Complexity Quotations

If there's one country that can be trusted to understand the complexity of history, it's Israel.

To inquire into the origin of life is like seeking the origin of electrical machinery or the origin of music. Every increase in complexity of arrangement, of form, of substance, leads to new and often incalculable properties.

The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.

We academics - I am an academic - we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes.

What we call 'evil' doesn't necessarily deserve any kind of respect or understanding, by any means; it just deserves an acknowledgement of its complexity so we can better understand it - so we can help prevent it.

And so from that, I've always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.

The average person doesn't understand what a stem cell is. There's a lack of health literacy in our nation. So the public can't really get into this dialogue because they don't understand the complexity of stem cells, not the faith-based approach, not the ideological or political, but the science behind stem cells.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

I know myself - I cannot just play a cliche. It has to be a character; it has to be written with the complexity of the human being behind. Could be bad, could be good, could be someone we would hate, but still, I need a reason for that influence, and I need to understand why.

I'm not saying anything that's unknown, but movies are always cut down and there's a lot of complexity within the film that is not always widely accepted by the general audience, which is just a reality; a movie of a certain size, they don't want people to be too - it's a balance of how deep to keep going with these ideas.

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

We, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.

It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science.

People have to see that there is a high degree of complexity about belonging to a gang. It's a symptom, not a problem.

The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost.

I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.

Sometimes the routes leading to feelings of anger are so convoluted and circuitous that it takes enormous skill to discern their original source, or fountainhead. But regardless of the reason for or the source of the anger or the relative ease or complexity in perceiving either the anger or its source - everybody, but everybody, gets angry.

There are so many ingredients that are contained in 'The Wall' that were not necessarily contained in other Pink Floyd records, particularly following on from 'Animals,' which was very spare and sparse. Production on it was much more massive, the complexity of the recording was much more intense.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

You have got to welcome and embrace complexity.

The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity.

I think a lot of writers are tempted to add complexity by over-complicating things, but always remember that most natural rules/laws are, at their core, simple. Start simple, and build from there, or you risk getting yourself and your readers tangled.

If the process of life is about moving toward increased complexity and organization, a sort of sublime unfolding of greater and greater self-organizing systems, then we're actually doing pretty well.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

There are some kinds of Christianity that insist you have to believe literally in doctrine. The Gnostic gospels open out the complexity and multiplicity of approaches to this. If you think the story of the virgin birth is mistranslated, for instance, it doesn't mean you have to throw out the whole thing.

Movies can provide tear-inducing or comically-entertaining representations of love, but many agree that its deeper conflicting complexities often seem unfathomable.

Once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We're back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy.

Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It's an emergent property.

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

Emily Dickinson never developed. She remained loyal to her persona and to that same little metrical song that stood her in such good stead. She is a striking example of complexity within a simple package. Her rhymes are like bows on the package.

It doesn't matter how much you want. What really matters is how much you want it

I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only story, and I think that the cognitive complexity is as important.

As we get more transparent with data sets about infrastructure and systems management, I have a feeling we'll see big changes in how we think about complexity and our relationship to our actions.

Magneto has a whole lot of complexity to him. Emotionally, he's coming from a very damaged place. I like the ambivalence of it. I want the audience leaving the theater wondering, asking the questions themselves rather than being spoon-fed like a lot of these super-villain characters.

Nerds... the 'nerd' has never been precisely defined, thanks to the psychological complexity of the creature. The word has connotations of some level of intelligence. The typical nerd is a male with intelligence but no sense of giving it a manly face.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.

Disability simulation fails to capture the nuance and complexity of living in a disabled body. And it certainly fails to give a deep understanding of systemic discrimination and abuse faced by disabled people.

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

Specialized management courses are useful but should come well after the complexity of management and business are understood.

I'm kind of a sloppy feminist. Any ideology makes me a little nervous because there's some point where it doesn't allow for the complexity of things.

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.

The project of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' is exactly that: to assert the beautiful, bountiful, chaotic complexity of one black American male. And, by extension, all black American males.

Your company is probably going to get hacked. The velocity and complexity of hacking attempts has skyrocketed, with companies routinely facing millions of knocks on the vault door.

I do think that the emotional weight of 'Biutiful' has blinded some viewers to the beauty and complexity of the film.

On the Web, we can be whoever we wish to be, editing the face we show to others in ways that aren't possible in physical space. We can also fine-tune the complexity and depth of our interactions and relationships.

I was struck after 9/11 by what seemed the assumption that everyone bereaved by that event was suffering the same thing. I wanted to explore how individual grief is, how complicated, how colored by the complexity of the mourner's relationship with the person who's died.

