Quotes about complication
page 7

“I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment… only to vanish forever.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Inside Information.
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

Life, Light, Time

“If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labour lost; many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Philo to Cleanthes, Part V
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)
Context: But were this world ever so perfect a production, it must still remain uncertain, whether all the excellencies of the work can justly be ascribed to the workman. If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labour lost; many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making. In such subjects, who can determine, where the truth; nay, who can conjecture where the probability, lies; amidst a great number of hypotheses which may be proposed, and a still greater number which may be imagined?

Age, Stupidity, World, Beauty

“There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.60
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)
Context: There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well. No matter if it takes fifty generations of arduous experimentation to explode the simpler hypothesis, and no matter how incredible it may seem that that simpler hypothesis should suffice, still fifty generations are nothing in the life of science, which has all time before it; and in the long run, say in some thousands of generations, time will be economized by proceeding in an orderly manner, and by making it an invariable rule to try the simpler hypothesis first. Indeed, one can never be sure that the simpler hypothesis is not the true one, after all, until its cause has been fought out to the bitter end. But you will mark the limitation of my approval of Ockham's razor. It is a sound maxim of scientific procedure. If the question be what one ought to believe, the logic of the situation must take other factors into account. Speaking strictly, belief is out of place in pure theoretical science, which has nothing nearer to it than the establishment of doctrines, and only the provisional establishment of them, at that. Compared with living belief it is nothing but a ghost. If the captain of a vessel on a lee shore in a terrific storm finds himself in a critical position in which he must instantly either put his wheel to port acting on one hypothesis, or put his wheel to starboard acting on the contrary hypothesis, and his vessel will infallibly be dashed to pieces if he decides the question wrongly, Ockham's razor is not worth the stout belief of any common seaman. For stout belief may happen to save the ship, while Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem would be only a stupid way of spelling Shipwreck. Now in matters of real practical concern we are all in something like the situation of that sea-captain.

“The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, A Liberal Education and Where to Find It (1868)
Context: The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated — without haste, but without remorse.

Life, Happiness, Game, Dependency

“However difficult those simple beginnings may be to accept, they are a whole lot easier to accept than complicated beginnings. Complicated things come into the universe late, as a consequence of slow, gradual, incremental steps. God, if he exists, would have to be a very, very, very complicated thing indeed. So to postulate a God as the beginning of the universe, as the answer to the riddle of the first cause, is to shoot yourself in the conceptual foot because you are immediately postulating something far far more complicated than that which you are trying to explain.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

The God Delusion (2006) Context: If the alternative that's being offered to what physicists now talk about - a big bang, a spontaneous singularity which gave rise to the origin of the universe - if the alternative to that is a divine intelligence, a creator, which would have to have been complicated, statistically improbable, the very kind of thing which scientific theories such as Darwin's exists to explain, then immediately we see that however difficult and apparently inadequate the theory of the physicists is, the theory of the theologians - that the first course was a complicated intelligence - is even more difficult to accept. They're both difficult but the theory of the cosmic intelligence is even worse. What Darwinism does is to raise our consciousness to the power of science to explain the existence of complex things and intelligences, and creative intelligences are above all complex things, they're statistically improbable. Darwinism raises our consciousness to the power of science to explain how such entities - and the human brain is one - can come into existence from simple beginnings. However difficult those simple beginnings may be to accept, they are a whole lot easier to accept than complicated beginnings. Complicated things come into the universe late, as a consequence of slow, gradual, incremental steps. God, if he exists, would have to be a very, very, very complicated thing indeed. So to postulate a God as the beginning of the universe, as the answer to the riddle of the first cause, is to shoot yourself in the conceptual foot because you are immediately postulating something far far more complicated than that which you are trying to explain. Now, physicists cope with this problem in various ways, which may seem somewhat unconvincing. For example, they suggest that our universe is but one bubble in foam of universes, the multiverse, and each bubble in the foam has a different set of laws and constants. And by the anthropic principle we have to be - since we're here talking about it - in the kind of bubble, with the kind of laws and constants, which are capable of giving rise to the evolutionary process and therefore to creatures like us. That is one current physicists' explanation for how we exist in the kind of universe that we do. It doesn't sound so shatteringly convincing as say Darwin's own theory, which is self-evidently very convincing. Nevertheless, however unconvincing that may sound, it is many, many, many orders of magnitude more convincing than any theory that says complex intelligence was there right from the outset. If you have problems seeing how matter could just come into existence - try thinking about how complex intelligent matter, or complex intelligent entities of any kind, could suddenly spring into existence, it's many many orders of magnitude harder to understand. Lynchburg, Virginia, 23/10/2006 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR_z85O0P2M&t=42m41s

God, Universe

“No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works.”

