Complex World Quotes & Sayings

Every religious tradition on which we draw has a reverence for life. We are a part of an intricate web of life. Every tradition on which we draw teaches that the ultimate expression of our spirituality is our action. Deep spirituality leads to action in the world. A deep reverence for life, love of nature's complex beauty and sense of intimate connection with the cosmos leads inevitably to a commitment to work for environmental and social justice. — Peter Morales

Behold your little ones. Pray with them. Pray for them and bless them. The world into which they are moving is a complex and difficult world. They will run into heavy seas of adversity. They will need all the strength and all the faith you can give them while they are yet near you. While they are young, pray with them that they may come to know that source of strength which shall then always be taught of the Lord' and great shall be the peace of thy children. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Americans are good people. They have no aggressions against us and they like us as we like them. They must know I don't hate them. I love them. I hear it is a complex society inside. Many Americans don't know about the outside world. The majority have no concern and no information about other people. They could not even find Africa on a map. I think Americans are good, but America will be taken over and destroyed from the inside by the Zionist lobby. The Americans do not see this. They are getting decadent. Zionists will use this to destroy them. — Muammar Al-Gaddafi

Our world isn't about ideology anymore. It's about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate willpower to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions - just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are. — Matt Taibbi

In any ten step instruction manual and every book of doctrines, there is complex advice that serves the very simple function of helping the lonely person find some similarity with the world around him.
He connects and, suddenly, there is a burst of joy, a ray of hope. He believes that it was those steps or that book, specifically, that brought him happiness, when really he has simply been triggered into his natural state. — Vironika Tugaleva

When faced with unbridled wildness of reality, dinosaurs fall into fevered delusions of grandeur. In fits of madness, they recreate the world in their own overblown image, bull-dozing the wild and replacing it with a wasteland that reflects their own emptiness. Where there was once the incredibly complex diversity of nature, there is now the dead simplicity of asphalt and concrete. — Curious George Brigade

The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of human interactions was so complex. — Michael Finkel

The whole universe is a complex of rhythms," mused Amanda. "We each of us feel a need to identify our bodily rhythms with those of the cosmos. The sea is the grand agency of rhythm. The grain-tops in the wind, the atoms that orbit are rhythmic. The uterus, which is a strong muscular organ, contracts with the birth of a baby - the rhythmic contractions, in fact, are the important motivations for the baby to emerge into the world. Rhythm is how it all begins. — Tom Robbins

Barry Jones once said that Australia is the only country where the word 'academic' is a pejorative. The academic sector has a vibrant and practical role to play in this complex world of ours. Higher education and research are worthy of your much closer attention. Yes, we can be and should be the clever country. Our progress can be within the highest ethical and moral framework. But this will only happen if we place appropriate emphasis on education, research and innovation within a truly international framework. — Gustav Nossal

The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life; it's so easy to make it complex. — Yvon Chouinard

Look at the problem of drug-resistant TB in the world. Look at HIV in the world. What's going to be required for everybody in the long run is the ability to do complex health interventions in poor settings. — Jim Yong Kim

The de industrialization of the US. economy based on the migration of corporations into third world areas where labor is very cheap and thus more profitable for these companies creates on the one hand conditions in those countries that encourage people to emigrate to the US. in search of a better life. On the other hand, it creates conditions here that send more black people into the alternative economies, the drug economies, women into economies in sexual services, and sends them into the prison industrial complex. — Angela Davis

Religion is a complex and often contradictory force in our world. It fosters hope and comfort but also doubt and guilt. It creates both community and exclusion. It brings societies together around shared belief and tears them apart through war. However, what unites the faithful, whatever their religion, is the unshakeable force of generosity. — Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

But what if absolute consistency on any issue from the left or the right, religious or secular, is an indication of mediocre intelligence and a lack of intellectual honesty? What if the world is a complex place? What if leadership requires flexibility? What if ideology is a bad substitute for common sense? What if ideological consistency, let alone "purity," is a sign of small-mindedness, maybe even stupidity? — Anonymous

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. — J. William Fulbright

We love a world in which the people in the white hats get rewarded and the people in the black hats pay the price. And that I have to say doesn't happen very often, particularly in a very complex economy. We're in a time of panic where people have lost trust in what the banks are doing, what the investment firms are doing - lost trust beyond a level of reasonableness, to be honest. And, it's got to be stopped. — Rebecca M. Blank