I was so impressed with her as I have been in the past and thought, she's the perfect age at this point, and what an opportunity it would be for this movie to take on a whole other level of complexity given what she does as an actor.

One forgets that before August, there was a very limited literature for black actors. August created a generation of actors, a huge number of very talented people who have their careers because of the depth and complexity they could find in the roles he wrote. And the work is so undeniably powerful that it crosses all kinds of lines.

One of the things that I talked to her about was the complexity of a Supreme Court nomination hearing because there are a lot of complicated issues. And I said to her, 'You've got a pretty good road map in what went on with Chief Justice Roberts.

Politicians must be simple and clear about how their ideas will serve the national cause. We can no longer use the complexity of today's problems as an excuse for inaction, rhyme or rhetoric that does not meet the challenges before us.

need to really invest ahead of the growth curve and get underneath the complexity of distributing products effectively and efficiently throughout the country.

New methods for attacking web applications are growing in volume, complexity and frequency. Organizations should regularly scan Web applications for vulnerabilities and push for early testing. Because many organizations may not have the resources to do this internally, Web application security solution vendors should provide their scanning capabilities in multiple ways - as a product, as a service or in a hybrid model that combines both approaches.

Network intrusions continue to plague IT managers, making automated security critical to availability and cost-effective management of a network. By reducing the complexity of network management and providing an effective way to identify and contain wired or wireless intruders, we're providing a cost effective way to manage and secure Alcatel and multi-vendor enterprise networks.

My feeling is that when we prepare a program, the experience can be just like composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said, programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules.

I didn't want to create a world of heroes and villains. I wanted to create a world of infinite complexity and confusion, ... I just wanted to see characters try to live an authentic life in a world that's increasingly inauthentic.

When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.

She has a complexity and a gift no other actor on the planet has, especially one who is young.

Maintaining a single view of products, customers, locations, and financial accounts is a significant challenge. At its heart, master data management involves changing, consolidating, and rationalizing core processes such as new product introduction or customer (or patient/citizen/supplier) registration and ongoing management. The greatest complexity comes from these business process changes and process integration issues, over and above the data integration requirements.

Luck certainly has a lot to do with any kind of success. But on the other hand, this is a business in which relationships are very important. And also there is oft times a degree of complexity to those relationships. She was always able to represent my point of a view in a way that made it palatable to whoever she was dealing with.

Simply the size and complexity of the global financial system, just what occurs on a daily basis, legitimately, it's 24 hours a day, when you look at Asia, Europe, Latin America, the U.S. And to track all that, it's an impossibility.

Securing the 'endpoints' of a corporate network is a challenge that affects all enterprises. Companies are looking for integrated offerings that can both protect the network and ensure that endpoints are compliant with security policies. This acquisition will give customers a complete endpoint compliance solution while helping to reduce complexity and cost.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

Handling the increasing number and complexity of the customer intentions is now beyond a simple set of transactions in most industries, so customers have to be carefully led to the right place.

Given the complexity and paradox of family business environment, how is that some firms manage to survive beyond centuries? Family businesses are under threat from both the sides, family as well as business.

Given the depth and complexity of the bond market, as well as its numerous inefficiencies and opportunities, bond funds deserve a lot more attention from individual investors,

Get Lower understood the need for a sophisticated technology to meet the complexity of the marketplace in general and its multiple business channels specifically. Efficient Frontier can help Get Lower meet and exceed its business objectives.

Globalization increases the length and complexity in the supply chain. You might be able to buy less expensive goods, but it takes longer to ship the products with less certainty.

Because of the complexity and difficulty of snow plowing at the high school, the arrangement worked out with the town is we hire a private contractor to do the snow plowing at the high school. It frees up public works to concentrate on the roads and the other five schools.

Because of the regional context, because of where they come from, because of the complexity of the issue, without a strong commitment of the international community the Afghans know that they cannot do it themselves.

To explore the possibility of creating a visual environment that has an equal degree of complexity and layering to play off the sonic world that he created, that is the boundary that is being pushed. We're going to learn a lot from this experience.

Having regard to the increasing complexity of the business, the board has formed the view that it was appropriate to increase the number of directors.

HP is simplifying the path for customers who are eager to add mobility to their lives but wary of the complexity and technical challenges,

I always have loved the Stradivarius. My teacher, Josef Gingold, he had a Stradivarius. As a treat, he would put it under my chin and let me play a few notes, and I remember that feeling of the overtones, the complexity of the sound. It's like a great wine.

