Quotes about complication
page 3

“I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. … Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated. Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images … So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; … worn death 'as close as dungarees', appreciated it - and life - more; seen the finest and most terrible in people … But, normal or manic, I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than most I know. And I think much of this is related to my illness - the intensity it gives to things”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

An Unquiet Mind

Love, Life, Death, People

“We look upon economic theory as a sequence of conceptual models that seek to express in simplified form different aspects of an always more complicated reality.”

Tjalling Koopmans (1910–1985) Dutch American economist

Source: Three Essays (1957), p. 142

Reality

“College education tends to make simple things complicated and hard to understand. What we should do is to teach our children the most essential and simple principles of life and ways to handle problems.”

Zheng Yuanjie (1955) Chiese writer

Zheng Yuanjie (2004) in: "Zheng Yuanjie's 19 years in fairy tales" on chinadaily.com.cn, May 10, 2004 ( online http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-05/10/content_329434.htm).

Life, Children, Education, Way

“This is great stuff, but does it have to be so complicated?”

Elliott Organick (1925–1985) American computer scientist

Often remarked when hearing about new technological advances; quoted in Communications of the ACM http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=6325, pg. 231.

“Let me tell you quite frankly: in one way or another we will have to finish with the Jews. The führer once expressed it as follows: should Jewry once again succeed in inciting a world war, the bloodletting could not be limited to the peoples they drove to war but the Jews themselves would be done for in Europe. If the Jewish tribe survives the war in Europe while we sacrifice our blood for the preservation of Europe, this war will be but a partial success. Basically, I must presume, therefore, that the Jews will disappear. To that end I have started negotiations to expel them to the east. In any case, there will be a great Jewish migration. But what is to become of the Jews? Do you think that they will be settled in villages in the conquered eastern territories? In Berlin we have been told not to complicate matters: since neither these territories, nor our own, have any use for them, we should liquidate them ourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to remain unmoved by pleas for pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we encounter them and wherever possible, in order to maintain the overall mastery of the Reich here… For us the Jews are also exceptionally damaging because they are being such gluttons. There are an estimated 2.5 million Jews in the General Government, perhaps. 3.5 million. These 3.5 million Jews, we cannot shoot them, nor can we poison them. Even so, we can take steps which in some way or other will pave the way for their destruction, notably in connection with the grand measures to be discussed in the Reich. The General Government must become just as judenfrei (free of Jews) as the Reich!”

Hans Frank (1900–1946) German war criminal

To senior members of his administration, December 16, 1941, quoted in "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: the final solution in history" - Page 302 - by Arno J. Mayer - History - 1988

War, People, World, Way

“I was not meant to be alone. I am not good at it. The years since Ruth's passing have ticked by with the kind of desparate silence known only to the elderly. It is a silence underscored by loneliness and the knowledge that the good years are already in the past, coupled with the complications of old age itself.
The body is not meant to survive nearly a century. I speak from experience when I say this…”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Ira Levinson, Chapter 28, p. 320-321
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

Age, Knowledge, Silence, Past

“This book offers an analytic description of the complicated processes by which seasons of business prosperity, crisis, depression, and revival come about in the modern world. The materials used consist chiefly of market reports and statistics concerning the business cycles which have run their course since 1890 in the United States, England, Germany and France.”

Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874–1948) American statistician

Preface
Business Cycles, 1913

Books, World, Business, Season

“I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi. And I certainly can’t even imagine the grief that she has for losing her son, but she’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong. I and everybody in the administration, all the people she named, the president, the vice president, Susan Rice, we were scrambling to get information that was changing, literally by the hour. And when we had information, we made it public. But then sometimes we had to go back and say we have new information that contradicts it. So I testified for 11 hours. … We have captured one of the lead terrorists and he admits it was both a terrorist attack and it was influenced by the video. This was fog of war. This was complicated. The most effective, comprehensive reports and studies demonstrate that. … I deeply regret that we lost four Americans. And I of course sympathize with members of the families who are still, you know, very much grieving. And I wish that there could be an easy answer at the time, but we learned a lot, and the intelligence kept improving, and we learned enough to say what we think happened at Benghazi.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

War, People, Family, Feeling

“… we have a situation in which millions of vehicles, each a miracle of often unnecssary complication, are hurtling in all directions under the impulse of anything up to 200 horsepower. Many of them are the size of small houses and contain a couple of tons of sophisticated alloys — yet often carry a single passenger. They can travel at a hundred miles an hour, but are lucky if they average forty. In one lifetime they have consumed more irreplaceable fuel than has been used in the whole previous history of mankind. The roads to support them, inadequate though they are, cost as much as a small war; the analogy is a good one, for the casualties are on the same scale.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Source: 1970s, Chapter 3 (The Future of Transport) in Profiles of the Future (7th printing, 1972)

War, Travel, History, Support

“Since the mid-1970s, there's been an international consensus for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. […] It's called a two-state settlement, and a two-state settlement is pretty straightforward, uncomplicated. Israel has to fully withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem, in accordance with the fundamental principle of international law, […] that it's inadmissible to acquire territory by war. The West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, having been acquired by war, it's inadmissible for Israel to keep them. They have to be returned. On the Palestinian side and also the side of the neighboring Arab states, they have to recognize Israel's right to live in peace and security with its neighbors. That was the quid pro quo: recognition of Israel, Palestinian right to self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in Jerusalem. That's the international consensus. It's not complicated. It's also not controversial.”

