Top 480 Complex Quotes

The world has become so complex that the idea of a power in which everything comes together and can be controlled in a centralized way is now erroneous.

Life is going to be complex, and the only way we’re able navigate our way through it at all is by living as best we can and absorbing those experiences and somehow making intuitive responses in future situations that resemble them in some way.

The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study.

One of the principal achievements of physics in the 20th century has been the revelation that the atom is not indivisible or elementary at all but has a complex structure.

Freedom has invented every useful machine, from the lowest to the highest, from the simplest to the most complex.

The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day. The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win – you pass the test.

If there’s one thing government needs desperately, it’s the ability to quickly try something, pivot when necessary, and build complex systems by starting with simple systems that work and evolving from there, not the other way around.

It’s a complex relationship when your dad happened to be president and you are president and then you have all the amateur psychology that goes on when people try to speculate about motivations.

Sonder is the realization that every individual passerby has their own life just as vivid and complex as yours.

Fragility, violence, and conflict are complex. Fragility is influenced by a wide set of factors, many of which are deeply entrenched, such as high social and income inequality. The lines between criminal, inter-communal, and politically motivated violence are often blurred.

Already from your own cells scientists can grow skin, cartilage, noses, blood vessels, bladders and windpipes. In the future, scientists will grow more complex organs, like livers and kidneys. The phrase ‘organ failure’ will disappear.

We are more than the sum of our biochemical functions. Even the tiniest flea is an incredibly complex living creature, with mouth-parts adapted to feeding on the blood of your cat or dog.

It is clear to all that the animal organism is a highly complex system consisting of an almost infinite series of parts connected both with one another and, as a total complex, with the surrounding world, with which it is in a state of equilibrium.

Enzymes – plainly the most important biotechnology of our era – already permeate many industrial processes. Unlike fossil fuels, they carry chemical programming which drives complex reactions, are renewable, and work at ordinary pressures and temperatures.

Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.

People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings.

Acceptance of one’s life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.

Melancholy is a state that I very much enjoy being in, actually. It’s not the same as feeling sad. It’s a more complex emotion; it derives from a tragic view of the world, a tragic view of art.

We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and of teachers trained for ever longer periods.

The poem ‘What Teachers Make’ is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: ‘Gee, Mr. Mali. You don’t possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?’ And that was the first time I’d ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I’m sure I have a teacher-God complex.

I think that the health care industry is so complex that it doesn’t necessarily start with a single killer app. You go back to the early days of the personal computer – when I joined the industry, we really didn’t know what the killer app was going to be.

Romanians have a particular love for poetry and have a beautiful, vivid language. The poets they love are not versifiers like Vadim Tudor, but genuinely complex mystical souls like Mircea Cartarescu.

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

Our technologies become more complex while we become more simple. They learn about us while we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems.

Jay-Z is like a rap-savant, he doesn’t have to write the rhymes down, he can create complex raps in his head. I mean he does memorize it, he just doesn’t write it down on paper. He doesn’t freestyle onto the track, it’s all thought out.

A Kerry footballer with an inferiority complex is one who thinks he’s just as good as everybody else.

If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don’t understand what they are doing.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

To put it bluntly, there isn’t one economic theory that can single-handedly explain Singapore’s success; its economy combines extreme features of capitalism and socialism. All theories are partial; reality is complex.

It’s worth being suspicious of writers – or anyone! – who does that myth-making thing. There’s always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it’s lived has a far more complex shape.

Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.

I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.

I hated seeing myself on screen. I was full of complexes. I hated my face for a very, very long time.

Television’s grown up a lot. It’s a little more adult, which I think is a good thing. It allows actors to tell more complex stories. I’m happy to see where it ends up.

There are always leading characters. There are always complex characters; there are very rewarding plays with great directors and tremendous playwrights, yeah. I’ve done a lot of things with theater that I’m very, very proud of.

Europe has shown how government can be organised in a network. Its institutions both compete and co-operate and include a directly elected parliament that does not appoint the executive, independent judiciaries and a complex set of relationships between the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the Parliament.

We are a part of this unique, complex, and complicated fabric of what it means to be an American. Americans come in all colors, creeds, and colors of the rainbow, and we can celebrate this together.

What people often ask me is, ‘What are the ingredients of Silicon Valley?’ While the answer to that is complex, some of the ingredients I talk about are celebrating entrepreneurship, accepting failure, and embracing a mobile and diverse workforce.

