Quotes about complication
page 4

“The Southerners understand how to treat the Negro — with firmness and with kindness — and the Negroes are liked below the Mason and Dixon line so long as they keep to their proper relation to the Whites, but in the North the blocks of Negroes in the large cities, migrating from the South, have introduced new complications, which are certain to produce trouble in the future …”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

Understanding, Future

“It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him. The wire was about pain too: it would always be there, jutting into his feet, the weight of the bar, the dryness of the throat, the throb of his arms, but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer mattered. So too with his breathing. He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he was nothing. This sense of losing himself. Every nerve. Every cuticle. He hit it on the towers. The logic became unfixed. It was the point where there was no time. The wind was blowing and his body could have experienced it years in advance.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), The Ringing Grooves of Change

Pain, Sex, Sense, Time

“Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 15 (p. 461)

Life, Lie, Understanding, Freedom

“The sinners would have included those who did not pay their tithes (one tenth of their income) to the priests, and those who were negligent about the sabbath rest and about ritual cleanliness. The laws and customs on these matters were so complicated that the uneducated were quite incapable of understanding what was expected of them. Education in those days was a matter of knowing.. the law and all its ramifications. The illiterate and uneducated were inevitably lawless and immoral. The ‘am ha-arez, or uneducated peasants, ‘the rabble who know nothing of the law’ (John 7:49) were regarded by even the most enlightened Pharisees, like Hillel, as incapable of virtue and piety.”

Albert Nolan (1934) South African priest and activist

Source: Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 23.

Education, Law, Understanding

“The goal of public policy is to make our lives better. Does that mean richer? Or healthier? No policy change is good for everyone, so we must weigh total gains against total losses. But even that task is more complicated than it first appears.”

Charles Wheelan (1966) American politician

Introduction to Public Policy (2011), Ch. 5 : Evaluating Social Welfare

Appearance, Change, Loss

“Sometimes I don’t know if my life is complicated, or if it’s that I just think too much about things.”

John Scalzi book Zoe's Tale

Source: Zoe's Tale (2008), Chapter 7 (p. 76)

Life, Thinking

“If I fall along the way, pick me up and dust me off; If I get too tired to make it, be my breath so I can walk; If I need some other love then, give me more than I can stand; When my smile gets old and faded, just wait around I'll smile again; It shouldn't be so complicated, just hold me and then, just hold me again”

Rob Thomas (1972) American singer

Love, Smile, Way, Waiting

“In every science, after having analysed the ideas, expressing the more complicated by means of the more simple, one finds a certain number that cannot be reduced among them, and that one can define no further. These are the primitive ideas of the science; it is necessary to acquire them through experience, or through induction; it is impossible to explain them by deduction.”

Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) Italian mathematician

Notations de Logique Mathématique (1894), p. 173, as quoted in "The Mathematical Philosophy of Giuseppe Peano" by Hubert C. Kennedy, in Philosophy of Science Vol. 30, No. 3 (July 1963)

Idea, Science

“Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.”

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 11 (p. 146)

World, Understanding, Distant, Painting

“The inductive-reasoning system I have described above consists of a multitude of “elements” in the form of belief-models or hypotheses that adapt to the aggregate environment they jointly create. Thus it qualifies as an adaptive complex system. After some initial learning time, the hypotheses or mental models in use are mutually co-adapted. Thus we can think of a consistent set of mental models as a set of hypotheses that work well with each other under some criterion—that have a high degree of mutual adaptedness. Sometimes there is a unique such set, it corresponds to a standard rational expectations equilibrium, and beliefs gravitate into it. More often there is a high, possibly very high, multiplicity of such sets. In this case we might expect inductive reasoning systems in the economy—whether in stock-market speculating, in negotiating, in poker games, in oligopoly pricing, in positioning products in the market—to cycle through or temporarily lock into psychological patterns that may be non-recurrent, path-dependent, and increasingly complicated. The possibilities are rich.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Source: Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality (The El Farol Problem) (1994), p. 8

Game, Thinking, Learning, Time

“Both of these alternatives would have the disadvantage of depriving Congress of responsible military advice needed to discharge its constitutional responsibilities toward the armed forces. Each year the matters of national security are becoming increasingly complicated and technical, yet the members of Congress must legislate wisely with respect to them. To whom can they turn other than to the Chiefs of Staff, who are responsible for our national defense? To deprive them of access to the views of the Chiefs of Staff would inevitably force them to seek irresponsible sources of advice, to the probable detriment of their legislative actions.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: The Uncertain Trumpet (1960), p. 113-114

“Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim, cypress-trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress-trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.
The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuschia hedges, had the flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake's head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame-red, moon-white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy suns stood watching their parent's progress through the sky. In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillaea that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny iron balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuschia-hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly. The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

My Family and Other Animals (1956)

Star, Flowers, Lying, Parent

“Man, he suspected, had a particular genius for complicating things, for creating social hurdles that one must leap or be thought lacking.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: Sea Without a Shore (1996), Chapter 8 (p. 100)

“You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualise a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?”

