Complexity Quotes - page 3

You can't prove Rembrandt is better than Norman Rockwell - although if you actually do prefer Rockwell, I'd say you were shunning complexity, were secretly conservative, and hadn't really looked at either painter's work. Taste is a blood sport. (Jerry Saltz)

The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the "struggle for existence" as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the large body of evidence about the actual complexity of the relationship between organisms and their resources.

Richard Lewontin

Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.

Max Horkheimer

Anthropology has reached that point of development where the careful investigation of facts shakes our firm belief in the far-reaching theories that have been built up. The complexity of each phenomenon dawns on our minds, and makes us desirous of proceeding more cautiously. Heretofore we have seen the features common to all human thought.

Franz Boas

There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.

Peter Drucker

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.

Fred Brooks

The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.

Kenneth E. Iverson

The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the breakdown of the mechanistic theory even within physics, the science where it was the most successful... Relativity took over in field physics, and the science of quantum theory in microphysics... In view of parallel developments in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and economics, many branches of the contemporary sciences became... ‘sciences of organized complexity' - that is, systems sciences. (Ervin László)

The systems view is the emerging contemporary view of organized complexity, one step beyond the Newtonian view of organized simplicity, and two steps beyond the classical world views of divinely ordered or imaginatively envisaged complexity.

Ervin László

There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.

P. J. O'Rourke

To be an ethical leader is indeed to be different. This kind of leader acknowledges the complexity of running a responsible business, yet tries to do it anyway.

Andrew Leigh

I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

So much of language is unspoken. So much of language is compromised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words. People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.

Garth Stein

The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost.

Daniel H. Wilson

Once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We're back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy.

Douglas Rushkoff

I often use the same harmonies as pop music because the complexity of what I do is elsewhere.

Ennio Morricone

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

Etgar Keret

There are some kinds of Christianity that insist you have to believe literally in doctrine. The Gnostic gospels open out the complexity and multiplicity of approaches to this. If you think the story of the virgin birth is mistranslated, for instance, it doesn't mean you have to throw out the whole thing. (Elaine Pagels)

Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.

Caroline Knapp

The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard's legacy has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world's greatest con man. Hubbard was certainly grandiose, but to label him merely a fraud is to ignore the complexity of his character.

Lawrence Wright

The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.

Edward Thorndike

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.

Edward Thorndike

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