I never read ‘The Cinderella Complex’ – I’m too afraid that my name might be in it.

To put it bluntly, there isn’t one economic theory that can single-handedly explain Singapore’s success; its economy combines extreme features of capitalism and socialism. All theories are partial; reality is complex.

The Icesave matter is complex and it is understandable that the issue has been oversimplified by many. Unfortunately some of the basic facts of the matter have been unilaterally interpreted, and sometimes distorted, giving rise to unjustified criticism of the conduct of the Icelandic authorities.

The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.

You can understand why good publicists go on to run distribution companies: because the creativity involved is complex and nuanced.

Richard Nixon was a very complex man. I don’t think he was a conservative, nor liberal, not even a moderate. He was a pragmatic politician. He loved politics.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Take a sound from whatever source, a note on a violin, a scream, a moan, a creaking door, and there is always this symmetry between the sound basis, which is complex and has numerous characteristics which emerge through a process of comparison within our perception.

My manager lives on my block; four of the apartments in my apartment complex of seven are people I know. It’s a really close-knit community, and almost everyone on these few blocks are artists or graphic designers, because we live right on the cusp of a warehouse district.

It’s human nature to make the complex manageable and determine things that fit your conclusions. That’s bias.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.

I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You’re putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It’s got to be aesthetically pleasing; it’s got to have subtext; it’s got to convey information.

Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it’s complex.

It’s very sad that there’s going to be a hiatus in manned space flight from the U.S. The Shuttle was a fantastic, hugely complex vehicle. It was inevitable it would come to an end, but this is the opportunity for the commercial world to get involved. As the Shuttle era ends, another window of opportunity opens.

I was rapping in 1939. It’s old. The roots are complex. And kids don’t know.

The computer is not, in our opinion, a good model of the mind, but it is as the trumpet is to the orchestra – you really need it. And so, we have very massive simulations in computers because the problem is, of course, very complex.

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

I was very short when I was little, so I probably had – and there may be a residue of it now – that Napoleon complex. Wanting to be as big and as powerful as the big guys.

It’s very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, ‘This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.’ And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.

Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself.

Movies are not novels, and that’s why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can’t be done.

I’m as moody and complex and private as anyone I ever knew.

I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we’re failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.

The brain isn’t like the heart. They learned how to transplant a heart. The brain is more complex.

There was a week where I was depressed with the rain, and people were telling me to get a light box. But I live on the 14th floor of an apartment complex, and I see the Broadway Bridge and Mount Hood, and it keeps me such company. And like true Oregonians, I don’t carry an umbrella anymore.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

Performing arts buildings are complex. The acoustics, the sight lines and all that have to just be perfect. So you begin with just making these things sublime as musical instruments. And if you fail there, you have failed it all.

Like the Tebbe complex, ruthenium olefin metathesis catalysts can be used for the production of living polymers.

I am unable to think of any critical, complex human activity that could be safely reduced to a simple summary equation.

It’s a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

Since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents, they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities.

Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should. Many students graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers… reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems.

‘Splendour’ broke through to new territory for me. It exposed my commitment to writing for women: my desire to recognise that they can be as aggressive, violent, mercurial, and complex as men.

Even complex passwords are getting easy to break if they’re too short. That’s because today’s inexpensive computer chips have the power of supercomputers from the year 2000.

A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before.

Our everyday lives are filled with complex decisions. We long for simplicity and ordinariness.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn’t have the personality of a politician. We don’t see the world that simply.

I saw Tequila Sunrise as a romantic picture with complex, bigger than life characters.

There is no avoiding the realities of the information age. Its effects manifest differently in different sectors, but the drivers of speed and interdependence will impact us all. Organizations that continue to use 20th-century tools in today’s complex environment do so at their own peril.

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.

Normally, we see characters that have God complexes. How interesting, I thought, it would be to capitalize on that. And say, OK, well fine, you have a God complex, well this person has a Satan complex. And the doctor chooses to treat him scientifically.

The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.

I guess why the Ocean’s films are hard for me is because on the one hand you have to make sure the performances are there, but on the other hand it’s a film that demands, to my mind, a very layered and complex visual scheme. That takes a lot of time to figure out.