Norman G. Finkelstein (1953) American political scientist and author

Norman Finkelstein & Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami Debate: Complete Transcript http://www.democracynow.org/finkelstein-benami.shtml Sourced statements on the Middle East

War, Peace, Law

“The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter One

People, Time, Wealth

“If I have learned anything as a scientist it is that one should not make things complicated when a simple explanation will do.”

Ivar Giaever (1929) Norwegian physicist

Nobel lecture (1973)

Learning

“My old man claimed that the more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Source: The Door Into Summer (1957), Chapter 5

Law

“In viewing the scheme of redemption, I seem like one viewing a vast and complicated machine of exquisite contrivance; what I comprehend of it is wonderful, what I do not, is, perhaps, more so still.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 422.

“Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Becker (1978) in: Creative Camera No.163-174. p. 70.

Way, Study, Learning, Reading

“She realized now that she knew little about people outside the courts of Nabban and Erkynland, although she had always thought herself a shrewd judge of humanity. However, it was a larger and much more complicated world on the other side of the castle walls than she had ever suspected.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 1, Chapter 13, “The Nest Builders” (p. 406).

People, World

“At the base of the plane, Styles freelance photographer is down on one knee, going handheld, still in the same Hawaiian shirt. The famously reclusive R. Vaughn Corliss is nowhere in view. Doug Llewellyn’s wardrobe furnished by Hugo Boss. The Malina blanket for the artist’s lap and thighs, however, is the last minute fix of a production oversight, retrieved from the car of an apprentice gaffer whose child is still nursing, and is not what anyone would call an appropriate color or design, and appears unbilled. There’s also some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level camera and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare — the artist in such a case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

"The Suffering Channel", Oblivion: Stories
Short stories

Cars, Color, Problem, Light

“The Mockery Bird regarded him with a roguish eye, head on one side, and took a few slow steps into the clearing. With its head on one side and its foot tentatively raised, it seemed like some sort of lanky, avian dancing master. It stepped forward among the guava stems with a mincing delicacy and then shuffled its wings like someone shuffling a pack of cards. He noticed that it had very long eyelashes which it raised and lowered over its large gaily-sparkling eyes. … There was another complicated rustle and flurry in the undergrowth and then, projected into the clearing by its own nervous eagerness, came a female Mockery Bird making strange, peeting noises, which became a soothing babble when she caught sight of the male. She went up to her mate and briefly preened his throat feathers as an over-zealous wife will straighten the tie of her consort. … Here in front of him, cossetting each other, were two birds which were thought to be extinct.”

Gerald Durrell book The Mockery Bird

The Mockery Bird (1981)

Bird, Dance

“The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive light, there must have been light to enter it.”

Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) Swiss naturalist

Geological Sketches (1870), ch. 2, pp. 31–32 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018968388;view=1up;seq=49

Nature, Light, Sun

“Looking back, I can see how there are challenges for any working parent. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and that was really challenging too. I think it’s hard to be a parent and it’s complicated and there are a lot of difficult decisions that you make for your child and for yourself and for your family. Only now as an adult can I appreciate how courageous it was for my parents to move because they didn’t know anybody there [in Connecticut], and also for my dad’s career it must have been hard being away from LA. But we were always on movie sets. We were never apart. I was sheltered from the industry lifestyle but not from the experience of the set.”

Bryce Dallas Howard (1981) American actress

Bryce Dallas Howard interview: ‘Pete’s Dragon’ star on growing up with a famous dad and why she won’t do ‘dark’ films http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/bryce-dallas-howard-interview-petes-dragon-black-mirror-ron-howard-growing-up-why-not-dark-films-a7170471.html (August 4, 2016)

Family, Home, Moms, Courage

“Ikenobo Sen'o, a master of flower arranging, once said (the remark is to be found in his Sayings): "With a spray of flowers, a bit of water, one evokes the vastness of rivers and mountains." The Japanese garden too, of course symbolizes the vastness of nature. The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, and this is because the asymmetrical has the greater power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail, than the Japanese art of landscape gardening. Thus there is the form called the dry landscape, composed entirely of rocks, in which the arrangement of stones gives expression to mountains and rivers that are not present, and even suggests the waves of the great ocean breaking in upon cliffs.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)

Art, Mountain, Flowers, Nature

“One of the most terrible things about the English education System in Ireland is its ruthlessness…it is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated… It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task. Into it is fed all raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and remoulds…”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

The Cause Of Ireland, Liz Curtis, Beyond the Pale Publications, Belfast 1994, pg 190.This quote was taken from the original, in Padraig Pearse’s book The Murder Machine.

