People Are Complex Quotes & Sayings

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. — Robert Winston

As someone who was gay bashed as a kid, I learned firsthand how a lot of people only feel good about themselves when they sense that someone or something is on a lower rung than they are. This inferiority complex drives racism and sexism as well as outdated attitudes about animals. — Dan Mathews

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

Here is the easiest way to explain the genius of Johnny Cash: Singing from the perspective of a convicted muderer in the song "Folsom Prison Blues,: Cash is struck by pangs of regret when he sits in his cell and hears a distant train whistle. This is because people on that train are "probably drinkin' coffee." And this is also why Cash seems completely credible as a felon: He doesn't want freedom or friendship or Jesus or a new lawyer. He wants coffee. Within the mind of a killer, complex feeling are eerily simple. This is why killers can shoot men in Reno just to watch them die, and the rest of us usually can't. — Chuck Klosterman

People are complex. I'm just showing my complexity. — Juliana Hatfield

My hope is that the wolves' stewardship of natural processes in Yellowstone will help people appreciate the complex ways that trees interact with their environment, how our interactions with forests affect their success, and the role forests play in making our world the kind of place where we want to live. Apart from that, forests hide wonders that we are only just beginning to explore. I invite you to enter my world. — Peter Wohlleben

Changes in Relationship with others:
It is especially hard to trust other people if you have been repeatedly abused, abandoned or betrayed as a child. Mistrust makes it very difficult to make friends, and to be able to distinguish between good and bad intentions in other people. Some parts do not seem to trust anyone, while other parts may be so vulnerable and needy that they do not pay attention to clues that perhaps a person is not trustworthy. Some parts like to be close to others or feel a desperate need to be close and taken care of, while other parts fear being close or actively dislike people. Some parts are afraid of being in relationships while others are afraid of being rejected or criticized. This naturally sets up major internal as well as relational conflicts. — Suzette Boon

I guess nobody assumes anybody is a libertarian. It's a more complex political discussion than most people are used to, to explain why you think the way you do about public education or drug laws, and why it's not as simple as being for or against something. — Dave Barry

This makes it much easier to institute radical departures in public policy. In complex or divided societies, the chances are that a minority - or even a majority - will be forced to concede, often against its will. This makes collective policymaking contentious and favors a minimalist approach to social reform: better to do nothing than to divide people for and against a controversial project. — Tony Judt

Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.

Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar,' to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product. — Victor Shklovsky

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

The problem is that white people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that. Racism is a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at other people's expense, whether whites know/like it or not. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn't care if you are a white person who likes Black people; it's still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don't look like you. — Scott Woods

There are diverse styles of learning, problem solving, and a range of methodologies that a person can draw from in order to structure their thoughts or intentionally revise ingrained personal habits including both systematic and unsystematic approaches. Problems solving styles are reflective of personal differences in the manner that people prefer to position themselves in respect to the phenomena in the world and efficiently react to alterations in the external environment. Problem solving strategies encompass numerous variances in what manner a person approaches new concepts, how they manage their daily affairs, and respond effectively to new opportunities and complex challenges. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another. — Nick Hanauer

Agreement is shared intellectual understanding. Tribes are clusters of people, and people are complex and nonrational at times. If a tribe is united only by agreement, as soon as times change, agreement has to be reestablished. — Dave Logan

In studying music, you're dealing with a person, not just what comes to you on a piece of paper, and it's important to get hold of what it is that lies between that person as a person, and the things which they're producing on the paper. I don't know whether I see things in too complex a fashion, but often people will do things which are not actually their nature, but will do things because they think that's what they should do. — Richard Meale

Most people believe they have a clear idea of what's right and wrong. Many say they know how they'll act, or how they'll handle an extreme situation. But to be honest, no one knows. Not really. Even if you say, 'I'll never do this or that.' it actually might not be true. Because no one of us truly knows what we'll do when the circumstances become so overwhelming and complex that we can't even tell right from wrong. And then there are the totally unforeseen situations, when life deals cards you never expected, or when something's that's considered wrong morphs into something right and your mind determines that what once was the rule is not written in stone. — Lurlene McDaniel

Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become. — Niall Williams

I think it's very important for me to work on myself while I'm working on a character, and also it's important how I'm giving to and educating an audience. So I tend to go with people who are complex and substantive. — Judith Light

While the American people have the impression that scientists are hard at work figuring out this complex matter of climate change, it's not actually that complicated. — Margaret D. Klein

