Oversimplification Quotes

• All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

  Doris Lessing

  Party, Reality, People

  "A Notorious Life". Interview with Dwight Garner, www.salon.com. November 11, 1997.

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• Rationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naïve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Average, Stupidity, Politics

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• Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes "for" particular items of anatomy or behavior.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Fall, Errors, Interaction With Others

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• The theoretical fruits of deliberate oversimplification through idealization are not to be denied... Reality in all its messy particularity is too complicated to theorize about, taken straight. The issue is, rather (since every idealization is a strategic choice), which idealizations might really shed some light... which will just land us... diverting fairy tales.

  Daniel Dennett

  Taken, Reality, Land

  Daniel C. Dennett (2014). “Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life”, p.497, Simon and Schuster

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• Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

  Karl Popper

  Funny, Art, Crazy

  1982 Quoted in the Observer,1Aug.

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• It is an oversimplification to say that the opposite of irony is oversimplification.

  Jedediah Purdy

  Opposites, Irony

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• People are still people, and they make their decisions based on their life experiences and their beliefs. You really can't divorce the two. It's important to fight against stereotypes and oversimplifications in very complex people.

  Benjamin Walker

  Divorce, Fighting, Two

  Source: collider.com

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• What I really don't like is oversimplification.

  Thomas J. Sargent

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• With an absurd oversimplification, the "invention" of calculus [method in mathematics] is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz.

  Richard Courant

  Men, Two, Sometimes

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• Left vs. Right is an out-dated concept and an oversimplification of 21st Century politics

  James Morcan

  Century, Left, Concepts

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• "Biblical theology" refers to something more precise than theology that is faithful to the Bible. It might be helpful to draw a contrast: at the risk of oversimplification, systematic theology tends to organize theology topically and with an eye cast on its contemporary relevance, while biblical theology tends to organize the same biblical material so that it is easier to see the distinctive contribution of each biblical book and human author, and to trace the trajectories of themes across the Bible so we see how the books of the Bible hold together.

  D. A. Carson

  Book, Eye, Biblical

  Source: www.biblegateway.com

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• A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks semipopular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general. these have not been found-yet the optimism has died hard and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks.

  David M. Raup

  Thinking, Years, Ideas

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• Now I realize, and I acknowledge, that the right brain/left brain distinction is a tremendous oversimplification. We don't come neatly divided into right and left hemispheres, but the fact is that the two hemispheres of the brain do specialize in certain functions.

  Darold Treffert

  Two, Brain, Hemisphere

  "Conversations on Creativity with Darold Treffert, Part III:". Interview with Scott Barry Kaufman, www.psychologytoday.com. April 15, 2011.

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• Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

  A. R. Ammons

  Art, Mean, Self

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• Please, Kate. Suspend your dislike of me for a few moments and listen to what I have to say. It makes sense." "I don't dislike you. It's an oversimplification.

  Ilona Andrews

  Moments, Please, Make Sense

  Ilona Andrews (2012). “Magic Bites: A Special Edition of the First Kate Daniels Novel”, p.12, Penguin

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• The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings.

  Robert Bork

  Government, Alternatives, Failing

  "Abroad At Home; Getting Even" by Anthony Lewis, www.nytimes.com. April 11, 1985.

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• I think during the Cold War in America at least, there was a division; there was the Soviet government and there were the oppressed people, who were not represented by this government. That was a massive oversimplification of what the true situation was there. There were certainly many people who were completely and fully alienated from the government.

  Joe Weisberg

  War, Thinking, Government

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• At the risk of some oversimplification, if the skill composition of our work force meshed fully with the needs of our increasingly complex capital-stock, wage-skill differentials would be stable, and the percentage changes in wage rates would be the same for all job grades.

  Alan Greenspan

  Jobs, Skills, Risk

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• With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part.

  Richard Courant

  Education, Reality, Men

  Richard Courant, Herbert Robbins (1979). “What is mathematics?: an elementary approach to ideas and methods”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The 'environmental crisis' has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of 'raw materials,' and that we may safely possess those materials by taking them.... And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as 'environmental' problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them.

  Wendell Berry

  Inspiring, Simple, Years

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.178, Counterpoint Press

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