“Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.”

Source: The Six Rules of Maybe

Variant: It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.
Source: Mockingjay

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 7, A Battle Among Giants, Reductionism and emergence, p. 54

Source: The Tent (2006)

On Jean-Luc Godard in an interview with John Simon (1971).
Context: In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this. But I can't see his pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don't understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he's bluffing, double-crossing me.

Lawrence Summers in: David Warsh (February 11, 1992) "Avoiding Weimar Russia", Boston Globe, p. 37, Section: Business.
1990s

Chaque substance est comme un monde à part, indépendant de toute autre chose, hors de Dieu...
Discours de métaphysique (1686)