Complexity Quotes - Page 22

• 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

  Vocabulary, Mind, Important

  "Notation as a Tool of Thought". Cvommunications of the ACM, 23 (8), (pp. 444 - 465), August 1980.

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• 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

  Struggle, Competition, Environmental

  "It’s Even Less in Your Genes" by Richard C. Lewontin, www.nybooks.com. May 26, 2011.

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• The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material, from which they are derived, or in the laws, governing their formation.

  Kurt Gödel

  Law, Atmosphere, Body

  "Nature's Imagination". Book by J. Cornwall, p.161-189, 1995.

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• I'm with the president nearly every day. We engage in complex conversations about some of the most weighty matters facing the world. I deliver to him this exquisite product that's been developed by my officers. He engages in a way that shows his understanding of the complexity. He asks really hard questions. He delivers policy outcomes based on the information that we provide him. My observation of the president is that, we deal in serious matters.

  Mike Pompeo

  Understanding, President, World

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• 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

  Essence, Essentials, Abstract

  "No Silver Bullet". Book by Fred Brooks, 1986.

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• No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple. In certain cultures, an overall symmetry may conceal the complexity of the work at first glance.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Art, Simple, Style

  Rudolf Arnheim (1974). “Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order”, p.49, Univ of California Press

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• Elizabeth Turnage is a woman of grit and grace who lives into the stories of those who join her in this odd journey of seeking God. She honors the complexity of life without ever losing sight of the simple glory of the cross. Her grasp of the mundane and miraculous and their interplay gives a depth and honesty to her story that tugs at the heart and gives us hope our story can matter. Her book will be a clarion call to bring our broken, holy, troubled, and glorious life to the author of all stories: Jesus.

  Dan B. Allender

  Jesus, Honesty, Book

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• Linear programming can be viewed as part of a great revolutionary development which has given mankind the ability to state general goals and to lay out a path of detailed decisions to take in order to "best" achieve its goals when faced with practical situations of great complexity.

  George Dantzig

  Discovery, Order, Goal

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• The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro with Renoir’s impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment.

  Ella Leya

  Dirty, Humanity, Shadow

  Ella Leya (2015). “Orphan Sky”, p.131, Sourcebooks, Inc.

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• You have to record as many details as possible and achieve an order, without taking away the complexity of the real. To voice the real and at the same time to create an image that is a world in itself, with its own coherence, its autonomy and sovereignty; an image that thinks

  Luc Delahaye

  Real, Thinking, Order

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• Mastery comes via a monomaniacal focus on simplicity versus an addiction to complexity.

  Robin Sharma

  Addiction, Focus, Simplicity

  FaceBook post by Robin Sharma from Jun 09, 2014

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• All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.

  Thomas Sowell

  Ignorance, Seems

  Thomas Sowell (2011). “Dismantling America and Other Controversial Essays (Large Print 16pt)”, p.397, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.

  R. Scott Bakker

  Men, Yield, Doe

  R. Scott Bakker (2012). “The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two”, p.138, The Overlook Press

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• Photography has an amazing ability to capture the fine detail of surface textures. But far too often these intricate patterns are loved by the photographer for their own sake. The richness of texture fascinates the eye and the photographer falls easy prey to such quickly-caught complexities. The designs mean nothing in themselves and are merely pictorially attractive abstractions. A central problem in contemporary photography is to bring about a wider significance in purely textural imagery.

  Arthur Tress

  Photography, Fall, Mean

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• With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

  Clay Shirky

  Data, Digital, Problem

  "Clay Shirky analyzes the newspaper Holocaust" by Bruce Sterling, www.wired.com. March 14, 2009.

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• Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dream, Kings, Men

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• ...the wonderful poems interpreting with equal magic the romance of strange lands and times, or the modern soul, naked and unashamed, as if clothed in its own complexity; the humorous-tragic questionings of the universe; the delicious travel-pictures and fantasies; the lucid criticisms of art, and politics, and philosophy, informed with malicious wisdom, shimmering with poetry and wit.

  Israel Zangwill

  Art, Philosophy, Humorous

  Israel Zangwill (1908). “Dreamers of the Ghetto”, p.551, Library of Alexandria

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• My early self-portraits appeared effortlessly and seemed like equivalents for my deeper emotions. Many critics remarked that the images had an almost other-worldly haunting presence. For me, they were simply my own reality at that point in my life. What I was trying to reveal was my inner soul in all its fragile complexity. Without knowing it, I was trying to peel back the layers that shroud and bind us all as we struggle to reveal our own authentic selves.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Struggle, Reality

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• Complexity demands resilience, and that's what panarchy offers. Resilience in the face of complexity is a challenge even when you apply rigorous intelligence and integrity to develop a coherent and flexible strategy.

  Robert David Steele

  Integrity, Challenges, Resilience

  Robert David Steele (2012). “The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust”, p.86, North Atlantic Books

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• When East meets West, amazing design happens. L'Alahambra rug is a marriage of the clean line and simplicity of Western graphic design meets the complexity and beauty of Eastern pattern.

  Genevieve Gorder

  Simplicity, Design, East

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• People are complex. I'm just showing my complexity.

  Juliana Hatfield

  People, Complexes

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• In many areas of understanding, none so much as in our understanding of God, we bump up against a simplicity so profound that we must assign complexities to it to comprehend it at all. It is mindful of how we paste decals to a sliding glass door to keep from bumping our nose against it.

  Robert Breault

  God, Glasses, Doors

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• As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas, simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity; so truths that were discovered only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond the reach of common intelligence. The strength and the limits of man

  Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet

  Men, Ideas, Profound

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• One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.

  Clive Barker

  Book, Thinking, Trying

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• Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Self, People

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, p.150, Penguin UK

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