D. A. Carson Quotes

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.

I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it.

False dichotomies are often at the heart of discord.

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.

Hard distinctions make bad philosophy.

What I really don't like is oversimplification.

To be a fashion critic is easy because you just say, 'I love it, I hate it,' but life is more than love and hate.

Our society has lost its taste for complexity and nuance…. We want simple answers …. We have almost disabled our politicians from speaking.

Simple black-and-white thinking or action is always going to be problematic.

This matter of two sides to every question is bad logic and bad practice: sometimes there are no sides; sometimes there are a hundred.

To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.

there are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

People are afraid of detail and complexity.

My life won't be a series of either/ors - musician or actor, rock or country, straitlaced or rebellious, this or that, yes or no. The real choices in life aren't that simple.

When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white.

There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.

I hate bumper stickers, you can't sum anything up. All you do is paint yourself in some caricaturist corner.

I'm one extreme or the other. I'm not good at doing moderation.

I'm kind of a sloppy feminist. Any ideology makes me a little nervous because there's some point where it doesn't allow for the complexity of things.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

There are two words for everything.

I'm not a politician because I'm an artist. Politicians have a very easy answer for a very complicated question. I have a very complicated question for what you consider very easy situations.

If everything isn't black and white, I say, 'Why the hell not?'