The Black Coat (2013)
“Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.”
In some published transcripts or quotations of this speech a variant of this statement appears immediately before the quote by Churchill below, but was not said during Reagan's televised address on (27 October 1964). Though he did make variations of the speech elsewhere it is unclear exactly when and where he may have said used these precise words:
: They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.
Later variant: For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers to the complex problems which are beyond our comprehension. Well, the truth is, there are simple answers, they just are not easy ones.
:* California Gubernatorial Inauguration Speech (5 January 1967) http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/govspeech/01051967a.htm
1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
Variant: Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.
Kenneth Boulding (1986) "Proceedings of the 7th Friends Association for Higher Education Conference, Malone College, 1986" p. 4, quoted in Debora Hammond, The Science of Synthesis, Colorado: University of Colorado Press, 2003.
1980s
“Simple answers to life’s questioning. That would be a magic beyond any I have ever been seeing.”
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 8, “On Sikkihoq’s Back” (p. 188).
“Sometimes a simple question could have a complicated answer.”
Source: Blue-Eyed Devil
