Complex Systems Quotes

• The only way to know how a complex system will behave-after you modify it-is to modify it and see how it behaves.

  George E. P. Box

  Way, Behave, Complexes

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• Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are extracted from messes by analysis. Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

  Russell L. Ackoff

  Independent, Risk, Analysis

  "Thinking in Systems: a Primer" by Donella Meadows, (p. 1), 2008.

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• The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

  Kevin Kelly

  Simple, Way, Literature

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• That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

  Steve Jobs

  Change, Inspiring, Life Changing

  "The 13 Most Memorable Quotes From Steve Jobs" by Dylan Love, www.businessinsider.com. October 5, 2011.

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• Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Different, Gains, Easier

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• You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.

  Tim Harford

  Successful, Errors, Trial And Error

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• The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Simple, Views, World

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• Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Simple, Pool Table, Way

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.16, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Complexity is not a goal. I don't want to be remembered as an engineer of complex systems.

  David Parnas

  Goal, Want, Complexity

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• Focus and simplicity...once you get there, you can move mountains.

  Steve Jobs

  Life Lesson, Moving, Simple

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• Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Knowledge, Garden, Race

  "The Primer Project". International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) seminar, October 12 - November 10, 1997.

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• Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

  Steve Jobs

  Change, Life Changing, Hard Work

  "Steve Jobs quotes: the man in his own words", www.theguardian.com. October 6, 2011.

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• When building a complex system, having crackerjack programmers (who can make any design work, even a bad one) can be a liability. The result, after lots of effort, is a working system that cannot be easily maintained or upgraded. Good -but not great- programmers would fail early, causing a realization that the system must be redesigned, and then reimplemented. The extra cost is paid once, early in the system's cycle (when it is cheap), instead of repeatedly paid late in the system's cycle (when it is more expensive).

  Richard E. Pattis

  Learning, Design Work, Effort

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• The human body is the most complex system ever created. The more we learn about it, the more appreciation we have about what a rich system it is.

  Bill Gates

  Appreciation, Body, Rich

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• Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability- except the order of a dead universe filled with a uniformly distributed gas.

  Arthur Koestler

  Simple, Order, Society

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• The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity.

  Seth Lloyd

  Simple, Law, Giving

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• What is important is that complex systems, richly cross-connected internally, have complex behaviours, and that these behaviours can be goal-seeking in complex patterns.

  William Ross Ashby

  Goal, Important, Behaviour

  William Ross Ashby (1956). “An Introduction to Cybernetics. (1. Publ.)”

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• Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

  Jurgen Habermas

  Goal, Cynical, Terrorism

  "Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida". Book by Giovanna Borradori, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas, p. 34, 2003.

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• That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex.

  Steve Jobs

  Inspirational, Change, Life Changing

  Steve Jobs (0101). “Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs”, p.44, Prabhat Prakashan

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• We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.

  Roger Penrose

  Law, Circles, Consistency

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• If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.

  Seth Lloyd

  Hair, Views, Dynamics

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• We have a complex system of government. You have to teach it to every generation.

  Sandra Day O'Connor

  Government, Generations, Teach

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• most economists, like doctors, are reluctant to make predictions, and those who make them are seldom accurate. The economy, like the human body, is a highly complex system whose workings are not thoroughly understood.

  Alice Rivlin

  Doctors, Body, Economics

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• No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.

  Emma Goldman

  Ignorance, Mean, Men

  "My Disillusionment in Russia". Book by Emma Goldman, 1925.

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• 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

  Hate, White, People

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