Complex Issues Quotes & Sayings

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. — Dee Dee Myers

we know intuitively and from experience that we work better in a complex interdependent task with someone we know and trust, but we are not prepared to spend the effort, time, and money to ensure that such relationships are built. We value such relationships when they are built as part of the work itself, as in military operations where soldiers form intense personal relationships with their buddies. We admire the loyalty to each other and the heroism that is displayed on behalf of someone with whom one has a relationship, but when we see such deep relationships in a business organization, we consider it unusual. And programs for team building are often the first things cut in the budget when cost issues arise. The — Edgar H Schein

The blanket assertion that corporations are people obfuscates the complex issues at play in the changing business world. Corporation are institutions. People are people. — Don Tapscott

Just as all pop music is not simplistic, not all contemporary concert music is complex. Often what a person connects with goes much deeper than generalized issues of simplicity and complexity. — Michael Hersch

What influences our behavior, and what our level of responsibility is, are very complex issues. And anytime we try to make this simplistic, we don't serve people well. — John Ortberg

The evangelical with his "minority complex" often forgets that he is part of a massive historical movement much larger than his own kind of church. Catholic and Protestant thought of various sorts, and Eastern Orthodoxy, can all be of help, for they share with him the basics of Biblical theism. The evangelical tends to see himself today standing alone, he supposes that nobody ever faced such issues as he now faces, and he therefore thinks in a vacuum. — Arthur F. Holmes

The issue of homosexuality in the church is complex, highly charged, and defined by misrecognized fears related to rapid social change and the perceived threat to familiar social institutions and the sense of security they represent. Underlying this conflict are the church's historic discomfort with issues of sexuality, and dualistic constructions that codify that unease into categories of sexual insiders (monogamous heterosexuals and celibates) and outsiders (everybody else). These have been magnified in recent years by cultural differences between different generations and African countries where the church has grown. — Jane Ellen Nickell

Because there are so many factors when considering the potential impacts of GMOs on our health and environment, we wanted to make a film that could unpack complex subject matter, while taking the audience on an entertaining ride. It is a very powerful tool because it allows viewers to understand the nature of these very complicated issues in a digestible format, and then hopefully engage in a dialogue about them in their respective homes and communities. — Zoe Lister-Jones

In relations between the states ... the interests of the country should be correlated with the interests of other countries, and compromise is to be found when resolving the most complex issues. — Vladimir Putin

Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called "radical" or "progressive" people don't hear enough "buzz" words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings). — Krysta Williams

It is much easier to make intellectual messes than it is to clarify complicated issues, especially when real solutions would challenge the status quo and require much careful thought across many fields of knowledge. Problems of climatic change, biotic impoverishment, population growth, and the choices to be made by various technologies and the transition to a sustainable and decent society with an economy that works over the long-term are difficult, complex, and intertwined problems with many possible answers. — David W. Orr

We have been seduced by sound bites. It is difficult to imagine how we are going to have an intelligent conversation around complex theopolitical issues as long as the average news consumer in America is willing to be sound-bite driven. We face a sorry state of affairs in our culture when few people seem willing to take the time for nuanced discussion on the complicated challenges we face. Politicians of all parties have been willing to foster this sound-bite mentality because it has worked for them. Most Americans work hard and are faced with too little time and too many distractions to study the issues well enough to make an informed judgment on them. As long as news consumers are willing to be manipulated by sound bites and are unwilling to commit the time to understand the complexities, we will continue to see artificial and simplistic distinctions drive too much of our conversation, resulting in divisions and disagreements that rarely get at the substantive issues. — Charles E. Gutenson

I learned more complex ways to manipulate the manipulators, to bring attention to issues about which I felt passionate. — Joey Skaggs

There is adventure in finding compelling stories and exploring complex issues in challenging environments, but there is also a responsibility to tell those stories accurately and objectively. — K. Lee Lerner

It's really hard to fit a complex idea into a 3-minute pop song. And when you're dealing with issues that you're passionate about, usually they have various levels. And within a poem, you can get around the issue of space, and in a song the same way, by simply leaving holes and alluding to what you're talking about. — Jon Foreman