P. J. O'Rourke (1947) American journalist

Roast of Robert Novak at the Conservative Political Action Committee (11 February 1994)

“The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description. Hence the need of pronoun and indices, and the more complicated the subject the greater the need of them.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

On The Algebra of Logic (1885)
Context: I have taken pains to make my distinction of icons, indices, and tokens clear, in order to enunciate this proposition: in a perfect system of logical notation signs of these several kinds must all be employed. Without tokens there would be no generality in the statements, for they are the only general signs; and generality is essential to reasoning. … But tokens alone do not state what is the subject of discourse; and this can, in fact, not be described in general terms; it can only be indicated. The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description. Hence the need of pronoun and indices, and the more complicated the subject the greater the need of them.

World, Imagination

“It is not enough to yearn for peace. We must work, and if necessary, fight for it. The task of creating a sound international organization is complicated and difficult. Yet, without such organization, the rights of man on earth cannot be protected.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Address to Congress (1945)
Context: It is not enough to yearn for peace. We must work, and if necessary, fight for it. The task of creating a sound international organization is complicated and difficult. Yet, without such organization, the rights of man on earth cannot be protected. Machinery for the just settlement of international differences must be found. Without such machinery, the entire world will have to remain an armed camp. The world will be doomed to deadly conflict, devoid of hope for real peace.

Peace, Fight

“If there be, in any region of the universe, an order of moral agents living in society, whose reason is strong, whose passions and inclinations are moderate, and whose dispositions are turned to virtue, to such an order of happy beings, legislation, administration, and police, with the endlessly various and complicated apparatus of politics, must be in a great measure superfluous. Did reason govern mankind, there would be little occasion for any other government, either monarchical, aristocratical, democratical, or mixed.”

James Burgh book Political Disquisitions

Ch I : Government by Laws and Sanctions, why necessary
Political Disquisitions (1774)
Context: If there be, in any region of the universe, an order of moral agents living in society, whose reason is strong, whose passions and inclinations are moderate, and whose dispositions are turned to virtue, to such an order of happy beings, legislation, administration, and police, with the endlessly various and complicated apparatus of politics, must be in a great measure superfluous. Did reason govern mankind, there would be little occasion for any other government, either monarchical, aristocratical, democratical, or mixed. But man, whom we dignify with the honourable title of Rational, being much more frequently influenced, in his proceedings, by supposed interest, by passion, by sensual appetite, by caprice, by any thing, by nothing, than by reason; it has, in all civilized ages and countries, been found proper to frame laws and statutes fortified by sanctions, and to establish orders of men invested with authority to execute those laws, and inflict the deserved punishments upon the violators of them. By such means only has it been found possible to preserve the general peace and tranquillity. But, such is the perverse disposition of man, the most unruly of all animals, that this most useful institution has been generally debauched into an engine of oppression and tyranny over those, whom it was expresly and solely established to defend. And to such a degree has this evil prevailed, that in almost every age and country, the government has been the principal grievance of the people, as appears too dreadfully manifest, from the bloody and deformed page of history. For what is general history, but a view of the abuses of power committed by those, who have got it into their hands, to the subjugation, and destruction of the human species, to the ruin of the general peace and happiness, and turning the Almighty's fair and good world into a butchery of its inhabitants, for the gratification of the unbounded ambition of a few, who, in overthrowing the felicity of their fellow-creatures, have confounded their own?

Happiness, Strong, Universe, Passion

“I was also interested in what it’s like to experience in a really vivid and authentic-seeming way agency and choice in a circumstance that you might later in your life view completely differently, because as much as you were experiencing agency and choice, you were actually in a radically disempowered situation you weren’t even experienced enough to recognize. That’s why I think consent is such a complicated issue.”