Simple people, people who don't exist, prefer things which don't exist,simple things.
"Good" and "bad" are simple things. You bomb me = "bad." I bomb you = "good." Simple people (who,incidentally,run this socalled world)know this(they know everything)whereas complex people - people who feel something - are very,very ignorant and really don't know anything.
Nothing, for simple knowing people, is more dangerous than ignorance. Why?
Because to feel something is to be alive. — E. E. Cummings

Faces may be hard to read because humans are complex social animals that have learned to suppress the display of emotions for various reasons. It is often inappropriate to show negative emotions like hatred and contempt in public, so people go about wearing socially acceptable faces rather like masks. — Glen Wilson

The primary, the most urgent requirement is the promotion of education. It is inconceivable that any nation should achieve prosperity and success unless this paramount, this fundamental concern is carried forward. The principal reason for the decline and fall of peoples is ignorance. Today the mass of the people are uninformed even as to ordinary affairs, how much less do they grasp the core of the important problems and complex needs of the time. — Abdu'l- Baha

You're at this place filled with a bunch of people who want to better their lives, but they need the help of others if they want even the smallest chance to succeed. At this place they tell you their stories, and then they tell you their dreams. You are sitting there, a tourist among people who you do not belong around, but these people, they intrigue you. They show you what it means to rise when you are down. They show you that even the bloodiest battles with your mind can in fact be won. — M.B. Julien

Why'd you give him all that stuff after he tried to rob me?"
"Because he was less fortunate than us, Natty. And Daddy always said that we have to be mindful of those who are less fortunate."
"But Daddy killed people, didn't he?"
"Yes," I admitted. "Daddy was complex. — Gabrielle Zevin

The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. — Anonymous

Our lives are like a complex musical score. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could then transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's lives be so convoluted? — Haruki Murakami

We must note the curious fact that people are not content with what is simple to understand, but go straight for the more complex problems which they will perhaps never grasp. What is simple to grasp is quite usable and useful, and can keep us occupied for a whole lifetime if it satisfies and stimulates us. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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 neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well
the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction. — Nicholson Baker

The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are. — Flemming Rose

Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people's choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them. Most are doing the best they can, given what information they've received and what problems they are facing. — Michael Lerner

I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs. — Freya Stark

Things like the financial markets - a proper grounding in mathematics could help the common man. I believe that if people are more familiar with mathematical concepts ... it can help deal with modern life, which is increasingly complex. — Viswanathan Anand

As a human I'm complex, as a human I don't have limits, but the book have it's own limits. All the time something good happens?? But why people don't continue to live in horror??
It satisfies me, to see how people suck blood it's a symptom that you are watching a vampire... But it's to far isn't it??
Sometimes to dream, how you dream and how you wake up in the dream and you wake up from that dream... wow that's awesome!? — Deyth Banger

The playfulness that I talk about comes very slowly. You cannot just jump out of your seriousness which you have accumulated for lives. Now it has a force of its own. It is not a simple matter to relax; it is one of the most complex phenomena possible, because all that we are taught is tension, anxiety, anguish. Seriousness is the very core the society is built around. Playfulness is for small children, not for grown-up people. And I am teaching you to be children again, to be playful again. It is a quantum leap, a jump ... but it takes time to understand. — Rajneesh

Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally discovering how the universe works via a series of complex tests and experiments, for the benefit of all mankind - and what thanks do you get? People call you "egghead" or "boffin" or "heretic", and they cave your face in with a rock and bury you out in the wilderness.
Not literally - not in this day and age - but you get the idea. Scientists are mistrusted by huge swathes of the general public, who see them as emotionless lab-coated meddlers-with-nature rather than, say, fellow human beings who've actually bothered getting off their arses to work this shit out. — Charlie Brooker

I wish that one would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved [by large studies]; the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion. — Alfred Binet

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

The modern world needs people with a complex identity who are intellectually autonomous and prepared to cope with uncertainty; who are able to tolerate ambiguity and not be driven by fear into a rigid, single-solution approach to problems, who are rational, foresightful and who look for facts; who can draw inferences and can control their behavior in the light of foreseen consequences, who are altruistic and enjoy doing for others, and who understand social forces and trends. — Robert J. Havighurst

We live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to suspect we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty. — Euell Gibbons

Kindness is like a muscle, the more we exercise it the better we are at it.
Kindness starts as a thought but ends as an action. Acting kindly toward others is the only real way to let people know we care about them and their happiness. Without action, kindness just lives in our minds but never touches the real world.
Being kind to others doesn't have to be complex or fancy. Sometimes the simplest acts of kindness are seen as the most sincere, such as holding the door, helping with directions, saying "please" and "thank you," or even just a smile. — Steven Handel

