#sophistication

The expansion and sophistication of transnational crime represents one of the most dangerous threats we confront in the next millennium. ↗

— Rand Beers

#crime #dangerous #expansion #millennium #most

Despite all that education and experience can do, I retain a certain level of unsophistication that I cannot eradicate and that my friends find amusing. In fact, I think I sometimes detect conspiratorial plottings among my friends to protect me against my own lack of sophistication. I don't mind. I suspect that I am never quite as unsophisticated as they think I am, but I don't mind. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#humor #sophistication #education

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#intellectual-sophistication #internet #irony #nerd #nerdery

When I decided to get married at 40, I couldn't find a dress with the modernity or sophistication I wanted. That's when I saw the opportunity for a wedding gown business. ↗

— Vera Wang

#business #decided #dress #find #get

In other cases, when the medium becomes entranced, the demonstration of a communicator's separate intelligence may become stronger and the sophistication less. ↗

— Oliver Joseph Lodge

#becomes #cases #communicator #demonstration #entranced

The amount of sophistication varies according to the quality of the medium, and to the state of the same medium at different times; it must be attributed in the best cases physiologically to the medium, intellectually to the control. ↗

— Oliver Joseph Lodge

#amount #attributed #best #cases #control

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions? ↗

— Joni Mitchell

#complex #emotions #europeans #experiencing #handle

There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake. ↗

— Bill Conti

#aesthetic #composers #higher #i #illusions

Being a Chicano in Hollywood, my experience is that you're not given credit for any sophistication... You're just kind of some guy that just crossed the border, you know, on the back of a truck and that's it. ↗

— Cheech Marin

#back #being #border #credit #crossed

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun. ↗

— Sherwood Anderson

#future #ghosts #life #manhood #nothingness