Susan Choi (1969) American novelist

On consent being a theme in her book Trust Exercise in “Trust, Serendipity, and Consent: An Interview with Trust Exercise Author Susan Choi” https://www.bookish.com/articles/interview-susan-choi-trust-exercise/ in Bookish (2019 Apr 16)

Life, Way, Thinking

“All of these types of abuses, whether they’re human rights abuses, or environmental crimes, stem from a core problem, which is a lack of governance at sea, especially on the high seas. Specifically, there are three ways in which misbehavior happens offshore routinely and with impunity: too few rules, a lack of enforcement, and insufficient awareness of what is happening there. All of these problems are also connected in the sense that they occur with a certain tacit complicity from all of us who live on land…”

Ian Urbina (1972) American journalist

On his book The Outlaw Ocean in “The Outlaw Ocean project – interview with Ian Urbina” https://hopeforjustice.org/news/2019/07/the-outlaw-ocean-project-interview-with-ian-urbina/ (Hope for Justice; Jul 2019)

Way, Problem, Sense, Sea

“Characters, even though they’re minor, shouldn’t be a device. No person should be a device to move the plot along. That’s when you run into problems with stereotypes. I strive, in my journalism and my fiction, to make characters as complex and complicated as they are in real life…”

Vanessa Hua American journalist and writer

On how she writes characters in “Motherhood and Migration: An Interview with Vanessa Hua on ‘A River of Stars’” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/motherhood-and-migration-an-interview-with-vanessa-hua-on-a-river-of-stars/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2018 Sep 13)

Life, Making love, Problem, Personality

“Coming to the theater humanizes people…Culture informs perspective, and the world is a complicated place. Telling the story on stage increases understanding…”

Karen Zacarias (1969) Mexican-American playwright

On how she views theater in “BWW Interview: A Date with DESTINY: Talking with Playwright Karen Zacarías” https://www.broadwayworld.com/washington-dc/article/BWW-Interview-A-Date-with-DESTINY-Talking-with-Playwright-Karen-Zacaras-20150914 in Broadway World (2015 Sep 14)

People, World, Understanding

“Television has lapped theater in a lot of storytelling techniques — realism, depth of character, complicated storytelling…What we have that’s different in the theater is the audience in the space with us. And I’m not interested in ignoring the space between us.”

Kristoffer Diaz American writer

On how theater differs from television in “Playwright Kristoffer Diaz steps into the ring” https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-xpm-2011-aug-21-la-ca-chad-deity-20110821-story.html in the Los Angeles Times (2011 Aug 21)

“Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us.... We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

As quoted in Popper (1973) by Bryan Magee

Making love, History, Birth, Time

“Ramsey theory implies that complete disorder is impossible. Somehow, no matter how complicated, chaotic, or random something appears, deep within that morass lurks a smaller entity that has a definite structure. Striking regularities are bound to arise even in a universe that has no rules.”

Ivars Peterson (1948) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 2, “Sea of Life” (p. 25)

Universe, Appearance

“The racial theory of Mr. Rice contains two elements: (1) That the Untouchables are non-Aryan, non-Dravidian aboriginals. (2) That they were conquered and subjugated by the Dravidians. This raises the whole question of the invasion of India by foreign invaders, the conquests made by them, and the social and cultural institutions that have resulted therefrom. According to Mr. Rice, there have been two invasions of India. First is the invasion of India by the Dravidians. They conquered the non-Dravidian aborigines, the ancestors of the Untouchables, and made them Untouchables. The second invasion is the invasion of India by the Aryans. The Aryans conquered the Dravidians. He does not say how the conquering Aryans treated the conquered Dravidians. If pressed for an answer he might say they made them Shudras. So that we get a chain. The Dravidians invaded India and conquered the aborigines and made them Untouchables. After Dravidians came the Aryans. The Aryans conquered the Dravidians and made them Shudras. The theory is too mechanical, a mere speculation, and too simple to explain a complicated set of facts relating to the origin of the Shudras and the Untouchables.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Who were the Shudras? (1946)

Question, Relation ships

“Remember, we live in a culture of immediacy. We live in a culture in which simplistic answers override more complicated answers. We live in a culture in which language is reduced to its bare bones. We live in a culture in which language is now in the service of violence.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Interview with Media For Us, 2019

“Political events are always very confused and complicated. They can be compared with a chain. To hold the whole chain you must grasp the main link. Not a link chosen at random.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Communism and New Economic Policy",(April 1921)
1920s

“What is happening to Assange should terrify the press…The silence about the treatment of Assange is not only a betrayal of him but a betrayal of the freedom of the press itself. We will pay dearly for this complicity…. Assange is on his own. Each day is more difficult for him. This is by design. It is up to us to protest. We are his last hope, and the last hope, I fear, for a free press.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"Crucifying Julian Assange" (2018)

Fear, Hope, Freedom, Silence

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

Love, Making love, Peace, Justice

“Today the Committee will consider the WikiLeaks matter. The case is complicated, obviously. It involves possible questions of national security, and no doubt important subjects of international relations, and war and peace. But fundamentally, the Brennan observation should be instructive.”