My Family and Other Saints echoes Gerald Durrell's classic memoir, My Family and Other Animals, not only in its title, but in its wonderful humor and lyrical prose. Like Durrell, Kirin Narayan takes the reader to a fascinating world far from our own, and brings to life its myriad sights, sounds and smells, while revealing the profound cultural beliefs of its people. India is just the most complex character among a cast of characters-family members, gurus, hippies, and neighbors-all of whom I now count as old friends. — Judith Barrington

Complex man that he was, J. Edgar Hoover left nothing to chance. The director shrewdly recognized that building what became known as the world's greatest law enforcement agency would not necessarily keep him in office. — Ronald Kessler

Complex is something that distort our perception of ourselves and the world — Sunday Adelaja

In this complex world, we all need God's Divine wisdom and guidance more than we ever have before. — Neale Donald Walsch

I looked down at this city, this civilization, and I realized just how little I really knew about a world where there was so much to know. — M.B. Julien

Maybe I've just read too many novels. In novels, alcoholics are always attractive and fuuny and charming and complex, like Sebastian Flyte or ABe North in Tender in the Night, and they're drinking because of a deep, unquenchable sadness of the soul, or the terrible legacy of the First World War, whereas I just get drunk because I'm thirsty, and I like the taste of lager ... — David Nicholls

To my mind the whole push and thrust and development of the world is towards the more complex, the flexible, the open-minded, the ability to entertain many ideas, sometimes contradictory ones, in one's mind at the same time. — Doris Lessing

Gone are the days when heroes are emotionally locked away from the world until the end of the book, and thank goodness for that. Modern romance heroes are more complex than ever. — Sarah MacLean

If you believe the Bible is true, you ought to know that demons are real. The Bible is filled with references of evil and demons, and Christ repeatedly cast out demons, so I believe the universe is much more complex and mysterious than it may appear to our senses. — D.L. Koontz

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them. — Norman Spinrad

[Making meth] is a complex process. The truth of it is that we live in a post-Google world where you can find six recipes for meth in 30 seconds on a search engine. — Vince Gilligan

The time is probably not far distant when music will stand revealed perchance as the mightiest of the arts, and certainly as the one art peculiarly representative of our modern world, with its intense life, complex civilization, and feverish self-consciousness. — Hugh Reginald Haweis

That's one of the ideas that we must always strive to understand if we are ever to understand the world around us. All things on our planet are related to one another. Even the smallest of actions, to one degree or another, affect this complex web. Irrespective of magnitude, events ripple around our world in ways great and small. — Jeffrey P. Bonner

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

If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it! — Richard Dawkins

Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation. — Richard Dawkins

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

I feel clobbered by the impossibility of translating into words as much of this enormous world we live in with its subtly complex and sprawling Periodic Table of emotions. To quote Freddie Mercury, I want it all. — David Mitchell

The World Trade Organization, The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies and devastate them, all under the fluttering banner of 'reform'. — Arundhati Roy

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo. — Margaret Lazarus Dean

Language, then, not simply as a list of separate things to be added up and whose sum total is equal to the world. Rather, language as it is laid out in the dictionary: an infinitely complex organism, all of whose elements [ ... ] are present in the world simultaneously, none of which can exist on its own. For each word is defined by other words, which means that to enter any part of language is to enter the whole of it — Paul Auster

There is nobody who is good or bad, it's just not like that. They all are complex individuals. They all see the world in their own way that makes complete sense to them. Nobody goes around feeling that they're evil - they think that they're doing the right thing. And so that seems to have something really important, big, and deep to say about human beings. — Dave McKean

I'd been too intent on the room to hear her coming up the stairs. Leslie said that the capacity not to notice a traditional Dutch folk dancing band walk up behind you was not a survival characteristic in the complex, fast-paced world of the modern policing environment. I'd like to point out that I was trying to give directions to a slightly deaf tourist at the time, and anyway it was a Swedish dance troupe. — Ben Aaronovitch

The truth is I don't know what happens to the spirits of the dead when they leave this world. Priests may claim to, even Truthseeker may claim to. However nobody truly knows. All Truthseeker truly knows is that Ishar, Kirfell, Orion and Avanti are lies. He has no proof of an alternative. I don't know. There may be nothing beyond this dark reality we live in, but that doesn't feel right to me. We love, we hate, we fight, we strive... People's lives seem too complex and important to be simply extinguished like a candle.'