Education, Law, Imagination, Understanding

“Population in India is widely differentiated in ethnic composition, geographical and climatic conditions, social and cultural stratiﬁcation, as well as by differences in economic status. Differential fertility therefore assumes a far more complex picture in India than anywhere in the world. Ethnic. geographical. socio-cultural and economic dilferences give a four-fold patterning with many complicated interactions. It is essential therefore to study different population groups separately.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Quote, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in lndia

World, Study

“You know, the whole American culture is going down the drain, you can't turn on a television set and see anything, or walk in the street and not find garbage, or neighborhoods that were formerly beautiful now have McDonald's in them, and it's all a part of an enormous degeneration of culture in the United States. People that exist in that culture are forced to make moral decisions all the time about their lives, their occupations, their love-lives, and they make decisions that are commensurate with what's happening to them in this culture, and it's too bad that that's happening because that's what Manhattan is about, that New York used to be such a great city, so wonderful, and it has to fight every day for its survival against the encroachment of all this terrible ugliness that is gradually overcoming all the big cities in America.
This ugliness comes from a culture that has no spiritual center, a culture that has money and education, but no sense of being at peace with the world, no sense of purpose in life. They don't know what they're doing, or why they're here. They have no religious center, they have no philosophical center, and so they act, they do what's expedient at the moment. They have no long view of society. They only have the view of quick money, and kill the pain of the moment, and so instead of dealing with the real problems that exist, that are complicated, they sweep them under the rug by turning on the television set, or taking cocaine, or doing many things that enable them to escape confrontation with the unpleasant realities of the world.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

[Allen, Woody, France Roche, Woody Allen, ou L'Anhedoniste; le Plus Drole du Monde, New York, 1979, France 2, 05 January 2013]
Others

Love, Life, Money, Pain

““The situation on, on earth is complicated.”
“You mean politics?” Dakkar spat the word, with immeasurable contempt.”

Adam Roberts book Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

Source: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014), Chapter 24, “Dakkar” (p. 228)

“To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

Way, Thinking

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

Life, Children, Books, Youth

“If economic reality is actually so complex that it can only be described by complicated mathematical models that add epicycles to epicycles and externalities to externalities, then the reality should be simplified.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

Source: Steady-State Economics, 1977, p. 4

Mathematics, Reality

“The physicist needs a facility in looking at problems from several points of view. The exact analysis of real physical problems is usually quite complicated, and any particular physical situation may be too complicated to analyze directly by solving the differential equation. But one can still get a very good idea of the behavior of a system if one has some feel for the character of the solution in different circumstances. Ideas such as the field lines, capacitance, resistance, and inductance are, for such purposes, very useful. … On the other hand, none of the heuristic models, such as field lines, is really adequate and accurate for all situations. There is only one precise way of presenting the laws, and that is by means of differential equations. They have the advantage of being fundamental and, so far as we know, precise. If you have learned the differential equations you can always go back to them. There is nothing to unlearn.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume II; lecture 2, "Differential Calculus of Vector Fields"; section 2-1, "Understanding physics"; p. 2-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Law, Way, Behavior, Feeling

“I became a vegetarian in 1969. … About eight and a half years ago, my husband and I decided to stop eating meat and then about six months later we stopped eating fish. … Partly because of my attitude towards health, and partly because of my husband's attitude toward animals. He's such an avid animal lover that, slaughtering them for food, he felt, was a worthless endeavor. I came to it from the point of view of someone who likes to be healthy, energetic, and vital. Together we both came to the same conclusions, but from different viewpoints, and eventually our reasons began to mingle. I began to share his attitude about animals and he began to appreciate the physical rewards of being a vegetarian. … I had two beautiful births as a vegetarian; they were great labors—no bleeding, no complications, no problems. The diet worked perfectly for me.”

Susan Saint James (1946) American actress and activist

Interview in The Vegetarians by Rynn Berry (Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1979), pp. 46–47.

Health, Food, Beauty, Lovers

“And then as the other world produces serpents, and vipers, malignant, and venomous creatures, and worms, and caterpillars, that endeavour to devour that world produces them, and monsters compiled and complicated of diverse parents, and kinds, so this world, ourselves produces all these in us, in producing diseases and sicknesses of all those sorts; venomous and infectious diseases, feeding and consuming diseases…”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

IV. Mediscque Vocatur; The physician is sent for.
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

World, Disease, Parent

“[Inez] "…If you consort with lowlifes you've got to expect complications."”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Burning Plain (1997), p.91 (Chapter 8)

“Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit, has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to total disagreement as to all the premises.”

Charles Dickens book Bleak House

Source: Bleak House (1852-1853), Ch. 1

Understanding, Time

“Many of us associate the Christian faith as a list of do's and dont's, to be sure. But the Christian life is to be oriented in relationship, why is there so much talk of formula? Could it be that the reason we are more interested in forumla than relationship is that we would like to deal with our need for religion without dealing with the complications of relationship? That even though we have chosen the Christian faith instead of "poppycock religion," we ultimately want the same thing as the pagan? And what is that? Easy answers, comfortable sentiments, beliefs that make us feel good. So we go through the motions. We go to our churches, we read our self-help books, we watch our religious television, and we check each item off our to-do list as if we were doing work for pay. One thing I am sure of. This is not the kind of real-life faith I'm looking for.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Life, Books, Faith, Religion

“It is clearly apparent that in building the best results should accrue in proportion as every element in the structure is fitted both to the function it has to perform and the materials of which it is made. It follows from this that disguise and complication are hindrances, both to good construction and good design, and as complication and disguise are expensive and wasteful, that the interests of good art and true economy run on parallel lines.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Introduction
Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Art

“Scientific models have all these connotations. They are representations of states, objects, and events. They are idealized in the sense that they are less complicated than reality and hence easier to use for research purposes. These models are easier to manipulate and "carry" than the real thing. The simplicity of models, compared with reality, lies in the fact that only the relevant properties of reality are represented.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 108 as cited in: Joe H. Ward, Earl Jennings (1973) Introduction to linear models. p. 4.