Eliezer Yudkowsky Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Harry Potter in Ch. 2 http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/2 Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010 - 2015)

Cats, Thinking

“Well there's a line that you must toe
and it'll soon be time to go
but it's darker than you know in those Complicated Shadows”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

Complicated Shadows
Song lyrics, All This Useless Beauty (1996)

Time

“We must agree that the socialist countries are, in a certain way, accomplices of imperialist exploitation … The socialist countries have the moral duty to put an end to their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Afro-Asian Conference (1965)

Way, Country

“That's what really interested me about India, the religious aspect-and the extravagance of it. There was so much of it; the temples had all these things crawling all over them. It was so alive and complicated compared to the relative austerity that I saw in Jewish and especially Protestant ceremonies. Not so much Catholic ceremonies, though. I always loved Catholicism for the same reason that I love Hinduism, they're so much alike: the kitsch, the colors, the incense, the saints and the pageantry.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

Love, Color

“14:06> …Of course I made it quite clear to the women that I thought that that the way that they had been abused was terrible and completely unjustifiable. However, I thought that it was very important that they should understand their own complicity in it; so that, for example, they understood that the way they chose men, and their refusal to see signs (which they were capable of seeing) resulted in their misery… <14:40> To give you a concrete example, I would say to them, ‘This man of yours, who’s very nasty to you, and drags you across the floor, and puts your head through the window, and sometimes even hangs you out of the window by your ankles: How long do you think it would take me to realise he was no good, as he came through the door? Would it take me a second, or half a second, or an eighth of a second, or would I not notice that there was anything wrong with him at all?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, an eighth of a second, you’d know immediately.’ And I would say to them, ‘Well, if you know that I would know immediately, then you knew immediately as well.’ It’s a logical consequence, really. And they would accept that. ‘And yet, you chose to associate with him, knowing full well that he was no good; and I tell you this, because it’s very necessary you should understand your own part in the predicament you now find yourself in, because if you don’t understand it, or don’t think about it, you’re just going to repeat it.’ which is of course, a very, very common pattern.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Daniels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Daniels_(psychiatrist) on helping victims of abuse understand how they can help to break the cycle. CBC Ideas Interview (podcast) (September 25, 2006)

Women, Men, Way, Understanding

“We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On the design of the iPod, as quoted in Newsweek (14 October 2006)
2000s

Music

“The trouble with tea is that originally it was quite a good drink. So a group of the most eminent British scientists put their heads together and made complicated biological experiments to find a way of spoiling it. To the eternal glory of British science, their labour bore fruit.”

George Mikes (1912–1987) Hungarian-born British author

How to Be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and More Advanced Pupils (1946)

Way, Drink, Science, Tea

“An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 9

Personality

“The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. Some -- those who cannot leave on their own -- should be counted among the innocent victims. If the media were to adopt this "continuum," it would be informative to learn how many of the "civilian casualties" fall closer to the line of complicity and how many fall closer to the line of innocence. Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others.”

Alan M. Dershowitz (1938) American lawyer, author

"'Civilian casualty'? That's a gray area", Los Angeles Times, 2006-07-22

Death, War, Learning

“The breakup of the former Yugoslavia--like the breakup of the former Soviet Union--presents challenges, some of which (such as developing tranquil relations among peoples of varying and often hostile ethnic and religious orientations) may, indeed, earn the label 'complicated.' But with the Bosnian war now in its third year, it is worth asking whether Washington has for too long outthought itself on this issue. Does the Bosnian crisis not hold some fundamental truths? Most certainly, it does. And if these truths could be agreed upon in a bipartisan fashion, might they not lay the foundation for the development of a comprehensive American policy that could assist in the deterrence of aggression and ultimately an assurance of peace in the region? The answer again is yes.”

Michael Johns (1964) American businessman

"How to Save Bosnia," The World and I, July 1994, by Michael Johns: Seeking Bipartisan Consensus to 'Save Bosnia'

Hostility, War, People, Truth

“I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated practical joke, and it’s better to laugh than cry.”

Robert A. Heinlein book I Will Fear No Evil

Source: I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Chapter 25, p. 442

Life, Cry

“Roper: This was not practical; this was moral!
More: Oh, now I understand you, Will. Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learned from books.”

Robert Bolt A Man for All Seasons

Act II
A Man for All Seasons (1960)

Books, Understanding, Learning

“Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. […] For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, January 2, 2009, "Moral clarity in Gaza" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer010209.php3 at jewishworldreview.com. 2000s, 2009

War, Dead

“There are four causes of infidelity and loss of belief in Allah: hankering after whims, a passion to dispute every argument, deviation from truth; and dissension, because whoever hankers after whims does not incline towards truth; whoever keeps on disputing every argument on account of his ignorance, will always remain blind to truth, whoever deviates from truth because of ignorance, will always take good for evil and evil for good and he will always remain intoxicated with misguidance. And whoever makes a breach (with Allah and His Messenger) his path becomes difficult, his affairs will become complicated and his way to salvation will be uncertain.
Similarly, doubt has also four aspects absurd reasoning; fear; vacillation and hesitation; and unreasonable surrender to infidelity, because one who has accustomed himself to unreasonable and absurd discussions will never see the Light of Truth and will always live in the darkness of ignorance. One who is afraid to face facts (of life, death and the life after death) will always turn away from ultimate reality, one who allows doubts and uncertainties to vacillate him will always be under the control of Satan and one who surrenders himself to infidelity accepts damnation in both the worlds.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Life, Death, Truth, World

