Reductive Thinking Quotes

Although I often find that the feminist rhetoric - not feminism - can come across as simple-minded, self-regarding, nuance-averse and reductive - biology to physiology, history to psychology, procreation to gynecology, and so on - I have come to realize that we should all be feminists.

Undoubtedly, one comes closer to the truth when one sees history as the expression of the class struggle rather than a series of private quarrels among kings and nobles. But precisely because such an analysis of history comes closer to the truth, it is more dangerous. It gives the illusion of full knowledge; it supplies answers to all questions, answers which merely run around in a circle repeating a few formulas.

The third-person or 'objective,' static, reductive models used in most science are important and yield significant results, but they have their limitations.

Milton Friedman is a man with dangerously simplistic visions and explanations of the economic world.

Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.

In the press, there's this desire for the black audience to be this monolithic thing that always responds to the same stars. That's a really reductive way of looking at the black audience.

everything isn't everything

I think it's a little simplistic to explain a work through the psychology of its author. In other words, that Haneke has emotional problems, so I don't have to take his films seriously. By using this argument, the viewer retreats from the challenges of the film.

It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.

I don't want to discount the beautiful work that the fashion houses do, but somehow, just focusing on what you're wearing feels reductive.

The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism.

Life is infinitely complex, and I feel like we live in a culture that really seems to want to simplify it into sound bites and bromides, and that does not work.

Generational thinking has always been reductive and condescending.

What we know oman today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him as a machine.

Next comes the realist phase ("After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.")

Man, my girl is one tough chick when she wants to be. I wonder if it has something to do with those big, comfy granny panties she’s got on.

His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another.

In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc.

It is no use trying to sum people up.

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.