Reality, Sense

“Because of the "all-or-none" character of nervous activity, events and the relations among them can be treated by means of propositional logic. It is found that the behaviour of every net can be described in these terms, with the addition of more complicated logical means for nets containing cycles; and that for any logical expression satisfying certain conditions, one can find in net behaving ever fashion it describes.”

Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) American neuroscientist

Source: A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity (1943), p. 115

Fashion

“After sleeping late on Sunday, I was back at my desk that afternoon. I had two prime considerations. First, I wanted to be certain that the tapes were not a trap for the committee or that there was a significant bit of missing information that we lacked; experience taught me that matters of this importance do not usually fall into your lap without more complications that are immediately apparent. Second, if our information was legitimate, I wanted to be sure the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action. Legalisms aside, it was inconceivable to me that the White House could withhold the tapes once their existence was made known. I believed it would be in everyone’s interest if the White House realized, before making any public statements, the probable position of both the majority and the minority of the Watergate committee. Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home. Buzhardt was the only White House staff member with whom I had had any substantial contact. He had been unassuming and straightforward in his dealings with me. He never tried to enlist me in any White House strategy, to suggest that I relay confidential information, or to so any of the things that were probably assumed by many of the so-called sophisticates in Washington.”

Fred Thompson (1942–2015) American politician and actor

page 86
At That Point in Time, Warning the White House about the Watergate tapes

Home, Sleep, Housing

“Things appear very complex but underneath they are quite simple. People complicate things by super-imposing their own viewpoints and advantages. If you remove all that is superfluous, most problems have very simple solutions.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

26
Ki Sayings (2003)

People, Problem, Appearance

“All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Foreward (p. xv)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

People, Thinking, Change, Time

“I was reading an article about this case in California, where two lesbians were fighting over the custody of children that genetically were traceable to one, but which the other had raised. You know what? Nobody even thought about or mentioned, nobody asked a simple question about whether the father of those children should have any claim, because, very often in these relationships, they are conducted in such a way and conception occurs in such a way as to intentionally mask who the father might be, so that children must grow up without knowing who their father is. And that means that an incestuous situation could easily arise in our society, it's more than likely to arise--not to mention every other kind of incestuous complication.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Rally in defense of marriage, Boston, Massachusetts, May 14, 2004. http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/04_05_14boston.htm. 2009

Children, Way, Question, Reading

“Symbols in general, and their main group,—words and concepts—in particular, perform a skeletal role for the socio-psychic content. … Consequently, the nature of ideologies is generally degressive, skeletal, with all the related features… So, beginning with the simplest example, the word not only secures the living content of experience, but also hampers the future development of experience by its conservatism. In science and philosophy, the customary but obsolete terminology is often a serious obstacle to progress, preventing the mastery of new material, and distorting the meaning of new facts which it cannot express fully and precisely. But this contradiction appears even more vividly in the development of more complicated complexes.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Source: Essays in tektology, 1980, p. 195, as cited in: Arran Gare, " Aleksandr Bogdanov and systems theory http://aaltowebstudio.cloudapp.net/tangentialpoints/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/05/Arren-Gare-2000-Aleksandr-Bogdanov-and-Systems-Theory.pdf." Democracy & Nature 6.3 (2000): 341-359.

Nature, Appearance, Science, Future

“Better than big business is clean business.
To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean.
What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while.
"A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow."
This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare.
That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money.
That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong.
And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions.
The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar. And the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society.
Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), Clean Business

Life, Men, Money, War

“Those who sell or facilitate weapons to individuals that will commit human rights violations know that they have responsibility for the death and misery caused by those weapons and at some stage may be liable to face the International Criminal Court for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2013, UN rights expert hails Arms Trade Treaty and urges States to do more to also regulate production http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=13207&LangID=E. 2013

Death, War

“The social organization of work is the most complicated and difficult problem that humanity has ever had to solve. It being possible to realize that organization (a difficult translation or me: "Cette organisation ne pouvant être réalisée par", Fr.) neither by violence, nor by merely external (or outward) or legal measures, it require the free participation of all (or everybody) to the joint (or common, or in commun) work, and, consequently, to a regeneration (or reconditioning) of men that bring them to overcome their selfishness et understand their duty towards themselves et towards the community.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 47.

Men, Communication, Understanding, Problem

“[Chantal to Fiodor:] "It seems to me that evil is much less complicated than you would like to believe. Here or anywhere else there is only one sin."
"What sin?"
"To tempt God," she said. "And what's the use? I think you are really very stupid. God looks where He pleases. If He has not yet looked at you, what is the use of tempting Him?"”

Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) French writer

Source: La joie (Joy) 1929, p.27

God, Stupidity, Thinking, Evil

“It seemed like every month that went by, every day older, life became more complicated. The rule for growing up seemed to be that no choice, no decision worth making was without some cost.”