~Vexis Zaelwarsh
Deathsworn Arc 5: The Temple of the Mad God — Martyn Stanley

If you fret that the world grows short of genuine wonders, consider this: the most complex lump of matter in the universe. It works in ways we can only guess at. THrough generations of intense study, scientists have at last come to understand some of its local mechanism, but the connection between local and general remains for them, as for the rest of us, a matter of arm-waving speculation--we know less about what's going on inside of it than we do about the functional structure of the most distant galaxies. It weighs a little over three pounds and is the consistency of toothpaste; you're carrying it between your ears. — Michael Kaplan

Our goal over the next few chapters is to address the origin of complex structures - including, but not limited to, living creatures - in the context of the big picture. The universe is a set of quantum fields obeying equations that don't even distinguish between past and future, much less embody any long-term goals. How in the world did something as organized as a human being ever come to be? — Sean Carroll

Roles written for women are so much more complex on television. The film world is becoming quite flimsy for women. — Julianna Margulies

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

During this time I came to understand a lot about myself, human beings, faith and the meaning of marriage and friendship. The world is not black and white, nothing is what it seems, and we are not cartoon characters that can be divided into goodies and baddies, but complex and multi-faceted beings with many weaknesses. Human beings will always disappoint. But God is there. He sometimes speaks through others and we would be wise to listen to those we trust and to our own inner voice, God's voice. No matter how difficult or painful life sometimes becomes, we must never lose faith.

We may not always find justice in this world, but compassion and forgiveness are such important qualities. They help us to dissolve so much of the negativity that we hold. Practising them mostly benefits ourselves. — Kristiane Backer

If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called "re-vision", i.e., the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as "the real world" or "the way it is" is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact. has a theatre critic (whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten) once put it," There's less there than meets the eye". Hence, my love for science fiction, which analyses reality by changing it. — Joanna Russ

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting. — Dean Koontz

Actually, the world is not complex. It is the task of trying to figure it out with words or numbers that is complex. — Alan W. Watts

Dogs are not 'people' of another species. They are another species. To train and care for them properly, to show them how to live in our complex world, requires first and foremost that we understand that. — Jon Katz

In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it's like to be a bad person. — Russell Smith

So it seems as though this part of us that is living a life on Earth is only a small piece or splinter of a much larger us. That we are many rather than one, or rather pieces of a more complex whole. We are only able to focus on the splinter we perceive as our totality. That is a good thing, because if we were aware of the complexity of it we would not be able to function in this world or reality. We are only able to see the facade that masks a much larger picture. Only now are we being allowed to peek behind the veil. — Dolores Cannon

The world is infinitely more complex than it appeared to me 15 years ago. — Andrew Denton

Why are women so fearful? The answer to that question lies at the root of The Cinderella Complex. (...) Many women achieve a certain amount of success in their careers and professions and still remain inwardly insecure. In fact (...), it's remarkable how many women these days retain a hidden core of self doubt while performing on the outside as if they were towers of confidence. (...)
Lack of confidence seems to follow us from childhood (...) No matter how fiercely we try to live like adults - flexible, powerful and free - that girl-child hangs on (...). The effects of such insecurity are widespread, and they result in a disturbing social phenomenon: women in general tend to function well below the level of their native abilities. For reasons that are both cultural and psychological - a system that doesn't really expect a great deal from us, in combination with our own personal fears of standing up and facing the world - women are keeping themselves down. — Colette Dowling

We have to learn to make our own way through a complex world without the benefit of an accepted trustworthy route map. — Guy Claxton

Everybody has a world, and that world is completely hidden until we begin to inquire. As soon as we do, that entire world opens to us and yields itself. And you see how full and complex it is. — David Guterson

Post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things - even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hypercomputers to surpass the best 'special effects' in movies or computer games so vastly that they could simulate a world, fully, as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in. — Martin Rees

When The Daily Muse initially wanted to launch a job board, our first ideas were insanely (and needlessly) complex. We wanted to integrate with social networks, gather rich personal data to build predictive algorithms, and put together numerous cool visualization tools before launching out to the world. We were just sure users would love it! — Kathryn Minshew

We were fortunate his brief psychic vision distracted him from what his fingertips could have told him about my face.
Of course we were aware that temporary clairvoyance was a lame and unlikely explanation. The ordering of this world, however is so abstruce, so deep and complex, most explanations that people to make sense of moments of strange experience are inadequate. Our very existence as thinking creatures is an astonishment that cant be solved. Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact more complex than the two combined. All life on earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us.
There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. — Dean Koontz

