the Hitler within us that's our problem," said the media expert Peter Boenisch. "Germans are pigheaded. The fascination of Hitler is a reaction to the complexity of the world, so complicated and so insoluble for the lower strata. There is no outlet for frustration.
Peter Wyden
#55. What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.
Robert Charles Wilson
#56. As we embrace our passions and delve into the mystery of life, we unite with the majestic complexity of nature; and if we follow the signs, this can help us understand who we really are.
Sebastian Pole
#57. The complexity of a subject, if crucial for understanding the story, needs to be shown in the visualisation. Thus, in many cases, clarifying a subject requires increasing the amount of information, not reducing it.
Alberto Cairo
#58. The flow experience, like everything else, is not "good" in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#59. Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.
Edward Tufte
#60. There's something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children.
Maurice Sendak
#61. The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being.
Sri Aurobindo
#62. Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?
Dick Cavett
#64. I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only story, and I think that the cognitive complexity is as important.
Steven Johnson
#65. Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
Vladimir Nabokov
#66. In debugging, errors are seen not as false but as fixable. This is a state of mind that makes it easy to learn from .6 Multiple passes also brought a new feel for the complexity of design decisions.
Sherry Turkle
#67. Compared to the complexity of the universe, this world of ours is like the brain of a worm.
Haruki Murakami
#68. The techniques have galloped ahead of the concepts. We have moved away from studying the complexity of the organism; from processes and organisation to composition.
James Black
#69. A belief in the purposeful complexity of Fate is always more comforting than random, straightforward facts. This may be why Mother preferred to believe in Atlantis and UFOs rather than in virtually everything else.
Bradley Denton
#70. The usual duty of the "intellectual" is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae.
Christopher Hitchens
#71. The complexity of language, he thought to himself, lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding.
Alexander Theroux
#72. Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.
Gary Ross
#73. Don't you sometimes feel bewildered when you think of the millions of things that put life together?' ... 'I;m not bewildered. I'm filled with the deepest awe and wonder. The miracle is that in its complexity it all works.
Julie Andrews Edwards
#74. On the Web, we can be whoever we wish to be, editing the face we show to others in ways that aren't possible in physical space. We can also fine-tune the complexity and depth of our interactions and relationships.
Walter Kirn
#75. The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.
Neil Cross
#76. Psychology either tends to glorify human beings or trivialize them, leaving out the complexity of the human soul and the demands of God.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#77. We are the products of our past ... a web of complexities.
Janet Leigh
#79. Embrace your complexity, stretch your creativity, and live up to your potential, you are what makes the world great.
Dan Wells
#80. if Watson is going to replace any physicians, it will likely be at the low end of complexity - for
Robert Wachter
#81. From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.
Abdus Salam
#82. The right amount of complexity is what creates the optimal simplicity
David Allen
#83. Ideology follows the money."
"Governments don't protect people, people protect governments."
"To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war.
Lawrence Samuels
#84. Complexity is not good. People don't understand the elegance of simplicity.
Gordon Willis
#85. Look at yourself as someone who is reaching for healing, and at the complexity of what needs to be healed. Do not think that you exist alone without other human beings of equal complexity.
Gary Zukav
#86. The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.
Michael Denton
#87. When East meets West, amazing design happens. L'Alahambra rug is a marriage of the clean line and simplicity of Western graphic design meets the complexity and beauty of Eastern pattern.
Genevieve Gorder
#88. The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.
Stephen Jay Gould
#89. As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.
Junot Diaz
#90. The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.
Edward O. Wilson
#91. We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.
Chuck Klosterman
#92. in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.
Joseph A. Tainter
#93. The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.
Richard Dawkins
#95. I tried to develop some theories that took account of the uncertainty in the world and the complexity in the world.
Herbert A. Simon
#96. Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#97. There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bush's presidency that his gracelessness as well as his appetite for war were linked to his impatience with complexity. He acted 'from the gut,' and was economical with the truth until it disappeared.
Teju Cole
#99. Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.
John Maynard Keynes
#100. ..humans love complexity of thought. This they pursue on the totally baseless assumption that complexity indicates profundity or truth.
Walter Ralston Martin