Mike Tyson is the most complex person I’ve ever met in my life. I’ve known Mike since 1986. We’re both from Brooklyn. I didn’t know him growing up, but once he became heavyweight champion, I knew him then.

With women, there’s a basic female instinct of caring deeply about the way they look; women stars have a narcissist complex.

Sometimes people are like, ‘Do you want to play strong women?’ I don’t have to play strong women in order to feel like a strong woman myself, but I do feel it’s important to play characters that are complex and interesting and believable.

With a fractured sense of self, we come to depend on what people feed back to us – often mediated through social networks – not what we are. We have complex identities but may become less able to act as a subject – confident in what we really are.

It’s a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

Critics often say, ‘Oh she makes films about strong women’. Wrong; I make films about complex characters and the choices they make.

I remember the Washington in which I grew up as a genuine small town. Maybe this is true for everyone, that we all feel that the times in which we grew up were simpler, less complex.

In debate, one randomly was assigned to one side or the other. This had at least one virtue – it made one see that there was more than one side to these complex issues.

On the other hand, ethnic psychology must always come to the assistance of individual psychology, when the developmental forms of the complex mental processes are in question.

Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

We must dare to think ‘unthinkable’ thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world.

Taken as a whole, Europe’s share of world output is projected to fall by almost a third in the next two decades. This is the competitiveness challenge – and much of our weakness in meeting it is self-inflicted. Complex rules restricting our labour markets are not some naturally occurring phenomenon.

I think the obligation of an artist is to make a difference in the world. That is what matters most to me. I think that artists are the leaders of the world because they do not have a connection to the industrial complex, the day-to-day short-term survival that most people are involved with.

The politicians in this world… have at their command weapons of mass destruction far more complex than their own thinking processes.

Systems are complex, so controlling an attack and achieving a desired level of damage may be harder than using physical weapons.

Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.

There is no economy without airlines. Airfreight runs the world. There is no Honolulu without an airplane. This is a very complex system. If you take it down, you can’t build it back up overnight.

I was a real mummy’s girl – still am. And as for my father, well, I have an Oedipus complex I’m still working out. I love that man!

I’m a little brother. I’ve always been small. People have said I have a Napoleon complex. But I’ve always had to fight for everything that I have.

Look, I play all these tough guys and thugs and strong, complex characters. In real life, I am a cringing, neurotic Jewish mess. Can’t I for once play that on stage?

In every war zone that I’ve been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.

We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.

I have a complex feeling about genre. I love it, but I hate it at the same time. I have the urge to make audiences thrill with the excitement of a genre, but I also try to betray and destroy the expectations placed on that genre.

Is deciding what you like an instinct, a sense that arrives as swiftly as my autoimmune response to cat dander? Or is it the result of reasoned consideration, the way wine tasters swish pinot noir around in their mouths, spit it out, and reach for complex metaphors about chocolate and tobacco?

The Democratic Media Complex, in its pursuit of Orwellian hate-crime legislation, reparations, and sundry non-ameliorative resolutions to America’s troubled racial past, pursues its victims with blood lust.

Humans are very complex; I definitely have a new respect for authors that are able to write books nonstop. It’s an incredible talent.

I got a dog with a Napoleon complex. I have a Napoleon complex. We’re small. Anything big that we feel is threatening us, we want to fight. We’re not a pushover.

It’s very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, ‘This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.’ And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.

In a very complex way, things have improved in the dramatic field. Before you had the good and the bad and you couldn’t mingle them. Now it’s more ambiguous.

Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

I’m known for having crazy shoes. I have a total Napoleon complex – I’m only 5’4″, and every heel I have is four inches or more.

The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life’s origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program.

I am confident that I am capable of leading projects, which are even complex.

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.

There’s no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.

Weak passwords are a crook’s best friend. Make yours long and complex, and change them often – not just on your bank account but on your email and social media, too.

I’m working in this very complex set of issues having to do with who we are as a species and how much we can do to the Earth before it starts to buckle under. My work can easily read as an indictment, but I don’t see it as that simple a problem.

To some degree. I think that I’ve always been very much of a chordal person. The chords are the foundation of everything. Some of Yes’ stuff is very linear, albeit complex, but it’s single-line melodic stuff. So I kind of had to wear a different cap working with Yes. It’s not so much chord-based.

I’ve been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.

The mayor of New York is the chief executive of the city. It is a complex organization and it requires the requisite skills to understand how to be the leader of the people and manage the government of N.Y.