“If we study the history of science we see happen two inverse phenomena… Sometimes simplicity hides under complex appearances; sometimes it is the simplicity which is apparent, and which disguises extremely complicated realities.
…No doubt, if our means of investigation should become more and more penetrating, we should discover the simple under the complex, then the complex under the simple, then again the simple under the complex, and so on, without our being able to foresee what will be the last term. We must stop somewhere, and that science may be possible, we must stop when we have found simplicity. This is the only ground on which we can rear the edifice of our generalizations.”

Henri Poincaré book Science and Hypothesis

Science and Hypothesis (1901)

History, Reality, Study, Appearance

“I have read it with the deepest appreciation of Mr. Herron's singular insight into all the elements of a complicated situation and into my own motives and purposes.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Letter to Mitchell Kennerley about the book Woodrow Wilson and the World's Peace, October 1, 1917 https://books.google.com/books?id=Gr6atcdK37EC&pg=PA123 https://books.google.com/books?id=2BL2AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA2383 1910s

Motivation, Reading

“Nevertheless, it is true that on 1 July 1997 Hong Kong became the only example of decolonization deliberately accompanied by less democracy and a weaker protection of civil liberties. This was a cause for profound regret, especially for the departing colonial power. But it was China's doing and China's decision. I am pleased that Britain narrowly avoided complicity in the dishonourable act of denying the citizens of free Hong Kong what they had been promised in 1984.”

Chris Patten book East and West

Chris Patten, East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom and the Future, Pan Books, second edition, 1999, page 83.

Democracy, Decision

“In general the position as regards all such new calculi is this - That one cannot accomplish by them anything that could not be accomplished without them. However, the advantage is, that, provided such a calculus corresponds to the inmost nature of frequent needs, anyone who masters it thoroughly is able - without the unconscious inspiration of genius which no one can command - to solve the respective problems, yea to solve them mechanically in complicated cases in which, without such aid, even genius becomes powerless. Such is the case with the invention of general algebra, with the differential calculus, and in a more limited region with Lagrange's calculus of variations, with my calculus of congruences, and with Mobius's calculus. Such conceptions unite, as it were, into an organic whole countless problems which otherwise would remain isolated and require for their separate solution more or less application of inventive genius.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

As quoted in Gauss, Werke, Bd. 8, page 298
As quoted in Memorabilia Mathematica (or The Philomath's Quotation-Book) (1914) by Robert Edouard Moritz, quotation #1215
As quoted in The First Systems of Weighted Differential and Integral Calculus (1980) by Jane Grossman, Michael Grossman, and Robert Katz, page ii

Nature, Problem

“My own beliefs are that the road to a scientific discovery is seldom direct, and that it does not necessarily require great expertise. In fact, I am convinced that often a newcomer to a field has a great advantage because he is ignorant and does not know all the complicated reasons why a particular experiment should not be attempted.”

Ivar Giaever (1929) Norwegian physicist

Nobel lecture (1973)

“Humanitarianism … occurs where a powerful group seeks to curb the activities of another group in their own better interests. They define them as a social problem and demands that action be taken to ameliorate their situation. This is complicated in the case of marihuana smoking, in so far as those individuals who make up the social problem would deny that any real problem exists at all.
I would argue that the humanitarian motive is exceedingly suspect; for it is often—though not necessarily—a rationalization behind which is concealed either a conflict of interests or moral indignation. For example Alex Comfort in The Anxiety Makers has charted the way in which the medical profession have repeatedly translated their moral indignation over certain ‘abuses’ into a clinically backed humanitarianism. For example, masturbation was once seen as causing psychosis, listlessness and impotence, and various barbaric clinical devices were evolved to prevent young people from touching their genital organs.”

Jock Young (1942–2013) British sociologist and criminologist

“The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy,” Images of Deviance (1971), p. 31

People, Way, Motivation, Problem

“Every technology goes through three stages: first a crudely simple and quite unsatisfactory gadget; second, an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise; third, a final stage of smooth simplicity and efficient performance based on correct understanding of natural laws and proper design therefrom.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Rolling Stones

Source: The Rolling Stones (1952), Chapter 4, “Aspects of Domestic Engineering” (pp. 52-53)

“The world is a harum-scarum place."
"Harum?" Sunny asked.
It's complicated and confusing," Olivia explained. They say that long ago it was simple and quiet, but that might be a legend.”