John Conyers (1929–2019) American politician from Michigan

U.S. Congress House Hearing: Espionage Act and the Legal and Constitutional Issue Raised by Wikileaks. Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives, One Hundred Eleventh Congress, Second Session, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-111hhrg63081/html/CHRG-111hhrg63081.htm (16 December 2010). CSpan recording https://www.c-span.org/video/?297115-1/wikileaksthe-espionage-act-constitution

War, Peace, Question, Relation ships

“I was not surprised when he died. No, I was not surprised. I don’t know why I say that, it’s just something that I feel from Chris, he was so complicated. He always struggled with mundanity. He was really in another dimension, and for him to be normal was really hard.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Ann Wilson on not being surprised by Chris Cornell's death, YouTube, November 15, 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqcg8Tla1nU,

Feeling

“We must not draw general conclusions from certain particular principles, though, in the main, true ones. We must not suppose that, because a man is a rational animal, he will therefore always act rationally; or, because he has such or such a predominant passion, that he will act invariably and consequentially in the pursuit of it. No. We are complicated machines: and though we have one main-spring, that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometimes stop that motion.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

19 December 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Spring, Passion, Animals, Drawing

“It will make it more complicated and costly than today for all of us. This is the essence of Brexit.”

Donald Tusk (1957) Polish politician, current President of the European Council

Brexit means drifting apart but we don't want to build a wall - Tusk https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43314976 BBC News (7 March 2018) 2011, 2018

Making love

“If I injure you, the injury persists even after I actually commit the act. If I stab you, you may suffer complications long after that initial actual stabbing. If I shoot you, you may suffer complications long after that initial shooting. That’s the case with African Americans. There are people well within the living memory of this country that are still suffering from the after-effects of that.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Reparations Are Not Just About Slavery But Also Centuries of Theft & Racial Terror, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

People, Suffering, Memory, Country

“The situation on, on earth is complicated.”

Adam Roberts book Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

“You mean politics?” Dakkar spat the word, with immeasurable contempt.
Source: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014), Chapter 24, “Dakkar” (p. 228)

“How are the internal complications, anyway? Aren’t the other branches of government getting a little suspicious about all these machinations?”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

“Let’s just say that one or two discreet assassinations may still have to be performed,” Khouri said.
Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 27 (p. 490)

“Theres always somebody bugging you. They just wont leave you alone. No matter how simple things are there always some sonofabitch complicating things and fucking with your life. Jesus, this fucking world stinks. People are nothing but a bunch of shits. A rotten bunch of shits. They always want to screw you.”

Hubert Selby Jr. book The Room

The Room (1971)

Life, People, World

“It is, I reckon, difficult to conceive of a single area of government policy that is at once so important for each of us, so catastrophically complicated, so insanely unjust, so obscenely ineffective, and has been quite so comprehensively cocked up by successive administratations as the British pension system.”

Jon Henley British journalist

The Guardian, 2008-12-19, section g2, page 5.

Success

“Carr states that the characters of the Brunhilde are not true archetypes. Why, then they are false archetypes, and these also have their being. Kidd believes that X himself is in the process of becoming the Third Evil to fill the void left by the insufficiency of Papadiabolous and Seaworthy in the roles of devils. But Kidd is Joycean. To complicate matters, Lafferty swears that Finnegan is in no way Joycean, that he is nine hundred years earlier, out of the Yellow Book of Lecan (the Tain Bo Cuailinge), a character out of the Tain.”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

This presupposes that Finnegan is identical with Fion McCool as well as with the more derivative Fingal, and also with Cu Chulainn. Well, Finnegan is capable of being all. To those interested in this line I recommend Thurneysen’s Die Irische Helden- und Konigsage.
Interglossia
The Devil is Dead (1971)

Books, Way, Evil, Falseness

“My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. "Would you hit a woman with a child?”

E.E. Cummings book EIMI

No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.
EIMI (1933)

Quotes, Question

“The humanity of tomorrow will be living in its flesh and in its conscious liberty; that time will be its present and it will in turn prefer it. New relations of flesh and sentiment of which we have no conception will arise between the sexes; already, indeed, there have appeared between men and women friendships, rivalries, complicities, comradeships — chaste or sensual — which past centuries could not have conceived.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

The Second Sex (1949)

Women, Men, Friendship, Sex

“In any case it is evident that there is a psychology as well as a sociology of handwriting. Tremendously complicated as the problem of diagnosis of individual traits from those tiny strokes of the pen appears, it is yet a legitimate problem of science; for the more progress psychology makes, the more evident it becomes that there is not a mode of expression which is not rooted to its finest detail in the complex psycho-physical organism. Meanwhile, it is fortunate that the task of identifying graphic signs should not be left wholly to the intuitions of the graphologist. Experimental work that seeks to induce variation in writing through a control of outer conditions must in time correlate certain definite variations in conditions with variation in such aspects of writing as size, speed, accuracy in alignment, inequality of control and the like.”