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

Derivatives are a huge, complex issue.

There’s only one movie theater in the entire city of Detroit. The entire city has one open movie theater, and it is in the – it is in the General Motors headquarters complex.

It’s almost as if the Swedes have two different personalities: one for winter and one for summer. I am both a happy and a melancholic person. It’s complex as I get so much from life.

Things that are ultimately complex must have a simple end user experience if they are to be successful.

One of the things I love about directing is I love actors, because no matter how complex they are, once you get down to working and talking to them and the toughest guy will want you to open them up and he wants to show you stuff he was afraid to show anybody before.

It’s so much easier to go to the Sony movie complex when you’re disabled. You take a great elevator. You get your own little private viewing area. I love it.

In the final analysis, poverty is a condition of helplessness – of inability to cope with the conditions of existence in our complex society.

Technological change is never an isolated phenomenon. This revolution takes place inside a complex ecosystem which comprises business, governmental and societal dimensions. To make a country fit for the new type of innovation-driven competition, the whole ecosystem has to be considered.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

Like a physically beautiful but otherwise rather dull person who trades on his or her looks, Southern California swings perpetually between a profound inferiority complex and an equally profound sense of entitlement.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

If you look at all the technology we’re interconnected with every day, all this complex technology that connects humanity, it actually doesn’t connect us.

I’ve been pretty lucky – or slothful – in that I’ve never been a ‘career builder.’ I take the jobs that come along that feel right, and that’s left me fairly open to all genres, really. But with ‘Caprica,’ the complex, dark and very smart script was the draw.

I have a complex feeling about genre. I love it, but I hate it at the same time. I have the urge to make audiences thrill with the excitement of a genre, but I also try to betray and destroy the expectations placed on that genre.

Diverse groups do best at complex problems and innovation when the facts aren’t clear: each individual’s perspective allows him or her to tackle challenges differently and, when stuck, rely on others’ differing points of views to progress.

A mortgage transaction is very complex, very complicated, and very localized – the rules are not just by state but by county, sometimes even by municipality.

I’m from Connecticut, and we don’t have any dialects. Well, I don’t think we have any dialects, and yeah, it’s very complex. That Rhode Island/Massachusetts New England region is arguably the hardest dialect to nail.

Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.

In a complex and troubling world, who wouldn’t want to simplify? Everybody does. Everybody wants to simplify and put up a picket fence.

Strutting and preening is, in fact, the surest sign of an inferiority complex.

We control health and pathogenicity by complex multi-speciated relationships through symbiosis and synergy. Portable shelters for livestock, along with electric fencing, insure hygienic and sanitary housing and lounging areas, not to mention clean air, sunshine, and exercise.

I should have worked harder in my life. I suffer from a guilt complex.

Why do I write? From selfishness. Because this state of liquefied, complex concentration, however faintly and dimly I’m able to perceive it, is the greatest pleasure I know.

People are complex. You can be smart and still look hot. You can be a punk rocker yet have a refined vocabulary. It’s all about this mashup that makes us who we are and I think that’s a beautiful thing.

As biologists, we contemplate with admiration and awe the wondrous array of sophisticated cell interactions and recognitions evolved in the T cell immune system, which must be a model for other similarly complex biological systems of highly differentiated organisms.

Scientists need to be prepared to engage, and the best people to engage with are students, ideally from primary school because there’s no question that their capacity to work out complex things is extremely good.

There’s something extremely rewarding about following characters that you like and knowing that there’s as many hours of viewing as you have the appetite for. You can tell more complex stories; you can create more complex characters in the longer form.

Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

I always had an inferiority complex, like I wasn’t good enough. I was shy. But dancing gave me so much joy, and I was good at it. I felt like a whole person because I could dance.

I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he’d come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries.

I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.

I don’t understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

I’ve realised that when I don’t play people who are complex I get very, very bored, and then lazy, and end up being rubbish.

It’s a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

Thumbs up or thumbs down on a website is not a conversation. The danger is you get into a habit of mind where politics means giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a website. The world is a much more complex place.

I suppose I sort of like effects that have some organic elements rather than ones that are entirely generated by a computer. Just because, no matter how complex the algorithm is, it’s still an algorithm.

Life is complex. You don’t have any person who is nice from the beginning until the end. You don’t always have the notion of redemption. The bad people don’t always pay.