Daniel Handler book The Carnivorous Carnival

The Carnivorous Carnival (2002)

World

“ Of all forms of symbolism, language is the most highly developed, most subtle, and most complicated. It has been pointed out that human beings, by agreement, can make anything stand for anything. Now, human beings have agreed, in the course of centuries of mutual dependency, to let the various noises that they can produce […] stand for specified happenings in their nervous systems. We call that system of agreements language. For example, we who speak English have been so trained that, when our nervous systems register the presence of a certain kind of animal, we may make the following noise: "That's a cat." Anyone hearing us expects to find that, by looking in the same direction, he will experience a similar event in his nervous system -- one that will lead him to make an almost identical noise. Again, we have been so trained that when we are conscious of wanting food, we make the noise "I'm hungry."”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Language as Symbolism, pp. 26-27

Food, Cats, Animals, Dependency

“There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 5 "Countess Steno"

“We find that the presidency has become too secretive, too powerful, too trammelled, too ceremonial, too impotent or too complicated, depending on the president under discussion or the critic making the analysis. On one thing all are agreed - there is a danger of an 'imperial' or 'monarchical' presidency. An incumbent in Washington knows he is in trouble on the day that cartoonists begin to represent him as a king.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

Secret, Dependency

“The whole picture is complicated by the stockists and merchants who will try to exploit any shortages that may appear.
The result is this. The feedback information from the industry's environment consists, first and foremost, of a forward order load. Much of this "demand for steel" will be bogus.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 4, An Alphabet of Models, p. 96.

Appearance

“The fine art world and the commercial art industry are both all about money. It's hard to say which is more contemptible: the fine art world with its double talk and pretensions to the cultural high ground, or the world of commercial art trying to sell to the largest mass market it can reach. A serious artist really shouldn't be too deeply involved in either of these worlds. It's best to be on the fringe of them. In general, if you want to be a success and make the money, you have to play the game. It's no different in the fine art world, it's just a slightly different game. Essentially, you're marketing an illusion. It's much easier to lie to humans and trick them than to tell them the truth. They'd much rather be bamboozled than be told the truth, because the way to trick them is to flatter them and tell them what they want to hear, to reinforce their existing illusions. They don't want to know the truth. Truth is a bring-down, a bummer, or it's just too complicated, too much mental work to grasp.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 297

Money, Truth, Lie, World

“I would meet screenwriters in L. A. who would write these very complicated sitcoms like Cheers and who'd have the most extraordinary sense of plot of anybody I've ever met. I saw the insides of lots of great houses. And I met people who you and I would regard as famous, and then realized some very interesting things about them, like how lonely they are. It was those years I was least a minority. In a sense, I owned the world. I owned it because I had certain charms that allowed me to insinuate myself into the world. Intellectually, it was very satisfying to be at the edge of this world. But when it became clear to me that I wanted to write this book, I had to divorce myself from that world and move to San Francisco.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)

People, Books, World, Sense

“The whole tendency of civilization is…towards the multiplication of the collective functions of society. The ever growing complications of civilization create for us new services which have to be undertaken by the State, and create for us an expansion of the existing services. I am of the opinion that the State should increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labour. I am very sorry we have not got the railways of this country in our hands. We may do something better with the canals, and we are all agreed that the State must increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the care of the sick and aged, and, above all, of the children.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 154
Early career years (1898–1929)

Children, Age, Country

“Since reasoning, or inference, the principal subject of logic, is an operation which usually takes place by means of words, and in complicated cases can take place in no other way: those who have not a thorough insight into both the signification and purpose of words, will be under chances, amounting almost to certainty, of reasoning or inferring incorrectly.”

John Stuart Mill book A System of Logic

Source: A System of Logic (1843), p. 11: Cited in Gaines (1976) "Foundations of fuzzy reasoning" in: International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 8(6), p. 623

Way, Chance

“The first of a thousand lies. Truth flowed to Micah Quill, was sucked in and disappeared, and emerged again looking ever so much like it used to, but changed subtly, at the edges, where none would notice, so that simple truth became a complicated fabric indeed, one that could wrap you up so tightly and close you off from the air until you suffocated in it.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Heartfire (1998), Chapter 9.

Truth, Change

“Is it not conceivable, that each tone is the fusion of a sum of still more primitive elements with the Gestalt qualities bound up therewith?… No conclusive argument can be brought forward even against the possibility that we may not, penetrating ever more deeply in this manner, finally arrive at a single proto-quality, or at least at a single quality-continuum, from out of which distinct contents (colours, tones, Y) are generated by the fusion of distinct combinations with the Gestalt qualities bound up therewith, [so that] one can no longer shrink from the idea that tones and colours might be exhibited as the products of a much higher degree of complication of proto-elements as yet unknown.”

Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) Austrian philosopher

Source: "On Gestalt Qualities," 1890, p. 16

Idea

“I’ve stayed interested in Hamilton not because he was a standard-issue hero, but because of his complications; he was self-destructive, had a highly problematic personality, and was often extreme in his politics. I don’t like hero history. It does the study of history a disservice on a thousand different levels. It’s far more interesting to study complicated people and the history they helped to shape.”

Joanne B. Freeman (1962) US historian and tenured professor of History and American Studies at Yale University

In conversation: Joanne Freeman on Alexander Hamilton the man and 'Hamilton' the musical https://news.yale.edu/2016/08/11/conversation-joanne-freeman-alexander-hamilton-man-and-hamilton-musical

People, History, Study, Help

“Ideas are like bundles of trajectories undergoing complicated evolution.”