Christopher Golden book Sins of the Father

Sins of the Father (1999

Life, Decision

“It is unfortunate that we try to solve the simplest questions cleverly, and therefore make them unusually complicated. We should seek a simple solution.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Question

“Advanced technology is great at tasks such as keeping an airliner flying several thousand feet in the air, but is easily crippled by social complications.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Introduction, p. 13
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)

Flying

“More complicated, but still a placid environment, is that which can be characterized in terms of clustering: goals and noxiants are not randomly distributed but band together in certain ways. This may be called the placid, clustered environment.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 28-29.

Way

“You ask me what's happened in my life, why and how I did this and that. And I think and tell, but it's never true story, because everything is so much more complicated, and also I can't even remember how things happened. Whole process is boring. Also false, but mostly boring.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948) Soviet-American dancer, choreographer, and actor born in Letonia, Soviet Union

As quoted in "Profile: The Soloist" by Joan Acoccella, in The New Yorker (January 19, 1998); reprinted in Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker https://books.google.com/books?id=KDhjzXAjyUMC&pg=PA62 (2000), edited by David Remnick, p. 62.

Life, Thinking, Falseness

“Mr. Arkwright, after many years intense and painful application, invented, about the year 1768, his present method of spinning cotton, but upon very different principles from any invention that had gone before it. He was himself a native of Lancashire; but having so recently witnessed the ungenerous treatment of poor Hargrave, by the people of that county, he retired to Nottingham, and obtained a patent in the year 1769, for making cotton, flax, and wool into yarn. But, after some experience, finding that the common method of preparing the materials for spinning (which is essentially necessary to the perfection of good yarn) was very imperfect, tedious, and expensive, he turned his thoughts towards the construction of engines for that purpose; and, in the pursuit, spent several years of intense study and labour, and at last produced an invention for carding and preparing the materials, founded in some measure on the principles of his first machine. These inventions, united, completed his great original plan. But his last machines being very complicated, and containing some things materially different in their construction, and some others materially different in their use, from the inventions for which his first patent was obtained, be procured a patent for these also in December, 1775.”

Richard Arkwright (1732–1792) textile entrepreneur; developer of the cotton mill

Source: The Case of Mr. Richard Arkwright and Co., 1781, p. 23

Pain, Study, Perfection

“It proved to be essential to clear the site for the new building. This idea was a forerunner of futurism which exposed the relentless nature of its motivating power. Revolutions had started undercover, everything grew more complicated. Painting economical in its creative output was still very complicated and uneconomical in its expression. cubism and futurism seized upon the purity of form treatment and colour and built a complicated and extensive system with them combining them without any regard for harmony. The rebuilding of life cast aside the old concept of nations classes patriotism and imperialism which had been completely discredited.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Life, Motivation, Idea, Nature

“There are only two things as complicated as insurance accounting and I have no idea what they are.”

Andrew Tobias (1947) American journalist

Source: The Invisible Bankers, Everything The Insurance Industry Never Wanted You To Know (1982), Chapter 2, By Popular Demand: A very Short Chapter On Insurance Accounting, p. 26.

Idea

“Although the behavior that emerges is complex, the rules that guide it are necessarily simple. In fact, it is their simplicity that creates the freedom to behave in complicated adaptive, and surprising ways.”

Shona Brown (1960) businessperson

Source: Competing on the Edge, 1998, p. 18

Way, Behavior, Freedom

“The more our commercial system gains in complication, the more does the common prosperity of us all come to depend upon the due performance of all contracts. Commercial development is broadly illustrating one profound truth: that the real basis of social morality is self-interest. If the subject of rivalry between nations is business, the code which has come to dominate business must necessarily come to dominate the conduct of governments.”

Norman Angell book The Great Illusion

The Great Illusion (1910)

Truth, Business, Dependency

“Thank you, President DeGioia. And good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me to Georgetown University. I am honored to be here. I wanted to meet with you today, as President DeGioia said, to share my thoughts on the relationship between law enforcement and the diverse communities we serve and protect. Like a lot of things in life, that relationship is complicated. Relationships often are.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Life, Law, Communication, Universe

“Let us at least make the experiment; let us free ourselves from complicity in these awful crimes, let us set ourselves to try, each in our own small circle, to bring nearer that bright time of peace and love which is the dream and the earnest desire of every true-hearted and thinking man. At least we ought surely to be willing to do so small a thing as this to help the world onward towards that glorious future; we ought to make ourselves pure, our thoughts and our actions as well as our food, so that by example as well as by precept we may be doing all that in us lies to spread the gospel of love and of compassion, to put an end to the reign of brutality and terror, and to bring nearer the dawn of the great kingdom of righteousness and love when the will of our Father shall be done upon earth as it is in heaven.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Vegetarianism and Occultism (1913), p. 40

Love, World, Peace, Food

“Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Letter (19 December 1935) as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, (No. 336)

Life

“There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“An Unprejudiced Mind,” p. 317
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

