Quotes About Reductionism

#1. Reductionism is like a kid who argues that whatever does not fit into his toy box is not a toy.

Nancy Pearcey

#2. The opposite of reductionism, holism - the idea that the only legitimate explanations are in terms of higher-level systems - is an even greater error than reductionism.

Anonymous

#3. We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner.

Stephen Jay Gould

#4. The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn't have been this way. We didn't impose it on the Universe. That's the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it.

Carl Sagan

#5. There is an irony in how Christians talk about and understand sexuality. Christians often lament the world's reductionism of sex to genital interaction and raw physical pleasures, but then they typically reduce a gay person's sexuality to just that.

Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

#6. But when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about the divine being who can't be located tangibly with the kind of evidence that the rationalism of reductionism demands in the same way that you cannot be located in your eyelashes or spine or shoulder.

Rob Bell

#7. In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

Eric Kandel

#8. My ability to help my clients was limited by our narrow focus. This was partly my fault for defining myself as a specialist, but I eventually came to see that this problem of reductionism is endemic to our culture.

Peter Morville

#9. Reductionism is merciless.

Douglas Hofstadter

#10. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords. (p. 28)

Eckhart Tolle

#11. A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting the rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analyzing nature.

Jacob Bronowski

#12. I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.

Azar Nafisi

#13. What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of "I" in your mind and whatever the "I" has identified with.

Eckhart Tolle

#14. The belief that life on earth arose spontaneously from nonliving matter, is simply a matter of faith in strict reductionism and is based entirely on ideology.

Hubert Yockey

#15. Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable.

Richard Dawkins

#16. The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

Edward O. Wilson

#17. A biblically based worldview is capable of affirming the best insights of secular philosophies without ever falling into reductionism.

Nancy Pearcey

#18. The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.

Terence McKenna

#19. That's another pitfall of reductionism: Until scientists have the means to isolate and measure things, they insist those things don't and can't exist, and anyone who says otherwise is ignorant an superstitious.

T. Colin Campbell

#20. The most consistent versions of materialism deny the reality of anything beyond matter - no soul, no spirit, no will, no mind. This is called reductionism: Humans are reduced to biochemical machines.

Nancy Pearcey

#21. We believe that religions are basically the same ... they only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.

Steve Turner

#22. Geographically speaking, you can't get to where you want to be unless you know where you are the begin with. You need a reference point. Similarly, you can't get to where you want to be in life until you are willing to admit where you are to begin with. Self-deception makes that next to impossible.

Andy Stanley

#23. Fingers touch the pages. They turn me. I continue on. I always do. All is big. The

Markus Zusak

#24. Scientific physiology has the task of determining the functions of the animal body and deriving them as a necessary consequence from its elementary conditions.

Carl Ludwig

#25. Chaos is complexity viewed through a reductionist filter.

Silvia Hartmann

#26. I hate to point out the obvious, but here's this tiny bird that's been trying to get through a huge bulletproof glass wall. A totally impossible situation. You tell me it's been here every day pecking away persistently for ten minutes. Well, today the glass wall came down.

Kevin Kwan

#27. Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

Leo Tolstoy

#28. I have doubtless erred more or less in politics, but a crime I never committed.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#29. He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#30. There are standards of the game that FIFA governs and promises to uphold.

Abby Wambach

#31. The causal, abstract, binary, holistic, and reductionist functions of the human brain all help you to process the enormous amount of information coming into our brain from the external world every day.

Abhijit Naskar

#32. The brain's dense thicket of interrelationships, like those of history or art, does not yield to the reductivist's bright blade. (91)

Thomas Lewis

#33. God dwells within me. As me.

Julia Roberts