Girls enjoy complex social interaction. Their verbal skills – and their delight in using them – develop earlier than boys’.

Medical ethics is a fascinating discipline, as it deals with issues replete with complex philosophical, moral, and ethical considerations that are rarely black or white.

My stories are pretty simplistic, but the characters are always complex and always right, and that comes from the script and my research and reverse-engineering what I find in the real world.

The economy may be complex, but Americans understand that the Wall Street banks control an outsized portion of the economy and that they have an outsized interest in their own profits.

Money and investing can be complex, confusing, and often boring subjects.

Things are more complex today, and I think humor has changed a a great deal. People are more sensitive today.

Food is ever-changing and ever moving forward and getting more and more complex.

As society becomes more and more complex, cheating will in many ways become progressively easier and easier to do and harder to police or even understand.

I’m interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence – that it’s possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions – is fascinating.

CEOs hate variance. It’s the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.

Going to war is a rare experience in American culture, so it’s easy for simple notions to gain a lot of weight. The reality is always more complex.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

The reason people need advice on using social media is that they’re a much more complex and nuanced way to communicate than a conversation or email.

Border security is a complex issue and will remain a top priority during the 2007 legislative year. As Congress works to fix this problem, I will continue to push for strong measures that beef up security at our borders.

I believe if you want to convey a complex philosophy, it’s advisable to keep it simple: day-to-day lingo.

What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars.

A great painter can paint something really complex, but they can crystallize it into something really simple.

However, very recently I have come to an understanding that complex music is not necessarily pleasant.

I would say practical progressive, which means that the Republican party or any political party has got to recognize the problems of a growing and complex industrial civilization. And I don’t think the Republican party is really wide awake to that.

The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.

Wars don’t happen on battlefields; they go on happening in people’s hearts for generations and generations, and the ecological damage is unfathomably complex and dire.

That’s my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.

The scourge of unlawful robocalls is technically complex to address, and no single action will get the job done.

Carbon-carbon bond formation reactions are important processes in chemistry because they provide key steps in building complex, bio-active molecules developed as medicines and agrochemicals.

Sometimes I want to convey something complex philosophically, and sometimes I just want to portray myself in a situation that I think other people have been in many times, but it hasn’t been written about much.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.

This is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny little world. Step inside of the tiny little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly, all these tiny little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world.

Egypt is a large, complex, very important country.

I adore recipes that make use of one cut of meat or a whole animal to create a complex dish, loaded with flavour.

I remember one director in Argentina said to me, ‘You are not going to have any opportunity to be a leading lady because of your height.’ And I didn’t care. I don’t have a complex.

When you live in a condo complex with people next door, I don’t know how you can be dead for four months without anybody noticing you not coming and going.

It’s a treat to portray a complex character. Besides… where else could I find a job where emotional outbursts and odd exclamations like ‘Egad!’, ‘Narf!’, ‘Poit!’, ‘Splonk!’ and ‘Zort!’ are allowed?

As we mature and grow older we collect a lot of baggage, and a lot of that stuff you collect on life’s journey gets in the way of acting. My kids can imagine a character and transform in the blink of an eye. It’s so simple for kids, so complex for adults.

One fine day I discovered that more complex plays really have to be directed.

My ideal vacation isn’t about complex maneuvers. I want to arrive somewhere foreign where I don’t speak the language, go hiking, then plop down in a sunny square, have drinks, read a book, and see what happens.

There’s no such thing as a specific authenticity to what Mexico is, because Mexico is incredibly complex and varied, and the food is completely different if you travel 50 kilometers. It just changes all the time.

Bogging down large armies in historically complex, dangerous areas ends in disaster.

I think any character has to be well-rounded, whether they are male or female – they have to be complex and make choices that maybe we don’t agree with, you know? I guess that’s what makes them human.

The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.

If I were overweight because I ate too much, I would have far more of a complex. I would know if I just stopped eating and showed a little discipline I would be thin. But there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about being short. You just gotta run with it.

Sonder is the realization that every individual passerby has their own life just as vivid and complex as yours.

At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It’s a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.

People often ask why I remain so optimistic, even in the face of the complex challenges we are facing in the Jewish world, in Israel and beyond. It’s because I am so impressed and inspired by the young people I meet.

