Complexity Quotes - Page 16

• Primates stand at a turning point in the course of evolution. Primates are to the biologist what viruses are to the biochemist. They can be analysed and partly understood according to the rules of a simpler discipline, but they also present another level of complexity: viruses are living chemicals, and primates are animals who love and hate and think.

  Alison Jolly

  Hate, Science, Thinking

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• After having produced aquatic animals of all ranks and having caused extensive variations in them by the different environments provided by the waters, nature led them little by little to the habit of living in the air, first by the water's edge and afterwards on all the dry parts of the globe. These animals have in course of time been profoundly altered by such novel conditions; which so greatly influenced their habits and organs that the regular gradation which they should have exhibited in complexity of organisation is often scarcely recognisable.

  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

  Science, Animal, Air

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• Coffee has ... expand[ed] humanity's working-day from twelve to a potential twenty-four hours. The tempo, the complexity, the tension of modern life, call for something that can perform the miracle of stimulating brain activity, without evil, habit-forming after-effects.

  Margaret Meagher

  Coffee, Evil, Miracle

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• A wider of more altruistic attitude is very relevant in today's world. If we look at the situation from various angles, such as the complexity and inter-connectedness of the nature of modern existence, then we will gradually notice a change in our outlook, so that when we say 'others' and when we think of others, we will no longer dismiss them as something that is irrelevant to us. We will no longer feel indifferent.

  Dalai Lama

  Change, Wise, Wisdom

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• Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

  Bill Gates

  Experience, Poverty, Bigs

  "Column: Great lines from commencement speeches of the past" by Randy Blaser, www.chicagotribune.com. May 18, 2017.

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• A cell of a higher organism contains a thousand different substances, arranged in a complex system. This great organized system was not discovered by chemical or physical methods; they are inadequate to its refinement and delicacy and complexity.

  Herbert Spencer Jennings

  Cells, Substance, Delicacy

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• I've never thought of my poems as violent. Violence, to me, has so much negativity attached to it - maybe that's my trouble with the word. But ferocious - indeed, I'll take it. And yes, poetry does need a bit of ferocity. Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity - the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.

  Alex Lemon

  Negativity, Violence, Trouble

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• I don't believe you can make an honest film about another person in all their complexities from a place of distance. You can make a journalistic report, you can judge someone from a distance, but you can't really get to know them.

  Joshua Oppenheimer

  Distance, Believe, Judging

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• [Man] is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things—property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job and art. But having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them. His house, his automobile are a part of him and a large part of him. This is beautifully demonstrated by a thing doctors know—that when a man loses his possessions a very common result is sexual impotence.

  John Steinbeck

  Art, Jobs, Animal

  John Steinbeck (1995). “The Log from the Sea of Cortez”, p.89, Penguin

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• In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.

  James A. Baldwin

  Journey, Reality, Darkness

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• We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reacher, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.

  Alberto Manguel

  Dream, Book, Library

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.273, Vintage Canada

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• Today we understand that reality corresponds to a model - or, even better, the sum of various models - which in science are termed "complex systems" - not complicated or difficult, that's a different thing! This complexity is what creates that which we all know - the World - is connected in a system of networks - and I'm not referring only to the internet but also to thousands of analog networks in which we are all immersed at every instant.

  Agustin Fernandez Mallo

  Reality, Different, World

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Harvey Weinstein is a monster. And what campus victims are talking about has a lot more gray in it - many more complexities.

  Vanessa Grigoriadis

  Victim

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Real, Men, Occupy Yourself

  "Cakes And Ale".

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• What does reflect reality very well is complexity theory, which comes from physics. I'm the one pioneering the idea of bringing it to capital markets. When you look at capital markets through the lens of complexity theory, you ask "what's the scale of the system?" Scale is a fancy word for size. What measures are you using? If you look at total debt, the concentration of assets in the five largest banks, what percentage of the total assets of the five largest banks are interconnected? What you see is a very densely connected, fragile system that could collapse at any moment.

  James Rickards

  Reality, Physics, Moments

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• Today there are a huge number of think tanks working on poverty-related issues; there are books written on the topic; and university centers being created to study poverty. But, at the same time, the media has a terribly hard time with this issue; it's very hard to convince editors and publishers to devote resources to complex investigations of the lives of America's poor. And, as a result, too often poverty is portrayed in stereotypes, in sound bites, in a few pat images rather than in its full Technicolor complexity and diversity.

  Sasha Abramsky

  Book, Hard Times, Thinking

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I think there are great roles for women in television because there is time to allow those characters to evolve. Even if you're the wife or the girlfriend or whatever it is that we women are, playing those things on TV, they are much more drawn out and there are greater arcs for the role. The roles are more integral to the complexity of the story.

  Linda Cardellini

  Girlfriend, Character, Thinking

  Source: www.elle.com

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• People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. But we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Moving, People, House

  Interview With Michael Krasny, www.motherjones.com. January/February 1997.

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• The latest thing that has caught me by surprise is Maryanne Amacher. I like sound that affects the listener physically. Traits such as complexity or simplicity don't really become a factor then. It's just the sound that I pay attention to.

  Kevin Drumm

  Simplicity, Attention, Surprise

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.

  Annie Dillard

  Mean, Doe, Calling

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• He stared up at the stars, and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.

  Neil Gaiman

  Stars, Pain, People

  Neil Gaiman (2007). “Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess's Stardust: Being a Romance Within the Realms of Faerie”, Vertigo

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• A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea.

  Douglas Preston

  Ocean, Writing, Sea

  Douglas Preston (2008). “Blasphemy: A Novel”, p.519, Macmillan

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• English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

  Zadie Smith

  Trying, Jargon, Hopeless

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• There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true.

  Matt Taibbi

  Wall, Thinking, Government

  "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia". Article by Matt Taibbi, www.rollingstone.com. June 21, 2012.

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• I know from my own experience that there is much more to 'intelligence' than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person's mind, or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.

  Daniel Tammet

  Believe, Numbers, Mind

  "Inside the Savant Mind: Tips for Thinking from an Extraordinary Thinker". Interview with Jonah Lehrer, www.scientificamerican.com.

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