In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful. — Timothy Leary

Being from Israel and a Jew is complex already, but with France, there is a freedom and a mix of culture. I have met musicians from all over the world. — Yael Naim

Warm-bloodedness is one of the key factors that have enabled mammals to conquer the Earth, and to develop the most complex bodies in the animal kingdom. In this series, we will travel the world to discover just how varied and how astonishing mammals are. — David Attenborough

The advice that I have valued in my own life has never turned on fixed maxims or canned metaphors. More crucially, lists of precepts don't work like targeted advice because lists contain inherently constraining messages. They seem to say that complex matters are knowable, that a given process leads to foreseeable results. It implies a thin and predictable world, whereas the sort of advice that has mattered to me bespeaks a quite tentative optimism, the optimism of the quest whose outcome is finally unknowable. — Peter D. Kramer

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. — Julian Assange

Intelligence isn't just about how many levels of math courses you've taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over 6 characters. It's about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it - then take that knowledge gained and put it towards solving the next, more complex problem. It's about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging. — Andrea Kuszewsk

Noa stared at her. She would always believe that he was someone else, that he wasn't himself but some fanciful idea of a foreign person; she would always feel like she was someone special because she had condescended to be with someone everyone else hated. His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person. Noa didn't care about being Korean when he was with her; in fact, he didn't care about being Korean or Japanese with anyone. He wanted to be just himself, whatever that meant; he wanted to forget himself sometimes. But that wasn't possible. It would never be possible with her. — Min Jin Lee

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. — Andrew Weil

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

The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit. — Wade Davis

I understand how not even a priest can resist you when you want him. I can understand how love is something horrible and complex and hurting and something that still happens even if it shouldn't, and can't, and how one can want to be somebody else's world. I get it. And it fucking hurts. — Aleksandr Voinov

I've always noticed that nobody can be single-minded who isn't narrow-minded; and I think it likely that people who aren't so cocksure what they want to do with themselves, hesitate because they have a great deal more to deal with. A nature rich in fine and complex possibilities takes more time to dispose of itself, but when it does, the world's beauty is the gainer. — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world. — Michael Denton

Content is not mere facts, drummed into tender little minds under the relentless pounding of rote learning. Content--even the date of the Quebec Act, Confederation, or the Battle of Vimy Ridge, or the name of the first prime minister-- is cultural capital, a basic requirement of life that every Canadian needs to comprehend the daily newspaper, to watch the TV news or a documentary, or to argue about politics and cast a reasonably informed vote. In an increasingly complex and immediate world, cultural capital must also include some knowledge of Europe, Africa, and Asia, too. — J.L. Granatstein

Human activity is destroying the natural systems that we depend upon for our survival. Our most basic instinct as humans is to survive; yet we continue to destroy our life-support machine. Connected humans understand this terrible contradiction; disconnected humans are not able to.

Not all humans are responsible: just those who are part of Industrial Civilization. Industrial Civilization depends on economic growth and the unsustainable use of natural resources, so it has developed a complex set of tools for keeping people disconnected from the real world and living a life that keeps civilization running. Humans have been manipulated in order to be part of a destructive system.

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization. — Keith Farnish

Freedom from stress, freedom from anxiety, freedom from depression; freedom is autonomy from all that stagnates growth in this ever complex and noisy world. By the fear of being in the unknown, we often overlook and forget the serene view of being on the raft: the glowing virgin stars, the gentle ways that the waves moves, and the endless possibilities that exist under the sun. The fundamental principle of freedom is to be lost and our state of mind never differs too far from this analogy of being stranded in the middle of the ocean. — Forrest Curran

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

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. — Hayao Miyazaki

No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don't need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers - but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. — Barbara Kingsolver

The complex ways in which we produce and reproduce the world in technologically developed societies involves the ways in which we separate ourselves into public and private persons, producing and consuming persons and so on, and the ways in which we as people negotiate and cope with those divisions. Stars are about all that, and are one of the most significant ways we have for making sense of it all. That is why they matter to us, and why they are worth thinking about. — Richard Dyer

Paradoxical thinking requires that we embrace a view of the world in which opposites are joined, so that we can see the world clearly and see it whole ... The result is a world more complex and confusing than the one made simple by either-or thought - but that simplicity is merely the dullness of death. When we think together we reclaim the life force in the world, in our students, in ourselves. — Parker J. Palmer