Only people who are well off can be - complex. — H.G.Wells

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

Complex PTSD consists of of six symptom clusters, which also have been described in terms of dissociation of personality. Of course, people who receive this diagnosis often also suffer from other problems as well, and as noted earlier, diagnostic categories may overlap significantly. The symptom clusters are as follows:
Alterations in Regulation of Affect ( Emotion ) and Impulses
Changes in Relationship with others
Somatic Symptoms
Changes in Meaning
Changes in the perception of Self
Changes in Attention and Consciousness — Suzette Boon

As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of 'experts' become more annoying, more people are tempted to think that some 'they' is manipulating 'us', using, among other dark arts, advertising. — George Will

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

Golfers, even the best golfers, tend to think simple thoughts. It is a misconception many of us have about successful people, in all fields, from the best writers to surgeons to physicists, that they are lost in complications, pondering thoughts that would stagger our minds. At times, that's probably true, but much of what successful people think about is relentlessly simple, building blocks that lead to the complex things. — Joe Posnanski

People are under the illusion that it's easy ... Technically, it is complex. You have a million options with equipment to distract you. I tell my students to simplify their equipment. — Brett Weston

Change appears to us mysterious because it is invisible. It is impossible to see a tree grow tall or a man grow old, except with the precarious imagination of hindsight. A tree is small, and later it is tall. A man is young, and later he is old. A people are at peace, and later they are at war. In each case, the intermediate states are at once infinitely many and infinitely complex, which is why they exceed our finite perceptions. — Daniel Tammet

People are now looking at the world in terms of axis of evil and evil-doers and by logical extension good-doers, and that's a very polarised look at good and bad people. Reality is much more complex than that and people can be good and evil on the very same day. — Mario Van Peebles

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. — Walter Lippmann

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

Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practise anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity. — Derren Brown

We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones among us to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything. When we land at a place like London airport we are concerned only not to appear foolish. It is more beautiful and more complex than anything we could have dreamed of, but we are concerned only to let people see that we can manage and are not overawed. — V.S. Naipaul

Human beings are just machines, Petra knew that, machines that do what you want them to do, if you only know the levers to pull. And no matter how complex people might seem, if you just cut them off from the network of people who give shape to their personality, the communities that form their identity, they'll be reduced to that set of levers. Doesn't matter how hard they resist, or how well they know they're being manipulated. Eventually, if you take the time, you can play the like a piano, every note right where you expect it. — Orson Scott Card

Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for hat we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you. — Jamaica Kincaid

For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, — Dorothy L. Sayers

If you take home one souvenir from this part of the tour, may I suggest that it be a suspicion of moral monists. Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places - particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation. Human societies are complex; their needs and challenges are variable. — Jonathan Haidt

When faced with complexity, it is reassuring to tell ourselves that we can uncover and understand every facet of every problem if we just try hard enough. But that's a fallacy. The better approach, I believe, is to accept that we can't understand every facet of a complex environment and to focus, instead, on techniques to deal with combining different viewpoints. If we start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, we become more effective because our ideas or decisions are honed and tempered by that discourse. In a healthy, creative culture, the people in the trenches feel free to speak up and bring to light differing views that can help give us clarity. — Ed Catmull

Overall, the evidence suggests that liking continues to increase as people are exposed to an idea between ten and twenty times, with additional exposure still useful for more complex ideas. Interestingly, — Adam M. Grant

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

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

The thing that you learn in directing is that when you're on the floor, no matter how complex the shooting is ... you have to remain absolutely sensitive to every nuance of the behavior of the people around you. Because, ultimately, if you don't keep in mind the overall humanity, then the machine takes over and suddenly all you have are technically fine shots, technically good performances. The story's being told, but something's lacking, something mysterious, indefinable. — Irvin Kershner

He thought, in your most secret dreams you cut a niche for yourself, and it is finished early, and then you wait for someone to come along to fill it - but to fill it exactly, every cut, curve, hollow and plane of it. And people do come along, and one covers up the niche, and another rattles around inside it, and another is so surrounded by fog that for the longest time you don't know if she fits or not; but each of them hits you with a tremendous impact. And then one comes along and slips in so quietly that you don't know when it happened, and fits so well you almost can't feel anything at all. And that is it.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked him.
He told her, immediately and fully. She nodded as if he had been talking about cats or cathedrals or cam-shafts, or anything else beautiful and complex. She said, "That's right. It isn't all there, of course. It isn't even enough. But everything else isn't enough without it."
"What is 'everything else'? — Theodore Sturgeon