June Downey (1875–1932) American psychologist

August 1909, Popular Science Monthly Volume 75, Article:"The Varificational Factor in Handwriting", p. 150-151
about Handwriting

Making love, Problem, Appearance, Science

“The connections among morality, prudence, and religion are complicated and beyond my concerns here. I would like to counter, however, the claim regularly made by religious people that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral or law-abiding than they. There is absolutely no evidence for this, and I suspect whatever average distance there is along the nebulous dimension of morality has the opposite algebraic sign.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Part 3 “Four Psycho-Mathematical Arguments”, Chapter 5 “The Gambling Argument (and Emotions from Prudence to Fear)” (p. 139)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)

People, Religion, Law

“So, I think the best analogy for rocket engineers, if you want to create complicated software, you can't run as an integrated whole, or run on the computer it's intended to run on, but, first time you run it, it has to run with no bugs. That's the essence of it. So ... we missed the mark there.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Caltech Commencement Address http://commencement.caltech.edu/archive/speakers/2012_address - 2012 Quotes https://www.wewishes.com/elon-musk-quotes/, Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007), Foreword to Marc Kaufman's Mars Up Close: Inside the Curiosity Mission https://books.google.com/books/about/Mars_Up_Close.html?id=o6XaCwAAQBAJ&hl=en. National Geographic. ISBN 978-1-4262-1278-9.

Thinking, Time

“You know perfectly well that women can and do - or rather did - handle the most complicated and delicate machines when they took the trouble to understand them. What generally happens is that they're too lazy to take the trouble unless they have to.”

John Wyndham book The Day of the Triffids

The Day of the Triffids (1951), Ch 10 - p.175

Women, Understanding

“Unless the intensity of our defense of life matches the ferocity of the assault against it, we allow a greater violence to grow exponentially until an earth once teeming with life becomes a mass graveyard, a battered wasteland, and a toxic cesspool. Then, when it is finally too late, the unfortunates who remain will grasp what the radicals tried to convey: what the logic of growth and capitalism finally wrought, the colossal failure of human vision and will, and the complicity of pacifism with the greatest violence of all.”

Steven Best (1955) American activist

Source: The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (2014), Chapter 3 "The Paralysis of Pacifism: In Defense of Militant Direct Action" (p. 78)

Life, Failure

“We don't have much time left. We are moving towards temperature increases of around two degrees Celsius, which is going to have consequences in the tropics, and we will loose things like glaciers. That's not a theory; it's happening right now. It's not a prediction; it's happening right now. But you just sightsee near those glaciers. But the glaciers are a big source of water. And on the questions of water, in California we store our water in a snowpack. When that's gone, the rain will be the same but it won't accumulate. With warming temperatures the snowpack will now work. It might be possible to substitute with dams, but that's complicated. This is conjoined with a big energy problem and I think that we really have to encourage development in this area. Just waiting for technological improvement won't work. We need to encourage it.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

quoted in Conor Clarke, An Interview with Kenneth Arrow, Part Three https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/07/an-interview-with-kenneth-arrow-part-three/22330/ (2009) New millennium

Question, Problem, Thinking, Water

“One of the chief differences between the commerce of the sixteenth century and of the twentieth lies in the wonderful and complicated organizations of the present day. Their magnitude makes even the largest of those of which we have been reading seem insignificant.”

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858–1947) America born English businessman

The Romance of Commerce (1918), A Representative Business of the Twentieth Century

Making love, Reading

“Science can function only by abstracting from the reality in which the scientist has his being. In spite of the astonishing complications it discovers, with which it dazzles and almost blinds us, science is compelled by its own terms of reference to be a drastic simplification.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 10, p. 253

Reality, Science

“Pre-eighteenth century economics were governed, not by consumers, who determined what should be produced by what they were willing to buy in a competitive market, but by producers who enjoyed special privileges in return for the most stringent kind of state regulations. Mr. Walter Lippmann, in his book, The Good Society, points out that in the days of Louis XIV the manufacturers of France were told exactly what to produce and exactly how to produce it. Industry and agriculture were governed by codes more complicated than anything ever invented by the NRA or Mr. Wallace.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 66

