Complexes Quotes - Page 7

A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.

Mark Kurlansky

Portraits, Haiti, Great Experiences

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What makes something simple or complex? It's not the number of dials or controls or how many features it has: It is whether the person using the device has a good conceptual model of how it operates.

Donald A. Norman

Simple, Numbers, Devices

Donald A. Norman (2010). “Living with Complexity”, p.40, MIT Press

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One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.

Jesse Ball

Might, Pairs, Events

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An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.

William Kingdon Clifford

Struggle, Atmosphere, Belief

William Kingdon Clifford, Leslie Stephen, Frederick Pollock (2011). “Lectures and Essays”, p.199, Cambridge University Press

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It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.

Sheena Iyengar

Mean, Perfectly Good, Sheep

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Object-oriented programming as it emerged in Simula 67 allows software structure to be based on real-world structures, and gives programmers a powerful way to simplify the design and construction of complex programs.

David Gelernter

Powerful, Real, Learning

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In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. Abstraction arises from the recognition of similarities between certain objects, situations, or processes in the real world and the decision to concentrate on these similarities and to ignore, for the time being, their differences.

Tony Hoare

Powerful, Real, Learning

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When building a complex system, having crackerjack programmers (who can make any design work, even a bad one) can be a liability. The result, after lots of effort, is a working system that cannot be easily maintained or upgraded. Good -but not great- programmers would fail early, causing a realization that the system must be redesigned, and then reimplemented. The extra cost is paid once, early in the system's cycle (when it is cheap), instead of repeatedly paid late in the system's cycle (when it is more expensive).

Richard E. Pattis

Learning, Design Work, Effort

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Complexity has and will maintain a strong fascination for many people. It is true that we live in a complex world and strive to solve inherently complex problems, which often do require complex mechanisms. However, this should not diminish our desire for elegant solutions, which convince by their clarity and effectiveness. Simple, elegant solutions are more effective, but they are harder to find than complex ones, and they require more time, which we too often believe to be unaffordable

Niklaus Wirth

Strong, Believe, Learning

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Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence.

Christoph Niemann

Essence, Simplicity, Design

"The Story of My App" by Christoph Niemann, www.newyorker.com. March 18, 2013.

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A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex.

S. N. Behrman

Simple, Discovery, People

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When a man in the process of dreaming becomes conscious that he is dreaming, he is no longer identified with the phenomena; he is not affected exultantly or dolefully. God consciously dreams His cosmic play and is unaffected by it's dualities. A yogi who perceives his real self as separate from his active senses and their objects never becomes attached to anything. He is aware of the dream nature of the universe and watches it without being entangled in its complex but ephemeral nature.

Paramahansa Yogananda

Dream, Real, Men

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If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

Gaston Bachelard

Dream, Memories, Childhood

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An insect is more complex than a star..and is a far greater challenge to understand.

Martin Rees

Stars, Challenges, Insects

"Our Cosmic Patch". Interview with Helen Matsos, www.astrobio.net. January 3, 2005.

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To say that humans are composed of machines is not to say that we are merely machines. Humans are dignified machines. We are (so far) the most extropic, most complex product of billions of years of evolution.

Max More

Years, Machines, Evolution

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I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about...the world I live in.

Julia Glass

Crazy, Writing, World

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What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consiousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would crate such a complex and fancy worm food?

Ernest Becker

Mean, Men, Animal

Ernest Becker (2007). “The Denial of Death”, p.87, Simon and Schuster

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Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

Remy de Gourmont

Education, Lying, Learning

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What is important is that complex systems, richly cross-connected internally, have complex behaviours, and that these behaviours can be goal-seeking in complex patterns.

William Ross Ashby

Goal, Important, Behaviour

William Ross Ashby (1956). “An Introduction to Cybernetics. (1. Publ.)”

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Leadership is based on complex phenomena.

Rakesh Khurana

"What Top Scholars Say About Leadership". Interview with Martha Lagace, hbswk.hbs.edu. May 10, 2010.

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The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

Clay Shirky

Principles, Problem, Dedicated

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If we can change our priorities, achieve balance and understanding in our roles as human beings in a complex world, the coming era can well be that of a richer civilization, not its end.

Sigurd F. Olson

Future, Civilization, Priorities

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As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.

Edward Bernays

Mean, Government, Civilization

Edward L. Bernays (1930). “Propaganda”

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At the end of the day, there's not an office complex anywhere on these grounds that I wouldn't be honored to have as a sitting member of Congress.

Steve Womack

Office, The End Of The Day, Sitting

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At first, I thought 'this series is going to be all about death and desecration,' but instead became a more complex landscape of human relationships. I hope I put something of these feelings into the portraits that I made of the characters, which were landscapes in themselves. An irony in the subject of crystal meth is how beautifully it resembles the desert sky.

Ralph Steadman

Character, Sky, Feelings

"The day when Bill Murray got festive and Belle & Sebastian went techno" by Sam Richards, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2014.

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