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

The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don't know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them - if the storytelling is good enough - we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, incontrovertible. — George Saunders

One of the pitfalls about writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise-beyond-their-years creatures or these sad-eyed tragic people. And the truth is, people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. They're every bit as funny and complex and diverse as anyone else. — John Green

I want to take some quite incredible photographs that have never been taken before ... pictures which are simple and complex at the same time, which will amaze and overwhelm people ... I must achieve this so that photography can begin to be considered a form of art. — Alexander Rodchenko

This isn't a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naive. That's okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way. A good way to start would be to let fall your notions about "perfect couples." It's really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times. — Cheryl Strayed

More people have access to education today than ever before. But I cannot help but feel that the modern educational experience is not preparing us adequately to attend the rich banquet of life. Certainly the young people of today have mastered the use of technology and are capable of solving complex scientific and mathematical problems, but who and what do these serve if they cannot think for themselves? If they have no understanding of the meaning and purpose of their own lives? If they do not know who they are as individuals? — Matthew Kelly

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

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

The rails intersect and combine in complex and convoluted ways. There are sixteen platforms in total. In addition, there are two private rail lines, the Odakyu line and the Keio line, and three subway lines plugged in, as it were, from the side. It is a total maze. During rush hour, that maze transforms into a sea of humanity, a sea that foams up, rages, and roars as it surges toward the entrances and exits. Streams of people changing trains become entangled, giving rise to dangerous, swirling whirlpools. No prophet, no matter how righteous, could part that fierce, turbulent sea. — Haruki Murakami

Mitt Romney was treated very unfairly. Mitt Romney didn't want to give his tax returns, because people don't understand returns that are complicated, and complex. And he didn't give it. He fought it, fought it, fought it, all the way into September. A month before the election, he gave his tax returns. And they picked out two items that were absolutely perfect. He did nothing wrong. And his returns are very much smaller than my returns. — Donald Trump

I didn't have a perfect model, but I wanted to try to blend my own personal reflections and experiences with this broader canvas to see how a lot of the narratives we have about economy and foreign policy got stuck. Because we have these categories of liberal, conservative, free marketer, open government - all these stereotypes about our politics and the categories we try to put things in are inadequate to this sort of complex, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory experience we have as ordinary people and that I have as an elected official. — Barack Obama

It is common knowledge among psychologists that most of us underrate ourselves, short-change ourselves, sell ourselves short. Actually, there is no such thing as a superiority complex. People who seem to have one are actually suffering from feelings of inferiority; their "superior" self is a fiction, a coverup, to hide from themselves and others their deep-down feelings of inferiority and insecurity. — Maxwell Maltz

The truth of scientific research, just like the truth behind many equally complex areas of study, is that the people behind them are far more human than we tend to admit. — Anonymous

While the visible victims may draw the headlines and attract indignant protests from so-called "pro-life" organizations, the invisible victims are people like you and me who will suffer from diseases that are never cured because funds are being poured down a healthcare sieve in order to maintain permanently-unconscious bodies on complex and costly forms of life support. — Jacob M. Appel

We don't really want to get what we think that we want.
I am married to a wife and relationship with her are cold and I have a mistress. And all the time I dream oh my god if my wife were to disappear - I'm not a murderer but let us say- that it will open up a new life with the mistress.Then, for some reason, the wife goes away, you lose the mistress.
You thought this is all I want, when you have it there, you turn out it was a much more complex situation.
It was not to live with the mistress, but to keep her as a distance as on object of desire about which you dream.
This is not an excessive example, I claim this is how things function. We don't really want what we think we desire — Slavoj Zizek

I think we are making progress, but we have long way to go. People also have got to understand the agenda that we are fighting for. This is a senator who has taken on every powerful special interest, whether it's Wall Street, whether it's drug companies who are ripping off the American people, the military industrial complex. — Bernie Sanders

Imagine, Bishop, that you have a beloved cat, but that your cat is not with you. If you close your eyes and further imagine you are petting your cat, the same neurons in your brains are activated as if you were petting the actual cat. Our minds may know the difference between its models and reality itself, but it prefers its models. So much so that we apprehend reality through our models, rather than directly via the sense. When I'm speaking to you, I have a little bishop in my head, and though I speak out load, I'm speaking to my little bishop. When you answer, I can only perceive you through my model of you.
Mentars also make models, but they don't apprehend reality through them. They end up, not with little people in their minds, but with highly complex rule sets. They relate to their models in the same way we relate to weather models, as things to consult, but not to conflate with external reality. — David Marusek