E. C. George Sudarshan (1931–2018) Indian physicist

in A Glance Back at Five Decades of Scientific Research, published in Particles and Fields: Classical and Quantum, Journal of Physics: Conference Series 87 (2007), IOP Publishing, p. 9.

Idea

“Truth is simple and open to all. Why do you complicate? Truth is loving and lovable. It includes all, accepts all, purifies all. It is untruth that is difficult and a source of trouble. It always wants, expects, demands. Being false, it is empty, always in search of confirmation and reassurance. It is afraid of and avoids enquiry. It identifies itself with any support, however weak and momentary. Whatever it gets, it loses and asks for more. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Truth and untruth
Source: "I am That." P.69.

Love, Truth, Search, Support

“As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 4, Princeton Days, p. 76

Confidence, Mathematics, Self-confidence

“Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10−12gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.”

Michael Denton book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

Source: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), p. 250

World

“According to this Jewish supremacist Weltanschauung, and in line with anti-Semitic rhetoric, not only will Jews be supremacists over the native Palestinians whom they conquered and must continue to conquer; they are also said to be supreme on a global scale. The complicity between Zionism and anti-Semitism has become complete.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“The day I joined this Israeli and Arabs youth movement, my life began to get complicated. Suddenly it was no longer black and white.”

Jonathan Kis-Lev (1985) painter

An optimist seeks peace (Ein Optimist sucht den Frieden) http://www.schwaebische.de/home_artikel,-Ein-Optimist-sucht-den-Frieden-_arid,2456681.html, Schwäbische Zeitung, 2008-07-10

Life, Youth

“There are three kinds of writing in economics: Greek-letter, up-and-down, and airport. Greek-letter writing formal, theoretical, mathematical is how professors communicate. Like any academic field, economics has its fair share of hacks and phonies, who use complicated language to hide the banality of their ideas; it also contains profound thinkers, who use the specialized language of the discipline as an efficient way to express deep insights. […] Up-and-down economics is what one encounters on the business pages of newspapers, or for that matter on TV. It is preoccupied with the latest news and the latest numbers, hence its name. […] Finally, airport economics is the language of economics bestsellers. These books are most prominently displayed at airport bookstores, where the delayed business traveler is likely to buy them. Most of these books predict disaster: a new great depression, the evisceration of our economy by Japanese multinationals, the collapse of our money. A minority have the opposite view, a boundless optimism: new technology or supply-side economics is about to lead us into an era of unprecedented economic progress. Whether pessimistic or optimistic, airport economics is usually fun, rarely well informed, and never serious.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Preface
The Age of Diminished Expectations (1990; 1994; 1997)

Money, Books, Way, Travel

“The surrealists still see things as everyone sees them, they complicate them in a different way but the vision is that of everyone else, in short the complication is the complication of the twentieth century but the vision is that of the nineteenth century. Picasso only sees something else, another reality. Complications are always easy but another vision than that of all the world is very rare.”

Gertrude Stein Picasso

Picasso (1938)

World, Way, Reality

“That is to say that every single book will be magnetized, will be ordered under complicated mathematical clusters, by related subjects, and semantic markers. You will state your questions, or the subject you are interested in, and the computer will find the books for you. Instataneous retrieval brings with it enormous changes in our relation to the history of a subject, because there is a cut-off point in all these systems beond which the previous books are no longer relevant. They have been adequately subsumed in the later ones. You have a completely different way of organsing knowledge—an immensely efficient and in many ways powerfully logical way, but which blocks the essential motion of the hand reaching along a shelf and stumbling on what it did not know was there. When these great knowledge and data-banks, as they are called, are operative there will come a whole change in the way the human mind and eye live with books.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 28.
Do Books Matter?

Books, Way, History, Mathematics

“A human is a complicated organic/electrical system, which is immersed in a culture. Try raising a monkey like a human, it won't work, you need the human's certain brain characteristics (including self-reflection) in order to create a truly intelligent creature. The brain processes inputs and perception in very particular ways, and I think until we understand the underlying processes better, there is no way to really simulate it in software. Computers will continue to be good at simplistic analysis, and raw processing power, but the subtlety of emotions is something intrinsic to the human organism and culture.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Way, Intelligence, Understanding, Thinking

“What happened this far remote would have little political impact on Earth. What the visual media could not carry into living rooms, the general public could not long remain exercised about. Statistically, a majority of the electorate could not or did not read complicated issues; no pictures, no news; no news, no event.”

C. J. Cherryh book Downbelow Station

Book 2, Chapter 2 (p. 118)
Downbelow Station (1981)

Exercises, Reading

“Smeds did not like it. It was getting complicated. He did not like things complicated. Trying to untangle them usually made things worse.”

Glen Cook book The Silver Spike

Source: The Silver Spike (1989), Chapter 28 (p. 541)

“The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

World, Understanding

“The mental operation by which one achieves new concepts and which one denotes generally by the inadequate name of induction is not a simple but rather a very complicated process. Above all, it is not a logical process although such processes can be inserted as intermediary and auxiliary links. The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination.”

