“It’s not that simple.”
“Ah! That phrase is Male for ‘I’m afraid to.’”
Source: Ventus (2000), Chapter 40 (p. 586)
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Karl Schroeder 25
Author. Technology consultant 1962Related quotes
Statement in Mainliner (July 1977), as quoted in Creativity and the writing process (1982) by Olivia Bertagnolli, p. 182; also partly quoted in Survival Skills for Managers (1981) by Marlene Wilson, p. 19
Variant: Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
As quoted in The Evaluation and Treatment of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (1999) by Nils R. Varney and Richard J. Roberts, p. 303
Context: My son's a painter. All through school his teachers tell him he's a genius. I tell him to paint me an apple that looks like and apple before he paints me one that doesn't. Go where you can go, but start from someplace recognizable. Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
“Simple minds respond to simple answers.”
Source: Shadows Linger (1984), Chapter 33, “Juniper: The Encounter” (p. 370)
“It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.”
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)
“To ask the hard question is simple,
The simple act of the confused will.”
To Ask the Hard Question is Simple, first published in book form in Poems (1930)
“Ask a simple question, get a simple brick wall.”
Source: Chapter 3 (p. 44) Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)
“Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.”