Reductionist Quotes

#1. When you repeat a mistake, it is not a mistake anymore: it is a decision.

Paulo Coelho

#2. Attempts to control complex systems by using the kind of mechanical, reductionist thinking championed by thinkers from Newton to Taylor - breaking everything down into component parts, or optimizing individual elements - tend to be pointless at best or destructive at worst.

Stanley McChrystal

#3. Philosophers sometimes also use 'reductionist' more strictly, to mean 'type-identities' between mental and physical categories, and to exclude 'non-reductive physicalisms' like metaphysical functionalism.

David Papineau

#4. There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

Maria Semple

#5. Bet you didn't see that coming," she murmured.
"I didn't, no. If I'd realized rapping your head would turn you into an insatiable sexual maniac who'd use me so brutally, I'd have cold-cocked you long before this.

J.D. Robb

#6. Penury was a matter of hard chairs and mean cushions; prosperity - old money - was a matter of feathers: an absurd reductionist view of it, but at times quite strikingly true.

Alexander McCall Smith

#7. I don't think the soul is immortal, or at least not immortal in individuals, but it may be immortal as an aspect of the human personality because when I talk about what literature nourishes, it would be silly of me or reductionist to say that it nourishes the brain.

Christopher Hitchens

#8. The increasing fascination with and funding of genetic technology is simply another medical dead end, another reductionist rabbit hole that will lead us no further toward preventing and reversing chronic illness.

T. Colin Campbell

#9. Nothing can account for the reductionist tendencies among neuroscientists except a lack of rigor and consistency, a loyalty to conclusions that are prior to evidence and argument, and an indifference to science as a whole.

Marilynne Robinson

#10. 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

#11. If Heaven was a summer sky and a TV left on mute, then the Underworld was a starry night and an electric guitar with amps.

Charity Parkerson

#12. If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness.

Joel Salatin

#13. If our world is regulated by reductionist, narrow, sophomoric versions of Darwin; or reductionist, narrow, sophomoric versions of religious dogma; you end up being childishly anti-scientific, and childishly anti-religious, and you miss the very complex interaction [they share]

Cornel West

#14. I think the main lesson that I have learned is that a good scientist is a humble scientist who is open-minded to listen to other scientists when they discover something.

Dan Shechtman

#15. If he set out right now to make a list of the things he had taken for granted in his life, he'd go broke buying paper.

James P. Blaylock

#16. It is now a building in which individuals toil independently in accordance with top-down, need-to-know reductionist planning. They might as well be spread around the globe.

Stanley McChrystal

#17. Being a black sheep is a way I would describe myself.

Gin Wigmore

#18. Fruit often ends up rotting in the crisper drawer. Well, that's the wrong place to put it. Out of sight, out of mind. The kids all know where the junk-food shelf is. Make the fruit that easy to get to. Put a big huge bowl of fruit on the counter.

Tyler Florence

#19. Women, churchgoers, and conservative were more likely than men, nonchurch goers, and liberals to disagree with the reductionist (neural) account of human life.

Andrew Ferguson

#20. I think the body is the ultimate thing. The soul and mind are part of the body. I don't think there is anything outside of that. Your physical self is who you are. Some people feel that that is reductionist, but I don't think it is. It's just true.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#21. And I knew that my only way through this mass of simultaneous future outcomes was to hold tight to the idea that it was possible to get to OK from where we were now. Not assured. Just possible.

Catherine Ryan Hyde

#22. There is no point in asking me general questions because I am always changing my mind.

Michel Houellebecq

#23. You know, in our culture today, our Western, reductionist, Roman, linear, fragmented ... culture, we don't ask how to make a pig happy. We ask how to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, and that's not a noble goal.

Joel Salatin

#24. Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right? ... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.

Douglas Rushkoff

#25. My parents are deeply pious Hindus.

Akhil Sharma

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

Silvia Hartmann

#27. People deserve to have their experiences understood in a genuine bio-psycho-social approach. All too often, this is ignored in favor of what is a very reductionist, bio-medical, model ...

Peter Kinderman

#28. The smallest gestures you do can sometimes carry the most weight.

Joe Vitale

#29. I'm not so sure that I am a reductionist in the strict type-identity sense. The issues here are messy. But I certainly a reductionist in the more general sense which is opposed to eliminativism and dualism.

David Papineau

#30. Genetic medicine is the ultimate reductionist fantasy.

T. Colin Campbell

#31. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.

Thomas Nagel

#32. Short form media is reductionist by nature.

Jon Krakauer

#33. One of the things that drive the various reductionist programs about mind, value, and meaning, in spite of their inherent implausibility, is the lack of any comprehensive alternative.

Thomas Nagel

#34. One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

Russell Banks