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

3rd edition, p. 318ff, As quoted by Phillip Frank, Philosophy of Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy (1957)
20th century, "Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung" (1905)

Imagination, Knowledge, Effort

“I'll be true, I'll be useful…
I'll be cavalier…I'll be yours my dear.
and I'll belong to you…
if you'll just let me through.
this is easy as lovers go,
so don't complicate it by hesitating.
and this is wonderful as loving goes,
this is tailor-made, whats the sense in waiting?”

Chris Carrabba (1975) American musician

As Lovers Go

Love, Lovers, Sense, Waiting

“In the case of the cosmos, […] even if we don’t understand how it came about, it’s not helpful to postulate a creator, because the creator is the very kind of thing that needs an explanation - and although it's difficult enough to explain how a very simple origin of the universe came into being - how matter and energy, how one or two physical constants came into existence - although it’s difficult enough to think how simplicity came into existence, it’s a hell of a lot harder to think how something as complicated as a God comes into existence - difficult enough to think of how a deist God comes into existence, and even more difficult to think of - how a Christian God, who actually cares about things like sin and gets Himself born of a virgin.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins vs. John Lennox, 21/10/2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UIbd0eLxw&t=10m38s "Has Science Buried God?" Debate (2008)

God, Hell, Understanding, Thinking

“One is faced with a dilemma: If one places total trust in all other users, one is vulnerable to the antisocial behavior of any malicious user—consider the case of viruses. But if one tries to be totally reclusive and isolated, one is not only bored, but one's information universe will cease to grow and be enhanced by interaction with others. The result is that most of us operate in a complicated trade-off zone with various arrangements of trust and security mechanisms.”

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

Source: On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991), p. 79

Behavior, Universe

“b>It is both more difficult and more complicated to die than people think. Even though the soul craves for nothing but extinction and oblivion forever, the body is a conservative master which will not give up until the very end.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

People, Soul, Thinking

“While any situation could be used as an image of any other, no thing could be an image of another—especially two things as complicated as two people. And to use them as such was to abuse them and delude oneself—that it was the coherence and ability of things (especially people) to be their unique and individual selves that allowed the malleability and richness of images to occur at all.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 2 (pp. 102-103)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

People

“The prevailing economic theory of business enterprise and behavior, the maximization of profit—which is simply a complicated way of phrasing the old saw of buying cheap and selling dear—may adequately explain how Richard Sears operated. But it cannot explain how Sears, Roebuck or any other business enterprise operates, nor how it should operate. The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 59 (1986 ; 45)

Way, Behavior, Business

““On your planet, how do you tell somebody that you love her?”
“It’s very complicated. You say, ‘I love you,’ and then you stand back and see what happens.””

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 9 (p. 112)

Love

“I suggest, then… that the first step was an advance under favor of peculiar conditions, from the simplest forms of being, to the next more complicated, and this through the medium of the ordinary process of generation.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 205

“So far as one understands a man, one is that man. The man of genius takes his place in the above argument as he who understands incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe is said to have said of himself that there was no vice or crime of which he could not trace the tendency in himself, and that at some period of his life he could not have understood fully. The genius, therefore, is a more complicated, more richly endowed, more varied man; and a man is the closer to being a genius the more men he has in his personality, and the more really and strongly he has these others within him.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Einen Menschen verstehen heißt also: auch er sein. Der geniale Mensch aber offenbarte sich an jenen Beispielen eben als der Mensch, welcher ungleich mehr Wesen versteht als der mittelmäßige. Goethe soll von sich gesagt haben, es gebe kein Laster und kein Verbrechen, zu dem er nicht die Anlage in sich verspürt, das er nicht in irgend einem Zeitpunkte seines Lebens vollauf verstanden habe. Der geniale Mensch ist also komplizierter, zusammengesetzter, reicher; und ein Mensch ist um so genialer zu nennen, je mehr Menschen er in sich vereinigt, und zwar, wie hinzugefügt werden muß, je lebendiger, mit je größerer Intensität er die anderen Menschen in sich hat.
Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 106.

Life, Men, Understanding, Personality

“I think the kicks in Wing Chun are enough. It´s much easier to use your hands than to use your feet. Your hand is able to reach your opponent long before your foot. Why take the long way to attack (circle), when there is a much more direct method of attack? If you are using your hands, then your opponent can´t see a kick coming if you have to use it. When you teach Kung Fu, you can fool a lot of people, but not yourself. You can make like a movie and do many complicated movements and kicks, but you only fool yourself as to whether that would work in a real situation of life and death.”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Wong Shun Leung: "Your hand is able to reach your opponent long before your foot." Practical Fighting Concepts Source: Interview with Wong Shun Leung, by: Erle Montaigue http://www.vingtsunupdate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44&Itemid=77

Life, Death, People, Fools

“I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Often referred to as Anderson's Law. Cited in: Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling by Harold Kerzner. Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=4CqvpWwMLVEC&pg=PA246. Accessed September 5, 2009. Checkland, P.B. (1985). Formulating problems in Systems Analysis. In: Miser, H. J. and Quade E. S. (eds.) (1985). Handbook of Systems Analysis: Overview of Uses, Procedures, Applications, and Practice. Chapter 5, pp. 151-170. North-Holland, New York. Attributed

Way, Problem

“Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase… Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all imitative of western forms: Chinese concert pianists are technically brilliant, but brilliant at Schubert and Rachmaninov. Chinese ballerinas dance to the scores of Diaghilev. The number of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, although there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to Stanford and Caltech… It is hard to think of a single Chinese sport at the Olympics, compared with umpteen invented by Britain, including ping-pong, I’ll have you know, which originated at upper-class dinner tables and was first called whiff-whaff. The Chinese have a script so fiendishly complicated that they cannot produce a proper keyboard for it.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Have I Got Views for You, p277
2000s, 2006

Art, Home, Thinking, Sport

“95% of Economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.”

