#complex

We need to shift the paradigm from reactive technologies to more integrative solutions that deal with the variety and complexity of the threats that are out there today. ↗

— John W. Thompson

#deal #more #need #out #paradigm

Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time. ↗

— Benjamin Hoff

#added #complex #complex system #confucianism #court

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#aspire #beings #biologists #birds #broader

Cinema, which is influenced by every single part of life, is direct and reaches you immediately. And writing - the best writing is complex ideas communicated concisely. And music - if it's a good tune, make sure people can bloody hear it. ↗

— Alex Kapranos

#bloody #cinema #communicated #complex #direct

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that. ↗

— Philip Kaufman

#answers #anything #complex #death #death penalty

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

— Paul Tournier

#accepting #away #comes #complexes #contrary

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. ↗

— Cornel West

#brown #catastrophe #complex #discourse #ghettos

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

— James Q. Wilson

#complex #contradictory #different #different people #empower

For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know--without ever having constructed one ourselves--that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209) ↗

— Alain de Botton

#complexity #complicated #construction #design #elegance

Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However the words in a great poet's phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly speaking, each word must be read or heard before the next. That way, language is as unilinear as time. Hence, in narrative, the great difficulty of presenting a very complicated change which happens suddenly. If we do justice to the complexity, the time the reader must take over the passage will destroy the feeling of suddenness. If we get the suddenness we shall not be able to get in the complexity. I am not saying that genius will not find its own way of palliating this defect in the instrument; only that the instrument is in this way defective. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#language #time #change