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. — Edward Burtynsky

Network news accustoms audiences to assertion not argument. Over time, it reinforces the notion that politics is about visceral identification and apposition, not complex problems and their solutions ... sound bites aren't very helpful. They can tell a voter what a candidate believes, but not why. And many issues are too complex to be freeze dried into a slogan and a smile ... What's lost in a world in which everything's an ad? Perhaps the country that created the assembly line has simply found a more efficient way to do politics. — Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Globalization is a complex issue, partly because economic globalization is only one part of it. Globalization is greater global closeness, and that is cultural, social, political, as well as economic. — Amartya Sen

When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out. — Anthony Bourdain

Eople would like to think there's somebody up there who knows what he's doing. Since we don't participate, we don't control and we don't even think about the questions of crucial importance, we hope somebody is paying attention who has some competence. Let's hope the ship has a captain, in other words, since we're not taking in deciding what's going on. I think that's a factor. But also, it is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues; they'd better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and control international affairs. — Noam Chomsky

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. — John Le Carre

The issues are complex, and so I think sometimes the best way to work things out is, well, not to work them out. — Karen Kingsbury

I feel it's important to talk about the complex issues affecting us. — Asghar Farhadi

When story and behavior are consistent, we relax; when story and behavior are inconsistent, we get tense. We have a deep psychological need for our stories and behaviors to be consistent. We need to be able to trust the story, because it's the lens through which we see reality. We will go to great lengths in the attempt to make a story that explains an action and supports or restores consistency. If we cannot make story and action fit, we either have to make a new story or change the action ... [But] The drive for consistency and the ability to redefine abhorrent action so it fits the story are very complex issues. We have a huge ability to continue believing stories we are told are true in order to stay comfortable with actions we don't want to change, or don't feel capable of changing. — Christina Baldwin

She considered him to be a good person, possibly with a Practical Pig complex that was sometimes a little too apparent. And he was unbearably naive with regard to certain elementary moral issues. He had an indulgent and forgiving personality that looked for explanations and excuses for the way people behaved, and he would never get it that the raptors of the world only understood only one language. She almost felt awkwardly protective whenever she thought of him. — Stieg Larsson

That's what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction - it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out. — Maggie Nelson

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents. — Stephen Jay Gould

The summary of Lambert and Lillenfelt's "Bloodstains" in Scientific American Mind in the October 12, 2007 The Informed Reader passes along many of these authors' strong opinions on complex and controversial topics without informing the readership that the authors' perspective is extreme, polarized, and vulnerable to challenge at many crucial points.
It is clear that false memories can be implanted in about 25% of subjects, when those memories concern issues in the normal and expectable range of experience. However, about 75% of subjects resist such efforts, and efforts to implant memories of abuse or offensive medical procedures are almost universally rejected. Therefore a wholesale attack against therapies that explore patients' memories is unwarranted. "Recovered Memory Therapy" is not a school of treatment. It is a slur used to mischaracterize approaches offensive to the authors' perspectives, designed to evoke an emotional bias against those to whom the slur is applied. — Richard P. Kluft

We are genetically programmed to react to stimuli in our immediate vicinity. Responding to complex issues that we cannot perceive directly requires the application of reasoning, which is less powerful than instinct. — Graeme Simsion

Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting "prison-industrial complex" - the business interests that capitalize on prison construction - made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything - health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America's prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States. — Bryan Stevenson

One of the things the police officers told us in the first minutes of being with them is that the way that they cope with their job is by using a lot of inappropriate humour. It's really a lovely opportunity to try to challenge our ideas of what it is to deal with complex issues, and that they're not always dower. Having that kind of humour along with the pathos for what people are going through is a really nice challenge. — Kristin Lehman

We are (most of us) embedded in an exceedingly complex network of social relationships, many of which are vital to our well-being. Every day we confront issues relating to the needs and wants of others and must continually make accommodations. And in addressing these conflicting interests, the operative norm is - or should be - fairness, a balancing of the interests and needs of other parties, other 'stakeholders.' — Peter Corning

Along with opportunities, there also exist many other tricky and complex issues to be managed in India. These include tackling both policy-level challenges and infrastructure challenges. — Gautam Adani

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. — Joseph Stiglitz

We live in an increasingly technological world where the issues are quite complex and based on some complicated science. — Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Real life issues are not mathematical equations. We're not calculators crunching numbers. We're humans sorting through complex, multi-layered issues, and we're doing so while enduring the (sometimes profound) personal effects of our conclusions. While we want to be reasonable, we are inexorably pulled in the direction of our oldest mental habits and by our deepest life-impacting needs. We're repelled by those ideas which can jeopardize our comfort, safety, and happiness. We can try to be fair, but all the while we are fighting against our needs and fears. There are things we don't want to be true (or false). Our lives are built on certain beliefs which, if disproved, could wreck us. These are the truths that we 'can't handle'. — Daniel Ionson