Feeling

“No country can possibly move ahead, no free society can possibly be sustained, unless it has an educated citizenry whose qualities of mind and heart permit it to take part in the complicated and increasingly sophisticated decisions that pour not only upon the President and upon the Congress, but upon all the citizens who exercise the ultimate power…Quite obviously, there is a higher purpose, and that is the hope that you will turn to the service of the State the scholarship, the education, the qualities which society has helped develop in you; that you will render on the community level, or on the state level, or on the national level, or render on the community level, or on the state level, or on the national level, or the international level a contribution to the maintenance of freedom and peace and the security of our country and those associated with it in a most critical time.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

"Commencement Address at San Diego State College (226)" (6 June 1963) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx 1963

Education, Peace, Hope, Exercises

“Classification is thought of by many librarians as either a fearful complication of a very simply act, or an outmoded, almost prehistoric, method of doing a very complex mathematical task.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 138

Fear, Mathematics

“It’s quite controversial for some, but it’s very human. Everybody remembers it and people love it. It’s not because there’s great combat or there’s insanely complicated gameplay, but it’s because there’s a very interesting story where you have a lot of choice that include tough moral decisions. This causes intrigue into how the story will end and that’s something I’ve always wanted to achieve. Putting people into situations and letting the player experience them, is ideal in my eyes.”

Daniel Vávra (1975) Czech entrepreneur

Kingdom Come: Deliverance, an Interview with Daniel Vávra https://80.lv/articles/kingdom-come-deliverance-an-interview-with-daniel-vavra/ (July 7, 2015)

Love, People, Decision

“When you are into mathematics, you have been so high on the scale of complexity of reasoning that you are living in some kind of altered reality. You think everybody on the street is able to understand complicated reasoning […]. And you get very frustrated, when you discover that's not the case.”

Cédric Villani (1973) French mathematician

"Mathematics: Beauty vs Utility - Numberphile". youtube.com. January 19, 2017. Retrieved September 16, 2018.

Mathematics, Understanding, Thinking, Reality

“Treatment of the apparently whimsical fluctuations of the stock quotations as truly non stationary processes requires a model of such complexity that its practical value is likely to be limited. An additional complication, not encompassed by most stock market models, arises from the manifestation of the market as a nonzero sum game.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Nine, Weighted Statistical Logic And Statistical Games, p. 295

Game

“…under extremely difficult circumstances (Iraq) pursues the inherently complicated task of rebuilding the country. Yet Iraq continues, courageously, to reach for the promise of a democratic, federal and pluralistic state, where generations of oppressed Iraqis will regain their dignity, freedom and the right to join the civilized and progressive nations of the world.”

Jalal Talabani (1933–2017) Iraqi politician

Olivia Ward (September 23, 2006) "Keep U.S., British forces in Iraq, says Talabani", The Toronto Star, p. A12.

World, Courage, Freedom, Country

“I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.”

Ernst Mach (1838–1916) Austrian physicist and university educator

"On the Relative Educational Value of the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences in Colleges and High Schools", an address in (16 April 1886), published in Popular Scientific Lectures (1898), as translated by Thomas J. McCormack, p. 367
19th century

Support, Learning

“Hush now child and don't you cry;
Your folks might understand you by and by.
Move on up towards your destination;
You may find from time to time,
Complications.”

Curtis Mayfield (1942–1999) American singer, songwriter, and record producer

Move on Up, from Curtis (1970).
Song lyrics

Understanding, Time, Cry

“"High" and "low" are completely arbitrary and artificial distinctions that some bloated assholes invented to make life more complicated. Comics are considered "low", but when Roy Lichtensein comes and picks out one panel of a comic, projects and paints it on a canvas then it's suddenly "high" art? Give me a break. The only thing that I care about in art is quality, intensity. Is a work of art capable of touching and moving me? Does it cause an emotional impact on me? Does it startle, surprise, upset, excite me? Does it make me think? Does it inspire me? Does it stimulate my imagination? Does it change the way I view the world to some degree?”

Gottfried Helnwein (1948) Austrian photographer and painter

Interview by Michal Szyksznian http://www.gottfried-helnwein-interviews.com/interviews/celebritarian.html, celebritarian.pl, 2009

Life, World, Art, Way

“To us, with our broader outlook, our more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some patient sympathy in the discovery of the real charm and the real beauty that it contains.”

Lytton Strachey book Landmarks in French Literature

Landmarks in French Literature (1912), ch. 4.

World, Beauty, Mood

“Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

Source: Ringworld (1970), p. 314

Universe

“Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practicing an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe would result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals? Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other equally difficult activities look very easy. Arriving at sound views on how to live falls into the second category, making a pot or a shoe into the first.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), p. 21.

Life, Shoe, Imagination, Thinking

“No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 76

Disease, Imagination

““How are the internal complications, anyway? Aren’t the other branches of government getting a little suspicious about all these machinations?”
“Let’s just say that one or two discreet assassinations may still have to be performed,” Khouri said.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 27 (p. 490)

“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing.”

Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) second president of Egypt

As quoted in [The Game of Nations, The Amorality of Power Politics, Copeland, Miles, 216, 1970, 4, Simon and Schuster]

Stupidity

“Her hair is troublesome and curly … It falls in long, black strands, but each strand has a gentle, complicated undulation travelling through it, like a mild electric shock or a thrill, hat gives it a life of its own; it is visually analogous to a tremolo on a musical note.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Afternoon Raag (1993)

Life, Music, Travel

“Two of my favourite current management writers are Americans – Clayton Christensen and Peter Senge. My all-time favourite gurus are Peter Drucker, who became a greatly admired friend, and W. Edwards Deming. The thing that set these people apart from many other business commentators is that they didn’t propose any all - encompassing theories, they simply told it like it is.
The fact is that life cannot be summarised as a simple set of rules; it’s far too complicated for that and it’s always changing. Unfortunately, all-encompassing panaceas do seem to be popular and certainly sell books, which is why I so value the objectivity of thought that each of these people brought to the debate.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

Interview: Robert Heller (2006)

Life, People, Books, Business

“People are trying to force me to redeem (myself) — certain women, certain mentors. Nobody's going to change me. I'm going to fight that. You can't change me; you can't tame me. When you say that, I'm going to bite you even harder. I'm more ferocious, more complicated. I'm not going to let anybody win a popularity contest off my conduct. You have to understand. It is a pervasive (belief) that I'm an animal — undomesticated as well. But regardless of the bizarre (stuff) I've done, I'm a very rational individual. But everybody still thinks I'm crazy and stupid because that's what they want to believe.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2005-06-02-tyson-saraceno_x.htm
On himself

Women, People, Stupidity, Understanding

“I can't wait 'til you draw something really complicated, like the Brooklyn Bridge or a lobster. You'll probably send me a singing telegram.”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Jace to Clary, pg. 325
The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Singing, Waiting, Drawing

“The analysis is clear, we have a great problem with Islam, in the Netherlands too. The solution is not so complicated; what is missing are political guts and a feeling of urgency. Immigration from Islamic countries should be forbidden. We must learn to be intolerant with the intolerant, in the street, in the mosque, in court. We must answer hatred and violence by terrorists with exclusion and intolerance and show who the boss in the Netherlands is.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Den Haag laf tegen islamitisch extremisme http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2005/07/22/den-haag-laf-tegen-islamitisch-extremisme-10580808-a530504, NRC Handelsblad (22 July 2005). Quoted in Tradition and Future of Islamic Education (2009) by Wilna A. J. Meijer, p. 24. 2000s

Feeling, Problem, Learning, Country

“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Four, Chapter VI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Four

Men, People, Communication, Fashion

“When I am trying to understand the method of winning in the endgame with two bishops against the knight, chess is a science, when I admire a beautiful combination or study, then chess is art, and when I am complicating position in the approaching time trouble of my opponent, then chess is sport.”

Ashot Nadanian (1972) chess player

S'pore Chess News, 7 September 2010 http://www.singaporechessnews.com/reflections_1.html

Beauty, Art, Understanding, Sport

“Each one of those ['Ellipsoids'] took at least three months [each]. I was starting those, when I was still at the Düsseldorf Academy. There was a very nice man in the workshop there who was very helpful in the process of making them. And they were extremely complicated – to get the shape right and everything. I mean one could get them sent to a factory, and have them produced according to these computer drawings, but somehow I didn’t really want to do this at the time – and also I did not have the money to do that anyway. Once I tried to have one fabricated in this way, but when it came back there was nothing there somehow. It was not like the ones that were made in the workshop”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Out to Lunch with Isa Genzken' (2009)

Money, Way, Time, Help

“We are the result of processes much more complicated than the small aspects of our lives and societies over which we have some control.”

Lee Smolin book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)

“The Asana of Science — Science's anti-Spiritual, anti-religious, anti-psychic point of view, and its Victorian, archaic materialism, and its prejudices against other kinds of knowing — all of this is insidious, not merely nonsensical, because it has such a profoundly negative effect on human beings. Many scientists who adopt this dogmatic approach act as if they were super-intelligent people with their tweedy, pipe-smoking, complicated linguistic minds. This is the archetype of intelligence, is it not? This is the way you are supposed to be if you are intelligent. Well, this archetype does not necessarily represent intelligence. It is just a pose, or asana. Real intelligence must be fiercely capable of investigating every aspect of existence, including the very process of knowledge that is called "science."”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/index.html

People, Way, Intelligence, Knowledge

“All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.”

Michael Lewis book The Big Short

Epilogue, Everything Is Correlated, p. 258
The Big Short (2010)

People

“In a war the normal codes of civilized behavior are suspended. It would be unthinkable in so-called normal life to go into someone's home where a family is grieving over the death of a loved one and spend long moments photographing them. It simply wouldn't be done. Those picture could not have been made unless I was accepted by the people I'm photographing. It's simply impossible to photograph moments such as those…without the complicity of the people I'm photographing…without the fact that the welcomed me, that they accepted me, that they wanted me to be there. They understand that a stranger who's come there with a camera to show the rest of the world what is happening to them…gives them a voice in the outside world that they otherwise wouldn't have. I try my best to approach people with respect. I want them to see that I have respect for them and the situation they're in. I want to be very open in my approach…feel open in my own heart towards them. I want them to be aware of that. People do sense it…with very few words…sometimes with no words at all.”