The notion of ‘reduce and refine’ is one I’ve pursued. I truly believe that by making things less complex, by finding innovative ways to make sustainability affordable, we can advance the notion that it is possible.

More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.

It’s quite hard to find a ballsy or complex character. So the roles I’ve taken are those. Lot’s of people put me in the dark category.

No doubt, the White House thinks the American people know Obama’s story. But since the Inauguration, we’ve seen only the president’s present: his perfect family, his Ivy League elegance, his effortless mastery of complex issues. We never see him sweat. And we forget that he ever had to struggle.

I learned first of all not to be intimidated by any visual effects that I don’t understand. It can all be learned. You can then use them as tools to tell your story. I also learned that you have to be really vigilant, the more complex the movie, to not lose yourself and to not lose sight of the priority.

The bravest person I’ve ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.

I have such trust complexes. I’m close to, like, two people.

The extraordinary genius of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie 100 years ago was their recognition that the great wealth they had amassed could be put to public good and used to solve the complex problems for which there were no other sources of capital.

We’re so complex; we’re mysteries to ourselves; we’re difficult to each other. And then storytelling reminds us we’re all the same.

People get used to more complex forms of entertainment, and they become bored by simpler forms. Television has become more complex in order to feed our demand.

I have a confession: I’m not a man of simplicity. I spent my entire early career making complex stuff. Lots of complex stuff.

The beauty of ‘The Hunger Games’ and also ‘Game of Thrones,’ in fairness, both projects have really complex, three-dimensional, contradictory, strong women… The writing of female characters is extraordinary and equal to the men.

I would recommend it to everybody, every now and again you just put a dress on, see what it feels like, because it’s, its interesting. A whole complex series of thoughts and feelings assail you as you look at yourself.

Lisa understands me. I’m very complex, but I have trouble opening up to people. I tend to keep things to myself. All my life, I’ve been kind of shy – opening up is always a challenge and Lisa can understand that.

My face is asymmetric, so it looks very different depending on where the camera shoots. That’s my biggest complex.

London has always moved and surprised me, reinventing itself in ways both fresh and familiar. It’s a contrary, complex and creative city, an anarchist of a thousand faces – fickle and unfailing, tender and bleak, ambitious and callous.

Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It’s a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way – that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction – and still trust that they’re going to come up with good answers.

If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.

I suffer from a more complex, persistent fear. It manifests itself in nerves, and on film the camera sees even the tiniest evidence of this. So you have to learn that when the director calls ‘Action,’ you don’t go to this place of tension, but somehow you become free.

The prison industrial complex, to put it in its crassest term, is a system of industrial mass incarceration. So there’s what you call bureaucratic thrust behind it. It’s hard to shut off because politicians rely upon the steady flow of jobs to their district that the prison system and its related industries promise.

Coming up in the Bay Area and being African American in a city that has a history of complex issues of violent crime, interaction with the police is always intense. That’s something you have to learn. My mom taught me at a young age that if ever a cop stops you, you put your hands up and freeze – don’t move.

It is our duty as states, citizens, and industry leaders to make the energy transition a reality with the ultimate aim of reconciling two major priorities: to meet ever-increasing demand and to confront the complex issue of climate change.

Good intentions often get muddled with very complex execution. The last time the government tried to make taxes easier, it created a 1040 EZ form with a 52-page help booklet.

By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Anyone who doesn’t think the welfare-industrial complex is trying to increase dependency isn’t paying attention.

We’re phenomenally blessed in the Walla Walla Valley. We have great, complex soil that’s nutrient-rich but fairly porous.

In a world of complex threats, our security and leadership depends on all elements of our power – including strong and principled diplomacy.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.

Addiction is a hugely complex and destructive disease, and its impact can be simply devastating. All too often, lives and families can be shattered by it.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

When I was young I had so many inferiority complexes. I had an inferiority complex because I didn’t go to university. I had an inferiority complex because I didn’t train. Then it gets tiring. And you do get bored of it.

After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we’ll have room for specialists. But right now we don’t.

The U.S. is a complex country. It has a high predominance of immigrants who have been eminently successful.

The working classes were becoming more and more sharply aware of the complex causes of international malaise.

Today, even small entities that trade complex instruments or are granted sufficient leverage can threaten the global financial system.

I searched so hard for a part that was so complex.

At any comic book convention in America, you’ll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.