He (understood) from a child the simplicity of complex music and the complexity of simple music. He has something that I don't have, which is perfect pitch. He knows what key everything is by hearing it once.

he says at the end of a flood of interviews. ''I hate this word. I don't see them as tortured. I see them as people. I suppose I'm drawn to the chance to show the complexity at the center of the drama.

He's your dream candidate for president of the United States, ... He's a moral man, an intellectual. He thinks through issues, he struggles. He shows the complexity of decision-making in the White House.

Having Dell in our community has been an outstanding economic driver, ... We have seen growth not only in the number of jobs that is now double the original projections, but also in the scope and complexity of the jobs.

Just the sheer size of it and complexity of it, it is beyond what anybody has seen -- not just in Louisiana but anywhere.

My personal feeling is if the complexity becomes difficult for me, I frequently will pass off part of my decision to some trusted adviser or rely on an expert recommendation, ... My husband is more into this than I am. When the decision gets into making trade-offs, I want to make the decision but I may not want to spend the time (learning about the product enhancements). When we were buying PCs in the beginning in the 1980s, it was the same situation: People wanted computers but didn't know what to buy. Everybody in the neighborhood would go to the person who was the expert.

Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.

Previously, synchronous rectification in resonant half-bridge topologies has not been commercially viable due to the complexity of varying system frequency and low standby power regulations. Here, the IR1167 enables simple SR for a major boost in system efficiency.

Our objective with Moab Cluster Suite 4.2.2 is to enable more users to easily use a cluster, let even the newest network administrations gain intuitive control over their cluster without training, and to allow sites with high levels of complexity to gain more fine-grained control over virtually every aspect of workload usage and system integration. Our customers consistently see the industries' highest utilization rates, commonly helping them achieve 10 to 30 percent more work on their existing hardware and sometimes even more.

I think that Apple has revolutionized every other consumer industry; why not television? The complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.

Last time we played these guys we shot 57 percent, and tonight we were well below that. That's to Fort Dodge's credit. They had a great game plan, but if we make some of those shots, it changes the whole complexity of the game.

managing the cost and complexity of the games; putting athletes and sport at the heart of your bid; and on focusing on technical excellence, not on things which are not essential.

I think there's a complexity to it, but I think audiences are completely up for that.

Retail is a pretty simple business, but what adds complexity is the size and scale. We couldn't do it without technology.

Our work demonstrates a fundamental error in the current challenges to Darwinism. New techniques allowed us to see how ancient genes and their functions evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. We found that complexity evolved piecemeal through a process of Molecular Exploitation -- old genes, constrained by selection for entirely different functions, have been recruited by evolution to participate in new interactions and new functions.

It isn't just a bridge project, it's a sewer project. We have known from the outset that it would be awhile before we could work out an agreement with Central San. Whenever there is more than one agency involved, it adds to the complexity of the project.

I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated.

I think we're seeing the market's reaction, a negative reaction, to the increasing complexity of business mix and a very complex capital structure.

To become a Premier-level partner, you have to know wireless just as well as our other technologies. Network complexity is driving the need for partners to invest in this business.

Unfortunately today, software and failure are too frequently linked, and we as an industry need to start tackling the software problem with the urgency it deserves. The root cause of this problem is often the complex and inefficient way that software is delivered. To reduce the complexity and increase the predictability of software delivery, we are offering customers a series of packaged, maturity-based solutions that leverage our global process expertise, our comprehensive library of process assets and templates, and our award-winning ALM technology.

The art of urban planning is not just to do fantasies, to impose mega-structural ideas, but to create rich fabric that has the complexity of New York City. New York City is not just a simple-minded village,

Using different personal digital assistants is a complexity I don't want to get into.

Wireless complexity varies from relatively simple in the case of single service suppliers, particularly in developing markets such as Eastern Europe, to rather more complex in the case of integrated service suppliers in the most advanced markets.

Wireless technology has changed the way we communicate and how we conduct business. While this technology expands accessibility and productivity, it introduces complexity and security risk as wireless networks and handheld mobile devices become a new target for hackers and thieves looking to disrupt usage and steal personal information and business-critical data. The increased risk of information theft and malicious code affecting handheld mobile devices demands more education and vigilance from consumers and small office/home office (SOHO) users alike.

Wireless technology has changed the way we conduct business, offering mobile workers constant access to business-critical applications and data. While this flexibility expands productivity, it introduces complexity and security risk as wireless devices become a new target for hackers looking to infiltrate a corporate network.