Simplification Quotes - Page 4

Nature/Structure. There is no more to say. In my pictures I reduce to that. But 'reduce' is the wrong word, because these are not simplifications. I can't verbalize what I am working on: to me, it is many-layered by definition; it is what is more important, what is more true.

Gerhard Richter

Art, Important, Definitions

Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture.

Frantz Fanon

Essence, Culture, Deterioration

Frantz Fanon (1965). “Damnés de la terre”, Grove Pr

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A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.

Bill McKibben

Style, Desire, Ability

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The economic union - creating a big common market, like the United States, so that you can compete across borders. There are common rules, regulations, and simplification, and that is still a good reason, too. When they put their monetary union together, that created a rigidity that made it hard for currency fluctuations. They don't really have a solution to that.

Jamie Dimon

Creating, Together, United States

Source: asia.nikkei.com

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To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.

Amartya Sen

Europe And America, World, Rewards

Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

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It's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of these supply chains in international capitalism, unless it is the nation state.

James C. Scott

Way, Structure, States

"An Interview with James C. Scott | Harry G. West and Celia Plender". Gastronomica Interview, gastronomica.org. March 14, 2017.

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The method of science depends on our attempts to describe the world with simple theories: theories that are complex may become untestable, even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification-the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

Karl Popper

Art, Science, Simple

Karl Popper (2012). “The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, p.44, Routledge

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Many foreigners have asked me how we made the Danish style. And I've answered that it...was rather a continuous process of purification, and for me of simplification, to cut down to the simplest possible elements of four legs, a seat and combined top rail and arm rest.

Hans Wegner

Cutting, Style, Elements

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Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.

Edward Abbey

Art, Philosophy, Crude

Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.29, RosettaBooks

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Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

Support, Political, Purpose

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In my opinion, a master is morally obliged to seize every sort of opportunity and to try to solve the problems of the position without fear of some simplifications.

Alexander Alekhine

Opportunity, Trying, Opinion

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People are so complex and multidimensional that raising someone to 'hero' status is too great a simplification.

Dalia Mogahed

Hero, People, Complexes

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Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Spiritual, War, Luxury

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...Simplifications have had a much greater long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity. The opportunity for simplification is very encouraging, because in all examples that come to mind the simple and elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design and get right, more efficient in execution, and much more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability....Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

Edsger Dijkstra

Hard Work, Opportunity, Simple

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We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning?

Geoffrey Hill

Real, Self, Ordinary Days

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Give the child good books, then let it alone! Don't plough and harrow its brain, or stretch it on Procrustes-beds of standardization, simplification, and what not!

Laura E. Richards

Children, Book, Reading

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There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians.

Richard Lewontin

Events, Narrative, Kind

Source: www.abc.net.au

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One of the things I've been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface.

Matt Mullenweg

Past, Months, Radical

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Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.

Yuri Lotman

Poetry, Simplicity, Literature

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... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.

Marcel Proust

Real, Character, Joy

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There is one simplification at least. Electrons behave ... in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly in the same way.

Richard P. Feynman

Way, Behave, Electrons

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Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others'. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery--more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.

Kate Millett

Mind, Madness, Wonderful

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It's a simplification to say that the men [during Stone Age] went to war to maintain their dominance over the women. The men would help dig agricultural ditches because they were superb farmers. That was very heavy lifting work. But then they just preened themselves, and put bird-of-paradise plumes [in their hair], and smoked dope.

Peter Matthiessen

War, Dope, Men

Source: www.believermag.com

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... one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross over-simplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement.

Geoffrey Hill

Tyrants, Mind, Language

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What we need of equipment is this: let it possess as good a structure as the real-life content that surrounds us. We need more simplifications to free us for seeing.

Berenice Abbott

Real, Needs, Structure

Berenice Abbott, Julia Van Haaften (1989). “Berenice Abbott, photographer: a modern vision : a selection of photographs and essays”

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