World Screen provides clear, insightful reporting on the most critical and complex issues of our industry. It combines local savvy with a global perspective, and it is an important source of information. — Gustavo Cisneros

Well, the most important thing a president will be is commander-in-chief. And that requires having an understanding of the complex issues on foreign policy. Foreign policy presents us often with hard choices, not black or white choices. — Marco Rubio

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves. Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed. — Alan Lightman

The environmental issues we face today are complex and span many knowledge domains. This undergraduate degree programme in Environmental Studies will nurture a pool of graduates who are able to think deeply and broadly about these issues, and help develop novel solutions for Singapore, Asia and beyond. I am delighted at this programme for another reason - it is the first undergraduate course that draws on expertise from eight Faculties in NUS, making full use of the comprehensive strengths of our University. — Tan Chorh Chuan

The Nazis are not justified by saying,
Don't you know that there is more than just the issue of the Jews? The issues are more complex than that! What of the poor in this country, who cannot afford housing? What about the sick and malnourished? Don't you care about these people? Don't you claim to be a follower of Jesus?!
Supporting a murderous political agenda with such an argument is tragic!
And what do we know about Obama? He is the single most anti-life proponent that has ever run for the office of president. — Joseph Bayly

In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all. — Eli Pariser

[It is] one of the most complex and emotional issues of out time. — Barbara Jordan

A great man is one who seizes the vital issue in a complex question, what we might call the jugular vein of the whole organism, and spends his energies upon that — Joseph Rickaby

Between economic freedom and government regulation? Chapter 2 will address these issues. The specific question I ask is how far very complex regulation has become the disease of which it purports to be the cure, distorting and corrupting both the political and the economic process. — Niall Ferguson

If they think they can get anyone who could have better handled the complex and difficult issues surrounding North Korea, Iran and other controversies, they are not understanding the world right now. — Mohamed ElBaradei

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. — Ryan Coogler

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable. — Carl Sagan

we tend to retreat into tribes, guided primarily by our uninformed rage. And we naturally hunger for reinforcement. Television news shows rise to the occasion, offering shouting matches between caricatured opposites competing for ratings. Elected officials are ridiculed as "wonks" for sharing or even understanding multiple viewpoints, the history of an issue, or its greater context. We forget that these are the people we're paying to learn about these issues on our behalf. Instead, we overvalue our own opinions on issues about which we are ill informed, and undervalue those who are telling us things that are actually more complex than they look on the surface. They become the despised "elite." Appropriately — Douglas Rushkoff

The issue of animal use and abuse can seem insurmountable, it is tragic and it is complex. We love our companion animals and we value wildlife but we are generally blind to the realities of what goes into the food we eat. — Liz Marshall

The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer - and they don't want explanations that do not give them that. — Thomas Sowell

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. — Tim Berners-Lee

Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The psychological need to avoid independence - the "wish to be saved" - seemed to me an important issue, quite probably the most important issue facing women today. We were brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We were taught to believe that as women we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, needful of protection. So that now, in these enlightened days, when our intellects tell us to stand on our own two feet, unresolved emotional issues drag us down. — Colette Dowling

Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics. — Udny Yule

Uneducated people are unfortunate in that they do grasp complex issues, educated people, on the other hand, often do not understand simplicity, which is a far greater misfortune. — Franz Grillparzer

The issues surrounding illegal immigration are wide-ranging and complex, but there is no question about the need to secure our borders. — Roger Wicker

Ronald Reagan was one of our great foreign policy Presidents. He did not come from the Senate. He did not come from the foreign policy world. He was a governor, but his resolve, his clarity of purpose, his intelligence, his capacity to deal with complex issues and solve tough problems served him extremely well, and if I were elected President, I hope I could rely upon those same qualities. — Mitt Romney

I would say it would be worth it if, in fact, it would - if you could demonstrate that that would be the case and that the results and ramifications around the world wouldn't lead to more problems and more people dying. It's a very complex issue, and that's why I think we need to decide it. — Angus King