Books

“The new tax bill should improve both the equity and the simplicity of our present tax system. This means the enactment of long-needed tax reforms, a broadening of the tax base and the elimination or modification of many special tax privileges. These steps are not only needed to recover lost revenue and thus make possible a larger cut in present rates; they are also tied directly to our goal of greater growth. For the present patchwork of special provisions and preferences lightens the tax load of some only at the cost of placing a heavier burden on others. It distorts economic judgments and channels an undue amount of energy into efforts to avoid tax liabilities. It makes certain types of less productive activity more profitable than other more valuable undertakings. All this inhibits our growth and efficiency, as well as considerably complicating the work of both the taxpayer and the Internal Revenue Service. These various exclusions and concessions have been justified in part as a means of overcoming oppressively high rates in the upper brackets--and a sharp reduction in those rates, accompanied by base-broadening, loophole-closing measures, would properly make the new rates not only lower but also more widely applicable. Surely this is more equitable on both counts.”

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

Source: 1962, Address and Question and Answer Period at the Economic Club of New York

Making love, Effort, Parting

“What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature, only much more so.
volume I; lecture 2, "Basic Physics"; section 2-1, "Introduction"; p. 2-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

God, World, Imagination, Game

“[Nature] only keeps us alive by a complicated system of the most shameful illusions, falsifying beyond rectification life, death, and after-death. Having made us take part in this poor puzzling game of life, she has taken care that all the rules shall be unfavourable to us: the cards are marked, the dice are loaded, we are always swindled. Thus years of hard work; and self-denial are frequently lost by a slip or chance, but seldom or never saved by a chance. Our health may be ruined by a pin-prick, but never doubled by an accident. We fall seriously ill in a moment, and take weeks or months to recover; lose a limb by some sudden mishap, but never by a good hap regain it. We cannot reach even a low degree of wisdom or knowledge without long hard study, while to be ignorant and foolish is the easiest and most natural thing in the world for us. Our sorrows are real and enduring; our joys deceptive and transient; our prizes of victory are not to be compared with our forfeits of defeat.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

"The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery", part II, p. 62
Essays and Phantasies (1881)

Life, Death, Wisdom, Health

“Today, on this day that is so extraordinarily important for me, I want to say just a few more personal words than usual.
I want to ask for your forgiveness.
For the fact that many of the dreams we shared did not come true. And for the fact that what seemed simple to us turned out to be tormentingly difficult. I ask forgiveness for not justifying some hopes of those people who believed that at one stroke, in one spurt, we could leap from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into the light, rich, civilized future. I myself believed in this, that we could overcome everything in one spurt.
I turned out to be too naive in something. In some places, problems seemed to be too complicated. We forced our way forward through mistakes, through failures. Many people in this hard time experienced shock.”

Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR

1990s, Farewell speech (1999)

People, Dreams, Hope, Way

“Life today is fast and full of opportunity. The complication is we think we have to do everything. The implication of this is we end up being pulled into endless distractions without pausing to really think. My position is we can make a different choice. We can discern what is really essential. We can design a life that really matters.”

Greg McKeown (author) book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Popular Quotes, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Journal Articles

Life, Making love, Thinking

“I’m complicated, not confused.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

“There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

Heart

“The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

“I have expressed an opinion on public issues whenever they appeared to me so bad and unfortunate that silence would have made me feel guilty of complicity.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Address to the Chicago Decalogue Society (20 February 1954)
1950s

Feeling, Silence, Appearance

“Arrogance complicates words, because it believes that intelligence is only for the chosen few. Elegance transforms complex thoughts into something that everyone can understand.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), About Elegance

Intelligence, Understanding

“If she's cute, sweet but bitchy and complicated, she's the woman you fall in love with.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Se è carina, dolce ma stronza e complicata, è la donna di cui ti innamori.
Source: prevale.net

Love

“The choice: the most responsible and complicated action in the world.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) La scelta: l'azione più responsabile e complicata del mondo.
Source: prevale.net

World

“One of the peculiar characteristics of music is that it is both the most natural and least artificial of the arts, and as well the most complicated and subtle.”

Walter Raymond Spalding (1865–1962) American music pedagogue and author

Page 3 https://books.google.com/books?id=pQARAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA3. Music: An Art and a Language (1920), Preliminary Considerations (Ch. I)

Art, Music, Nature

“I am the world's worst C programmer because it's so complicated I can't understand it [...] All I know is that whenever I write C, my pointers are always missed by one from where they're supposed to go.”

