Simplification Quotes - Page 4

• A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.

  Bill McKibben

  Style, Desire, Ability

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• It's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of these supply chains in international capitalism, unless it is the nation state.

  James C. Scott

  Way, Structure, States

  "An Interview with James C. Scott | Harry G. West and Celia Plender". Gastronomica Interview, gastronomica.org. March 14, 2017.

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• Nature/Structure. There is no more to say. In my pictures I reduce to that. But 'reduce' is the wrong word, because these are not simplifications. I can't verbalize what I am working on: to me, it is many-layered by definition; it is what is more important, what is more true.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Important, Definitions

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• The economic union - creating a big common market, like the United States, so that you can compete across borders. There are common rules, regulations, and simplification, and that is still a good reason, too. When they put their monetary union together, that created a rigidity that made it hard for currency fluctuations. They don't really have a solution to that.

  Jamie Dimon

  Creating, Together, United States

  Source: asia.nikkei.com

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• Every attempt to explain human behavior, especially the irrational, must as a matter of course end in simplification.

  Morton Irving Seiden

  Matter, Behavior, Ends

  Morton Irving Seiden (1968). “The paradox of hate: a study in ritual murder”

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• To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.

  Amartya Sen

  Europe And America, World, Rewards

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

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• The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Medicine, Track, Events

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• The brain, Schopenhauer says, is the 'one great tool' that has enabled a creature endowed with neither sharp teeth nor claws to survive in a competitive environment. Moreover simplification of data, and indeed judicious falsification, are adaptive traits.

  Julian Young

  Brain, Environment, Traits

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• ... one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross over-simplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement.

  Geoffrey Hill

  Tyrants, Mind, Language

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• I will work with Congress to introduce a series of legislative reforms and will fight for their passage in the first 100 days of my administration. And this legislation quickly includes Middle Class Tax Relief and Simplification Act.

  Donald Trump

  Fighting, Class, Administration

  "Donald Trump’s campaign has become one big airing of grievances". www.washingtonpost.com. October 27, 2016.

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• Faith transcends reason because divine truth is not only higher, but also wider than the human mind, and the rationalist in his haste for premature simplification always tends to shut his eyes to one aspect of the truth and to seek a false harmony of thought by the sacrifice of an essential element of reality.

  Christopher Dawson

  Eye, Sacrifice, Reality

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• What we need of equipment is this: let it possess as good a structure as the real-life content that surrounds us. We need more simplifications to free us for seeing.

  Berenice Abbott

  Real, Needs, Structure

  Berenice Abbott, Julia Van Haaften (1989). “Berenice Abbott, photographer: a modern vision : a selection of photographs and essays”

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• Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Spiritual, War, Luxury

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• It's a simplification to say that the men [during Stone Age] went to war to maintain their dominance over the women. The men would help dig agricultural ditches because they were superb farmers. That was very heavy lifting work. But then they just preened themselves, and put bird-of-paradise plumes [in their hair], and smoked dope.

  Peter Matthiessen

  War, Dope, Men

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• In my opinion, a master is morally obliged to seize every sort of opportunity and to try to solve the problems of the position without fear of some simplifications.

  Alexander Alekhine

  Opportunity, Trying, Opinion

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• The Structure of Magic I by Richard Bandler and John Grinder is a delightful simplification of the infinite complexities of the language I use with patients. In reading this book, I learned a great deal about the things that I've done without knowing about them.

  Milton H. Erickson

  Reading, Book, Knowing

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• Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.

  Michael Joseph Oakeshott

  Support, Political, Purpose

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• I despair of persuading people to drop the familiar and comforting tactic of dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we might expand the framework of debates by seeking other dichotomies more appropriate than, or simply different from, the conventional divisions. All dichotomies are simplifications, but the rendition of a conflict along differing axes of several orthogonal dichotomies might provide an amplitude of proper intellectual space without forcing us to forgo our most comforting tool of thought.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Axes, Space, People

  "Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 8, 1987.

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• ...Simplifications have had a much greater long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity. The opportunity for simplification is very encouraging, because in all examples that come to mind the simple and elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design and get right, more efficient in execution, and much more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability....Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Hard Work, Opportunity, Simple

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• Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.

  Edward Abbey

  Art, Philosophy, Crude

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.29, RosettaBooks

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• Many foreigners have asked me how we made the Danish style. And I've answered that it...was rather a continuous process of purification, and for me of simplification, to cut down to the simplest possible elements of four legs, a seat and combined top rail and arm rest.

  Hans Wegner

  Cutting, Style, Elements

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• We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning?

  Geoffrey Hill

  Real, Self, Ordinary Days

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• Give the child good books, then let it alone! Don't plough and harrow its brain, or stretch it on Procrustes-beds of standardization, simplification, and what not!

  Laura E. Richards

  Children, Book, Reading

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• There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians.

  Richard Lewontin

  Events, Narrative, Kind

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Simplification of modes of proof is not merely an indication of advance in our knowledge of a subject, but is also the surest guarantee of readiness for farther progress.

  Lord Kelvin

  Knowledge, Science, Progress

  Lord Kelvin, LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S. and Peter Guthrie Tait, M.A. (1912). “Elements of Natural Philosophy”

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