Ha-Joon Chang (1963) Economist

Lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whVf5tuVbus at the RSA about his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, September 2010.

Sense

“You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn't amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Treason (1988)

People, Fashion

“Life is too complicated to use analogies to describe it.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

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

Life

“The constitutional treaty was an easily understandable treaty. This is a simplified treaty which is very complicated."
On the Lisbon Treaty, 23 June 2007”

Jean-Claude Juncker (1954) Luxembourgian politician

http://www.nzz.ch/2007/06/24/eng/article7955045.html, EU leaders hammer out treaty deal, Swissinfo / NZZ, 24 June 2007, 2007-06-26
2007

Understanding

“Gradual development of flight should begin with the simplest apparatus and movements, and without time complication of dynamic means.”

Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) German aviation pioneer

The Romance of Aeronautics (1912)

Time

“When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?”

Enrico Bombieri (1940) mathematician

Enrico Bombieri, cited in: Leonard F. Koziol (2014), The Myth of Executive Functioning. p. 1

Question, Sense

“Roe was a shock to me because even at 16 or 17 years old I understood that abortion was killing an unborn baby. I mean it was simple and straightforward and indeed it is simple and straightforward. We try to make this complicated, but it's simple and straightforward. You've got a new human life developing in the mother's womb and abortion is the business of killing that baby. Now, the Planned Parenthood videos have made that very graphic but you didn't actually need the videos, uh, at least I didn't need to the videos to know that. But even then we didn't think of abortion as something Democrats were for and Republicans were against. The division of the parties into a pro-abortion party and an anti-abortion party came a little later.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

2016, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

Life, Business, Thinking, Baby

“So the fact that I had worked in more than a dozen countries and have been working for 25 years trying to implement health, education and social protection programmes, I think really helped me inside the World Bank Group and helped me to feel a sense of closeness to our frontline staff. But it’s a complicated organization… I’m still learning… and the ethnography will continue until I’m done with my work at the World Bank Group.”

Jim Yong Kim (1959) Korean-American physician and anthropologist, 12th President of the World Bank

UN News Centre, Interview with Jim Yong Kim, 7 October 13

Health, World, Education, Feeling

“The type of rationality we assume in economics — perfect, logical, deductive rationality — is extremely useful in generating solutions to theoretical problems. But it demands much of human behavior — much more in fact than it can usually deliver. If we were to imagine the vast collection of decision problems economic agents might conceivably deal with as a sea or an ocean, with the easier problems on top and more complicated ones at increasing depth, then deductive rationality would describe human behavior accurately only within a few feet of the surface. For example, the game Tic-Tac-Toe is simple, and we can readily find a perfectly rational, minimax solution to it. But we do not find rational “solutions” at the depth of Checkers; and certainly not at the still modest depths of Chess and Go.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Source: Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality (The El Farol Problem) (1994), p. 1

Behavior, Imagination, Game, Problem

““There were difficulties.”
“Oh,” she said, “so you’re the man whose life develops complications! I’ve so longed to meet you; the rest of us here in this world have it much too easy, I’m afraid.””

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013), Chapter 6 “The Five-Year Game: Change of Venue” section 8 (p. 337)

Life, World

“History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Page 349
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

Life, History

“In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality — heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 7, sct. 1
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

God, Truth, Books, World

“You know in childhood it is difficult to be different. I spent long times in hospitals and it was complicated, but it made me know how strong I can be, and it helped me to get my wills. A long time ago I started to shoot my little short with my own cam with friends, but in 2005 came my first professional work. I visited an FX make up workshop and took a look at what else the teacher was doing outside of classes. He was working for movies and then I offered myself for work and have them take benefit of my peculiar body.”

Javier Botet (1977) Spanish actor

Holy “Mama” – An Interview with Javier Botet https://thedodgy.com/2013/11/22/holy-mama-an-interview-with-javier-botet/ (November 22, 2013)

Strong, Teachers, Time, Help

“…how poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, “Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t”—is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"The Obscurity of the Poet". p. 9
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)
Variant: How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, “Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t” — is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.

Reading

“A film should appeal to sophisticated, profound-thinking people while at the same time entertaining simplistic people. A truly good movie is really enjoyable too. There’s nothing complicated about it. A truly good movie is interesting and easy to understand.”

Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) Japanese film maker

Akira Kurosawa as quoted in Kamiski, Michael (2007). The Secret History of Star Wars(PDF). p. 48. Retrieved 2011-01-31.

