Over-Simplification Quotes

In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.

Journalists want me to keep repeating myself and they don't see that it would make people think I didn't believe myself. If what I say isn't worth believing when I say it, what additional value would it have from being repeated? If I were to repeat that statement this afternoon, in two weeks the newspapers would all be clamoring to have me say it again. Then pretty soon I should have to say it every day, and nobody would believe it.

The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!

People tend to simplify things.

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

Just because we have the best hammer, does not mean that every problem is a nail.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If we start to dumb down what has been made clear, where does that stop?

In all aspects of our society we overcomplicate things under the guise of making things easier and simpler, when in fact we are doing the opposite.

It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

I'd be wary of simple solutions to complex problems.

People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes.

In any case, the idea of giving "all" of reality is overly simple and absurd.

The method of science depends on our attempts to describe the world with simple theories: theories that are complex may become untestable, even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification-the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.

It is so hard to make important decisions that we have a great urge to reduce them to rules.

If you overdo something, you end up typecast. You always have to expand.

Hard distinctions make bad philosophy.

To generalize is to be an idiot.

What I really resent most about people sticking labels on you is that it cuts off all the other elements of what you are because it can only deal with black and white; the cartoon.

The present blitz about drugs - I think it looks very much like how we treated insane people 100 years ago -- throw them in the cage - as if that's the whole answer. And it's not the whole answer.

Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

The more you try to simplify things the more you complicate them. You create rules, build walls, push people away, lie to yourself and ignore true feelings. That is not simplifying things.