The purpose of life is to help others, and if you can’t help them, won’t you at least not hurt them? I know that is a platitude, that that is sentimental and can easily be attacked. But loving, caring is simple, and we make it complex. Our own neuroses make it complex.

Economies are complex beasts that need people to do an extraordinary range of tasks.

Judges decide upon copyright law. They decide upon trademark law. They decide upon scientific issues. They decide upon very complex technical issues on a daily basis. So you must have confidence in the Supreme Court, that they will apply their mind and they will come out with a decision consistent with the Constitution.

I am deeply romantic and a genuine yet complex person.

Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before.

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.

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

A campaign is a complex organism that requires expensive parts. Finding the right parts and meshing them together into a cohesive working unit is an art in and of itself.

I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.

Giving gifts to others is a fundamental activity, as old as humanity itself. Yet in the modern, complex world, the particulars of gift-giving can be extraordinarily challenging.

There are surely times when a conservative and a liberal would agree. We would agree on how moral it is to discriminate on the basis of race. There’s absolutely no light between those two positions. It becomes a little more complex when you talk about law as opposed to morality.

I’d love to rent a private villa in a resort complex with a kids’ club.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

I’ve always had a complex about being taken seriously.

A lot of the advertisement is done by saying: first of all, have a complex about who you are.

I listen to music all the time, and I just choose things I like, or things that I’ve not used before. Sometimes I work with music that’s very difficult – that I don’t even particularly like, per se, but that is really complex or interesting.

We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex – but Congress can.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

We didn’t take Charlize Theron seriously until she did ‘Monster’ and became physically ugly. I would love to see women be able to be powerful, complex, smart, opinionated and taken seriously, even if they are beautiful.

It’s a big and growing problem, the amount of power possessed by Google and Facebook. President Eisenhower said it about the military-industrial complex. They pose a grave threat to our democracy.

I would love to see women be able to be powerful, complex, smart, opinionated and taken seriously, even if they are beautiful. Even more, I would love to see women held to different standards, other than the superficial ones that we’re held to.

It is pure mythology that women cannot perform as well as men in science, engineering and mathematics. In my experience, the opposite is true: Women are often more adept and patient at untangling complex problems, multitasking, seeing the possibilities in new solutions and winning team support for collaborative action.

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

I do all my work by storyboard, so as I draw the storyboard, the world gets more and more complex, and as a result, my North, South, East, West directions kind of shift and go off base, but it seems like my staff as well as the audience, doesn’t quite realize that this has happened. Don’t tell them about it.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

The mind controls so much of the body. We are much more than flesh and blood; we are complex systems. Patients do better when they have faith that they’re going to do better. That’s why I always tell my patients and their families not to neglect their prayers. There’s nobody I don’t say that to.

My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.

These new ‘hybrid’ F1 cars represent an extremely complex project.

Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple.

A friend of mine jokes that I have a painstaking royalty complex. Like maybe I was a duke in a past life.

Pigeons are gentle and smart and have complex social relationships. Their hearing and vision are both excellent.

Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims.

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far.

The world is a complex place, and the influence of the media in its representation and its power of communication and interpretation is a remarkable amplifier of emotions, and of illusions.

The Internet lets women use words, which is their natural tool. Little girls speak in more complex, grammatical sentences than little boys do, and women never lose that superiority in verbal ability.

Complex things, if you don’t understand them, it seems complicated. If you understand them, and we know how to handle it, it became simple.

The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.

‘m really proud of ‘Sad, Sad World’ because it manages to state a very complex paradox of an emotion that I experienced when I had children, which is this great happiness and this great intensity, but with that intensity comes a deeper understanding of the world.

We do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate, to emerge, to survive.

I like my country, but I don’t think like an Italian. It’s a complex, complicated difficult country to make things happen in.

I have very complex and complicated ideas about technology. It’s such a prominent way that we communicate with each other. In ways, I think it’s really positive, and in ways, I think it’s really negative.

First, the American legislative process isn’t well suited to large and complex measures.

Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

No single solution or actor can deal with the complex and interrelated challenges to electoral integrity arising from manipulated data, hate speech, and fake news. These phenomena are not new; they have been part of electoral cycles since the advent of democracy.

I’m glad that cinema is catching up to what television has known for a while: That three-dimensional, complex women get an audience engaged as much as the men.

The whole debate on what food is best for us is complex, ongoing and often controlled by vested interests.