Joe Armstrong (1950–2019) British computer scientist

26 Years with Erlang

World, Understanding

“Even the idea of evolution doesn’t explain nature— Simply, because it’s based on turning simplicity into complicated things.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Idea, Nature

“Time is still too complicated for us to comprehend and we cannot define it using our wristwatches, nor by using the big clocks on the wall.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Time

“Before falling in love
Your life is quite an simple.
After falling in love
Your life becomes complicated.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Love, Life

“Human beings are of course unique. They have, perched between their ears, the most complicated biological machine on the planet. But complexity is not everything, and it is not the goal of evolution. Every species on the planet is unique. Uniqueness is a commodity in oversupply.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 2 “Species” (p. 25)

“The establishment of troops in the cultural circles has this problem: the class element is relatively complicated. But, while a person cannot decide his own origin, his performance and attitude still count.”

Jiang Qing (1914–1991) Chinese political figure and wife of Mao Zedong

Source: Talk at the Peking Forum on Literature and Art (9 and 12 November 1967)

Problem, Personality

“At the beginning, I thought that a model should be a sexy girl or should just be a really gorgeous girl or should be a cute girl or just very calm. Now, as time passes, I found that modeling can be more complicated and I can be inspired by many things besides just poses in magazines.”

HoYeon Jung (1994) South Korean model, actress

Source: "HoYeon Jung" in Models https://models.com/mdx/hoyeon-jung-on-koreas-next-top-model-skydiving-and-her-no-limit-approach-to-life/ (12 December 2018)

Girl, Time

“The truth is, the lives of activists are much more complicated than what the novel presented. My father was not a regular man nor a regular father. He gave himself to his cause, and our relationship was forged by distance. There is no resentment. The world needs people like my father.”

Ti-Anna Wang (1989) Chinese dissident

"Daughter of imprisoned Chinese activist inspires ‘Nine Days’ by Fred Hiatt, a book about their plight" in The Washington Post https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TAgbvFpO2-kJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/daughter-of-imprisoned-chinese-activist-inspires-nine-days-by-fred-hiatt-a-book-about-their-plight/2013/04/05/67b339d0-9e03-11e2-a2db-efc5298a95e1_story.html+&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us (5 April 2013)

People, Truth, World

“While not reliable enough to be put in charge of anything more complicated than a dishwasher, they were very easy to convince that all their troubles were someone else’s fault.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Cryoburn (2010), Chapter 2 (p. 34)

“This remarkable feat merely reaffirms what most of us in molecular biology have long known to be the truth: the essence of life is complicated chemistry and nothing more.”

James D. Watson (1928) American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.

Source: DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution (2003/2017), Chapter 9, “Reading Genomes: Evolution in Action” (p. 242)

Life, Truth

“One of the main elements that intensifies and strengthens love in a couple is spontaneous complicity.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Uno degli elementi principali che intensifica e fortifica l'amore in una coppia è la spontanea complicità.
Source: prevale.net

Love

“We have a very complicated situation with major floods at the level of major arteries, not only in the capital, but in various districts – landslides, collapsed bridges.”

Edite Tenjua (1972) São Tomé and Príncipe lawyer and businesswoman

Source: Edite Tenjua (2021) cited in: " Sao Tome: Government appeals for international help after major flooding https://www.macaubusiness.com/sao-tome-government-appeals-for-international-help-after-major-flooding/" in Macau Business, 30 December 2021.

“There's a reason why you only do tax policy in a major way every few years — it's really complicated.”

Mark Warner (1954) United States Senator from Virginia

Source: " Senate Democrats target billionaires https://www.axios.com/senate-democrats-billionares-tax-biden-7078079f-7235-4ae6-ab7d-d3bd0476517e.html" (October 23, 2021)

Way

“People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Skin in the Game

Source: Skin in the Game (2018), p. 162

People

“When I become a character in a movie or drama … I can think about the character only and not the complicated matters of my own life. I feel ecstasy in those moments and it’s what keeps me going as an actor. It’s not about the money, it’s not about the honor.”

Gong Yoo (1979) South Korean actor

Source: "Gong Yoo on becoming South Korea’s leading man" in CNN https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/28/asia/gong-yoo-talk-asia/index.html (30 August 2017)

Life, Money, Feeling, Thinking

“You are the excellence of charm: strong and fragile, cheerful and melancholy, innocent and perverse, selfish and altruistic, sociable and asocial, simple and complicated, sensitive and impassive, elegant and trendy, sweet and bitchy, true, concrete… authentic and sincere. You are a condemnation for the one who hosanna you. Your essence is a masterpiece of woman.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Tu sei l'eccellenza del fascino: forte e fragile, allegra e malinconica, innocente e perversa, egoista e altruista, socievole e asociale, semplice e complicata, sensibile e impassibile, elegante e trendy, dolce e stronza, vera, concreta... autentica e sincera. Sei una condanna per chi ti osanna. La tua essenza è un capolavoro di donna.
Source: prevale.net

Strong, Sincerity, Selfishness

“Just being complicated, but damn special makes you fall in love.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Il solo fatto di essere complicata, ma dannatamente speciale ti fa innamorare.
Source: prevale.net

Love

“It is a private matter [sexuality], but if there are opportunities to say something . . . I wonder if, if it would be beneficial to someone else, that responsibility is on you. It’s complicated.”