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Nutritionists all over the world are of the opinion that we should combine protein with complex carbohydrates. A simple dosai made with parboiled rice, husked black gram and fenugreek seeds fulfils this need. — Chandra Padmanabhan

We have undoubtedly achieved Pakistan, and that too without bloody war, practically peacefully, by moral and intellectual force, and with the power of the pen, which is no less mighty than that of the sword and so our righteous cause has triumphed. Are we now going to besmear and tarnish this greatest achievement for which there is no parallel in the history of the world? Pakistan is now a fait accompli and it can never be undone, besides, it was the only just, honourable, and practical solution of the most complex constitutional problem of this great subcontinent. Let us now plan to build and reconstruct and regenerate our great nation ... — Muhammad Ali Jinnah

I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one moment after another in the most complex combinations.
Freed from the boundaries of time and space. I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you. - Dziga Vertov 1923 — John Berger

Stereotypes lose their power when the world is found to be more complex than the stereotype would suggest. When we learn that individuals do not fit the group stereotype, then it begins to fall apart. — Ed Koch

The physicist is like someone who's watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves in the game are. But understanding the rules is just a trivial preliminary on the long route from being a novice to being a grand master. So even if we understand all the laws of physics, then exploring their consequences in the everyday world where complex structures can exist is a far more daunting task, and that's an inexhaustible one I'm sure. — Martin Rees

The world grows ever complex. More urban. Less peaceful. — Fennel Hudson

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

A reviewer once commented that my urban fantasy novels were paced more like epic fantasy, in that they relied on complex world-building and a gradual immersion in the lives of the characters. — Laura Anne Gilman

The world is complex, and so too must be the activities that we perform. But that doesn't mean that we must live in continual frustration. No. The whole point of human-centered design is to tame complexity, to turn what would appear to be a complicated tool into one that fits the task, that is understandable, usable, enjoyable. — Donald A. Norman

to investigate the faltering and uneven spread of globalising capital in one small corner of the world, attempting to appreciate the meanings this has for everyday lives, whether via neoliberal techniques of control and governance, shifts in the relative access of different groups to resources, or complex and localised power plays. The wider context: of national contestations over natural resources, the shape of economic development and the relationship between Bangladesh and foreign interests is ever present. — Katy Gardner

In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. Abstraction arises from the recognition of similarities between certain objects, situations, or processes in the real world and the decision to concentrate on these similarities and to ignore, for the time being, their differences. — Tony Hoare

In June 2010, after more than 38 years in uniform, in the midst of commanding a 46-nation coalition in a complex war in Afghanistan, my world changed suddenly - and profoundly. An article in 'Rolling Stone' magazine depicting me, and people I admired, in a manner that felt as unfamiliar as it was unfair, ignited a firestorm. — Stanley A. McChrystal

Global poverty is a complex web of interlinked problems. There is no one 'silver bullet' that will solve global inequality. Multiple contributing factors must be tackled in parallel. Yes, education alone is unlikely to lead to employment without economic reform to address the demand side in much of the developing world. — Adam Braun

The Mirror Empire is the most original fantasy I've read in a long time, set in a world full of new ideas, expanding the horizons of the genre. A complex and intricate book full of elegant ideas and finely-drawn characters. — Adrian Tchaikovsky

That's the world something simpler... humans, mankinds make it complex. — Deyth Banger

Our great problem, is that children now know whatever they want to know - at the press of a button they can discover all horrors of the adult world. They know very early on that the world is sometimes a very dark, difficult and complex place, and the literature they read must reflect that. Otherwise we're just entertaining them to pass the time. — Michael Morpurgo

People are looking for certainty. The more complex the world becomes, the more people look for people to give them certainty and tell them what to do. During the past few years of actively thinking about this, there is one thing that I have accepted: certainty is not out there. There is not one strategy to follow, and that's OK. — Noreena Hertz

Complexity has and will maintain a strong fascination for many people. It is true that we live in a complex world and strive to solve inherently complex problems, which often do require complex mechanisms. However, this should not diminish our desire for elegant solutions, which convince by their clarity and effectiveness. Simple, elegant solutions are more effective, but they are harder to find than complex ones, and they require more time, which we too often believe to be unaffordable — Niklaus Wirth

I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.' ... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the imagination. — Cynthia Ozick