Nuanced Thinking Quotes

It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.

I know a moderate, more centered candidate like myself doesn't get as much attention as people who tend to say more extreme things.

I don't see the world completely in black and white. Sometimes I do.

If you meet your heroes, you're always going to be disappointed. Frederick Douglass was a great man, but would I want my daughter to marry him? Probably not. That doesn't mean that I don't think he's a great man.

I have been brought up open-minded. If I didn't know any people from other countries, I'd think everyone was evil based on news stories. But I know a lot of people, and know that there is no such thing as stark good and evil. Isn't it possible there is the same amount of evil everywhere?

The better you hear a thing put, the more certain you are there's another view.

I am not a person of opinions because I feel the counter arguments too strongly.

I really am opinionated, but not for long. I have found myself coming off of what I think of something because the guy I'm talking to makes better sense than I am. I have so many points of view, I can't keep track of 'em, because I talk to too many people... I'm not so opinionated that I won't budge.

I believe it's worth observing terrible things people have done as clearly and rationally as we can to show that our monsters are not caricatures.

I guess nobody assumes anybody is a libertarian. It's a more complex political discussion than most people are used to, to explain why you think the way you do about public education or drug laws, and why it's not as simple as being for or against something.

Rather than recognising the challenges of a fast-changing society require sometimes complex responses, that we live in a world of trade-offs, that easy answers are usually false answers, we have seen the rise of the simplifiers.

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life.

Things are never as good or as bad as they seem.

I'm sick of having an opinion on everything. Getting older, you learn all sorts of things you're supposed to, but I feel like it's time, when you get older, through experience, to... I started to feel quite... what's the word? ... intimidated by seeing both sides of everything.

I don't think of people as out-and-out black or white.

You can be outraged by what the Koch brothers do with their money in politics and you can appreciate what they contribute to hospitals and medical research, and you can do that at the same time and still retain an ability to function.

The most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems.

You have to laugh at things in order to let them be what they truly are. Because nothing is only sad. Nothing is only funny. There's context to all of those things.

Life is too complex to compress into soundbites. Every situation is different.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

One should be intelligent enough to know when not to be too intellectual

I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium.

The difference between me and them is that I'll look at Jesse Jackson and I'll see four Jesse Jacksons, and they'll just see one, the clown ambulance chaser.

...Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?" "I hope there's gray...Black and white make things easier, but only if you don't want to think.

I don't think that the Left has a monopoly on bad ideas. I don't think the Right has a monopoly on good ideas.