James Nachtwey (1948) American photographer

War Photographer, documentary, 2001

Love, Life, Death, War

“Grey was the very type of the old whig nobleman, punctiliously honourable and high-minded, and devoted to the constitution and to popular liberty as he understood them. At the same time his views were narrow, he was personally diffident and timorous in reform, and even less democratic than many of his opponents. (For his general opinions and comments on passing events see LE STRANGE'S Correspondence of Princess Lieven and Earl Grey, 1824–34, London, 1890, a collection of his letters to the wife of the Russian ambassador, with whom he maintained a most intimate friendship.) At the time when, after his long exclusion from office, he became prime minister, he had outlived the power of feeling or inspiring enthusiasm; but it was perhaps fortunate that at a moment of so much popular excitement the ministry was led by so cold a man. He was a great orator and a great debater, and, like all great orators, was very nervous just before rising to deliver his greatest speeches. He was exceedingly ready in apprehending complicated statements of fact, and in bringing them home to his hearers.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

J. A. Hamilton, 'Grey, Charles, second Earl Grey, Viscount Howick, and Baron Grey (1764–1845)', Dictionary of National Biography (1890).
About

Friendship, Feeling, Home, Time

“The relationship between a civilization's socio-economic structure and its culture is perhaps the most complicated of all problems for the sociologist.”

Daniel Bell book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 1, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, p. 33

Problem

“I will achieve it only [being an artist] by perseverance, and by openly asserting my determination to emancipate myself, [but].... I both lament and envy your [Edma's] fate. Bichette [her niece] helps me to understand maternal love; she comes onto my bed every morning and plays so sweetly.... life gets more complicated by the day here now I am gripped by the desire to have children, that' all I need.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

in an unpublished extract from a letter of Berthe to Edma, written in 1869; as cited in The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, ed. Denis Rouart; Camden, London 1986 / Kinston, R. I. Moyer Bell, 1989, p. 31 (private collection)
1860 - 1870

Love, Life, Fate, Children

“One important point about the idea that there are multiple globalizations is the fact that it further complicates the whole idea of finding a point of origin for globalization.”

George Ritzer (1940) American sociologist

Source: Globalization - A Basic Text (2010), Chapter 2, Global Issues, Debates, and Controversies, p. 47

Idea

“We must recognise that the absolutely free working of such a system cannot now be accepted. We are living too closely knit a structure of society in which the very complication of our immense programme of social reform and industrial development necessitates strong powers being retained at the centre. It will be necessary to use the organising power and majesty of the State in a variety of ways. The State will have to be the grand arbiter between competing interests.”

Rab Butler (1902–1982) British politician

Fundamental Issues (Conservative Political Centre, 1946), p. 7.

Way, Strong

“Many kinds of processes are at work in the world around us, and they are all superimposed on, and interact with, each other in complicated ways.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 3, Experiment, p. 28.

World, Way

“Well I know some people's they got a little less than nothing
But still find some to spare
And other people got more than they could use
But they don't share
And some people got problems man
They got awful complications
Other people got perfect situations
With no provocation”

Jack Johnson (musician) (1975) American musician

Middle Man.
Song lyrics, Brushfire Fairytales (2001)

People, Problem, Perfection

“By dancing we could remain in the moment. By dancing we could avoid talking, dwelling on the past, or thinking about the future. We were connected in a way that was neither threatening nor complicated; just circling and swaying, following the oldest rhythms of breath and heartbeat.”

Valya Dudycz Lupescu (1974) American writer

The Silence of Trees (2010)

Way, Thinking, Past, Future

“"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")

To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.

Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.

The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.

Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.

But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money, Family, Way, Feeling

“With unrivalled activity.. [he] concentrated the most varied and most complicated functions of government in his own person. He himself watched over the distribution of grain, selected the jurymen, founded the colonies.. regulated the highways and concluded building-contracts, led the discussions of the senate, settled the consular elections - in short; he accustomed the people to the fact that one man was the foremost in all things, and threw the lax and lame administration of the senatorial college into the shade by the vigour and dexterity of his personal rule.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
On Gaius Gracchus.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

People, Personality

“Life is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

As quoted in The Los Angeles Times (20 April 2003)

Life

“What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

"Hope and the Absurd in the work of Franz Kafka"
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

Secret

“Systems with unknown behavioral properties require the implementation of iterations which are intrinsic to the design process but which are normally hidden from view. Certainly when a solution to a well-understood problem is synthesized, weak designs are mentally rejected by a competent designer in a matter of moments. On larger or more complicated efforts, alternative designs must be explicitly and iteratively implemented. The designers perhaps out of vanity, often are at pains to hide the many versions which were abandoned and if absolute failure occurs, of course one hears nothing. Thus the topic of design iteration is rarely discussed. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see this phenomenon with software, for it is a rare author indeed who publicizes the amount of editing or the number of drafts he took to produce a manuscript.”

Fernando J. Corbató (1926–2019) American computer scientist

"A Managerial View of the Multics System Development" http://www.multicians.org/managerial.html, Conference on Research Directions in Software Technology, Providence, Rhode Island, October 10-12, 1977 published in Research Directions in Software Technology (1978), P. Wegner (ed.), MIT Press, ISBN 0262230968, pp. 139-158. Also reprinted in Tutorial: Software Management, Donald J. Reifer (ed.), IEEE Computer Society Press, (1979, 1981, 1986)

Pain, Behavior, Failure, Problem

Quotes about complication page 3

Quotes about complication
page 3