Jonathan Bailey (1988) British actor

"Jonathan Bailey: From Broadchurch to the West End: the star of Sondheim’s smash hit Company in The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/from-broadchurch-to-the-west-end-the-star-of-sondheims-smash-hit-company-mjppfprkr (31 October 2018)

“Anyone can build complicated. Our actions are determined by simplicity.”

Sergei Korolev (1906–1966) Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer

SOS im All. Pannen, Probleme und Katastrophen der bemannten Raumfahrt [SOS in Space. Breakdowns, Problems and Disasters in Manned Spaceflight], pg. 163 (2000)

“Human Destinies with their differences have made the universe more wondrous and complicated beyond humans' apprehensions.”

Idegu Ojonugwa Shadrach (1995)

Universe

“WITH THE EMBERS STILL BURNING:
The scientific community has done a pronounced amount of hand-wringing about its involvement in the atomic bomb’s creation, and a disproportionately absent amount of the soul-searching with respects to its creation of the science of eugenics. The 450,000 deaths due to the bomb are relatively small in the shadow of the many millions dead as a result of National Socialism’s eugenic campaign. The casualties of The Holocaust are the casualties of the science of eugenics, which so many scientists had actively campaigned for leading up to World War II. Yet, the scientific community has confronted its complicity with collective silence and sometimes outright censorship.”

A.E. Samaan

Source: From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848

Death, War, World, Soul

“The complicated, crazy and audacious woman… the woman who sculpts the thought, who knows how to excite and fascinate… the woman who smells of life and love: she kidnaps mind, soul and heart.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: La donna complicata, pazza e audace... la donna che scolpisce il pensiero, che sa emozionare e affascinare... la donna che profuma di vita e amore: rapisce mente, anima e cuore.
Source: prevale.net

Love, Life, Soul, Heart

“Without complicity, it cannot exist any pleasure.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Senza la complicità, non può esistere alcun piacere.
Source: prevale.net

Pleasure

“In life, great people always come from having faced and complicated situations.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Nella vita, le grandi persone provengono sempre dall'aver affrontato e superato situazioni complicate.
Source: prevale.net

Life, People

“The most complicated enigma to solve is finding the right person to share your life with.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: L'enigma più complicato da risolvere è trovare la persona giusta con la quale condividere la propria vita.
Source: prevale.net

Life, Personality

“It's not common to find the woman who smells of dignity, the strong woman who knows how to speak the truth, delicate and complicated because she knows her value and who could belong only to who dare to love her every defect, with notable respect.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Non è comune trovare la donna che profuma di dignità, la donna forte che sa dire la verità, delicata e complicata perché consapevole del suo valore e che potrebbe appartenere solo a chi osa amare ogni suo difetto, con notevole rispetto.
Source: prevale.net

Love, Truth, Strong

“Everything complicated, attracts.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Tutto ciò che è complicato, attrae.
Source: prevale.net

“Humility is the most complicated part to play. Be wary of imitations: sooner or later, time simply reveals who must leave the scene.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: L'umiltà è la parte più complicata da recitare. Diffidate delle imitazioni: prima o poi, il tempo rivela semplicemente chi deve uscire di scena.
Source: prevale.net

Time, Parting

“The three qualities that make a person irresistible are complicity, intellect and humanity.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Le tre qualità che rendono irresistibile una persona sono la complicità, l'intelletto e l'umanità.
Source: prevale.net

Personality

“Remaining silent in the face of incorrect or rude behavior risks legitimizing them, transforming silence into a form of complicity. Reacting clearly and effectively is essential both to protect yourself, both to promote a culture based on respect.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Restare in silenzio di fronte a comportamenti scorretti o maleducati rischia di legittimarli, trasformando il silenzio in una forma di complicità. Reagire in modo chiaro ed efficace è essenziale sia per proteggersi, sia per promuovere una cultura basata sul rispetto.
Source: prevale.net

Behavior, Silence

Quotes about complication page 7

Quotes about complication
page 7