People, Understanding, Thinking, Time

“(Folowing a soundclip of an Obama official saying there are Christian militant groups and thus the Mid-East fighting is more complicated than Islamism) I'm going to have noise-cancellation headphones ready for when an agent of Obama or any Democrat speaks again… The idiocy in this nation…”

Michael Savage book The Savage Nation

The Savage Nation
The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2015-02-18
Radio, 00:54
2015

Fight

“It is better to have the child in the chimney corner moved by what happens in the poem, in spite of his ignorance of its real meaning, than to have the poem a puzzle to which that meaning is the only key. Still, complicated subjects make complicated poems, and some of the best poems can move only the best readers; this is one more question of curves of normal distribution. I have tried to make my poems plain, and most of them are plain enough; but I wish that they were more difficult because I had known more.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950 [p. 170]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Question

“Religion is not black and white. It's much more complicated. Spirituality is much bigger than that. God is much bigger than that. I don't believe in a wrathful God. I believe he's much more forgiving and inclusive than some religions. The things that are done in her name or his name are horrible.”

Susan Sarandon (1946) American actress

"'The Power of One' : Interview with Susan Sarandon" at Belief.net
Quote

God, Religion, Forgiveness

“People who like to display complicated technique in their verse are more given to pride themselves on their work than are those who write for their own solace.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Einar in "Shepherds' Meet"
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers

People

“In the future (…) people will become more sensitive and aware than they are now. They will have to, because society will become more complicated, more full of people, with more different things happening. People will have to become much cleverer and much sharper. Then they will like my music.”

Elliott Carter (1908–2012) American composer

From the documentary A Labyrinth of Time (2004) by Frank Scheffer.

People, Music, Future

“A few things led me to the vegan diet. I guess the first thing to say was that I had multiple injuries and surgeries. Then additional complications: stamina level, inflammation, stuff with my stomach, overall mood, how my body was feeling and working. … Eating a vegan diet has changed my everyday living. I sleep better, I wake up in a better mood, I recover faster, I’m not so inflamed, not so achey. I feel better overall, in everything that I do. I can take in more information easier. My mind is just open.”

Wilson Chandler (1987) American basketball player

"NBA Star Wilson Chandler Reveals the Vegan Secrets Behind His Success" https://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/09/28/wilson-chandler-interview/, interview with Highsnobiety (September 28, 2017).

Feeling, Mood, Sleep, Change

“Investigating chemical reactions can be greatly complicated and often obscured by the presence of extraneous materials. So, the first step, therefore, is to learn how to analyze and classify materials to ensure that you are working with pure substances before initiating any reactions.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 1 : The Atom in Modern Chemistry

Learning

“Class, conservatives insist, is not really about money or birth or even occupation. It is primarily a matter of authenticity, that most valuable cultural commodity. Class is about what one drives and where one shops and how one prays, and only secondarily about the work one does or the income one makes. What makes one a member of the noble proletariat is not work per se, but unpretentiousness, humility, and the rest of the qualities that our punditry claims to spy in the red states that voted for George W. Bush. The nation’s producers don’t care about unemployment or a dead-end life or a boss who makes five hundred times as much as they do. No. In red land both workers and their bosses are supposed to be united in disgust with those affected college boys at the next table, prattling on about French cheese and villas in Tuscany and the big ideas for running things that they read in books.This sounds like a complicated maneuver, but it should be quite familiar after all these years. We see it in its most ordinary, run-of-the-mill variety every time we hear a conservative pundit or politician deplore "class warfare"”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

meaning any talk about the failures of free-market capitalism — and then, seconds later, hear them rail against the "media elite" or the haughty, Volvo driving "eastern establishment."
Part II: The Fury Which Passeth All Understanding, Chapter Six: Persecuted, Powerless, and Blind (pp. 113-114).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

Life, Money, Boy, Idea

“I avoid all political complications,” said Cloche, with a severe expression. “Of whatever stripe. I only wish that political complications would similarly avoid me, and my work.”

Adam Roberts book Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

Source: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014), Chapter 2, “The Captain’s Last Supper” (p. 7)

“nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.”

John H. Holland (1929–2015) US university professor

Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 1. Basic Elements, p. 23

Behavior

“The bewildered novice in chess moves cautiously, recalling individual rules, whereas the experienced player absorbs a complicated situation at a glance and is unable to account rationally for his intuition. In like manner mathematical intuition grows with experience, and it is possible to develop a natural feeling for concepts such as four dimensional space.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Introduction, The Nature of Probability Theory, p. 2.
An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition)

Feeling, Mathematics, Nature

“Christianity is not a highly complicated collection of so many dogmas that it is impossible for anyone to know them all; it is not something exclusively for academicians who can study these things, but it is something simple: God exists and God is close in Jesus Christ.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

remarks http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2007/july/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20070724_clero-cadore_en.html at Auronzo di Cadore (24 July 2007) 2007

God, Study, Christ

“It's an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Speaking at the National Governors Association meeting at the White House https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2017/feb/27/trump-healthcare-complicated-budget-video (27 February 2017) 2010s, 2017, February

Quotes about complication page 4

Quotes about complication
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