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

I don't think that politics are as complex as people like to make them seem or out to be. — Lupe Fiasco

I really should not be so willing to interpret my own books as I seem to be this evening. But the blessing Ames gives Jack is an act of recognition that blesses Ames, too. He is profoundly moved that he has had the occasion to do it, that Jack accepted it, wanted it. I really do believe that all blessing is mutual, and that the moment of blessing is when people rise to the very beautiful seriousness of what they are. I feel that we ought to value ourselves and one another far more than we do, and I'm speaking theologically here, but also with an awareness that always haunts me, that we are the wonder of the universe, incomparably complex, brilliant, poignant - and perverse, of course. Our own overwhelming problem. But there are good grounds for awe in any human encounter. If we came anywhere near respecting the richness of this improbable life - hopes would flourish and blossom as they have never done before. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Geoff Mulgan

What I see in the corporate sector is very clearly an issue of a major shortfall in the issue of, what some people call confidence, but whatever you want to call it. Clearly people are looking out in the very distant future and they are saying that it is too complex. — Alan Greenspan

Explanations involving conspiracy, greed, and even stupidity are easier to generate and accept than more complex explanations that may be closer to the truth.

A bit of wisdom called Hanlon's Razor advises us 'Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.' I would add a clumsier but more accurate corollary to this: 'Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system of interactions.' People behaving with no central coordination and acting in their own best interest can still create results that appear to some to be clear proof of conspiracy or a plague of ignorance. — Douglas W. Hubbard

Being concerned about other people is especially relevant in today's world. If we consider the complex inter-connected ness of our modern lives, how we depend on others and others depend on us, our outlook will change. We'll begin to see 'others' not as somehow distant from us, but as people we are in touch with, people close to us; we will no longer feel indifferent to them. — Dalai Lama

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places
and there are so many
where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. — Howard Zinn

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

Alignment, to us, means bringing pieces into the same line - the same direction. The metaphor is that a magnet will make pieces of iron point toward it. Agreement is share intellectual understanding. Tribes are clusters of people, and people are complex and nonrational at times. If a tribe is united only by agreement, as soon as times change, agreement has to be reestablished. If people learn new ideas or see a problem from a new perspective, they no longer agree, so tribes based on agreement often discourage learning, questioning, and independent thought. Tribes based on alignment want to maximize each person's contribution, provided that they stay pointed in the same direction like magnetized iron filings. — Dave Logan

I see the God complex around me all the time in my fellow economists. I see it in our business leaders. I see it in the politicians we vote for - people who, in the face of an incredibly complicated world, are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works. — Tim Harford

So the real question for me as an educator is, if I go out and tell people that I think they are eating too much sugar, if I go out and tell mothers I think they should stop their kids from eating so much sugar because it is bad for them, am I going to get flak from the scientists? Or am I going to be allowed to make that statement without travail, on the grounds that even though we do not have hard evidence to link sugar with a specific disease, we do know that a dietary pattern containing considerably less sugar, in which sugar is replaced by a complex carbohydrate, would be a much healthier diet? JOAN GUSSOW, chairman, Columbia University nutrition department, 1975 I — Gary Taubes

Things like pornography perpetuates this idea that women are just there as objects of male desire and are not complex people with their own sexuality and humanity. — Marielle Heller

Economic development is not a zero-sum game; the world does not need poor countries in order to have rich countries, nor must some people be poor in order for others to be rich. Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house. They are poor despite the fact that Bill Gates lives in a big house. For a complex array of reasons, America's poor have not shared in the productivity gains spawned by Microsoft Windows. Bill Gates did not take their pie away; he did not stand in the way of their success or benefit from their misfortunes. — Charles Wheelan

Bayes's theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes's theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions - or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called. — Bill Bryson

You've got this world, these pathologists that are, day in and day out, taking apart bodies, coming up with theories about how they died and how to better serve the community. At the same time these people have lives outside and families and my character in particular, he has a fiance and things are going well for him, so you've got to show that nice warm compassionate side at the same time you've got to show the steely, icy cool of a doctor. Not only that, but a doctor who gets a bit of a God complex and starts killing people for sport. — Milo Ventimiglia

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

What attracted me to it, beyond it being really intelligent, was that it was sadly something that would be unique on television. Anchoring this political show is this vital, dynamic, complex, thriving marriage. These people are passionately and fiercely committed to making it work out. — Tim Daly