Simplistic Thinking Quotes

The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind,' puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

Television is to news as bumperstickers are to philosophy.

Black and white is how it should be, but shades of grey are the colors I see.

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.

I'm like Bush, I see the world more like checkers than chess.

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

I hunt deer because they aren't capable of higher forms of thinking. All they care about is, 'What am I going to eat next, who am I going to screw next, and can I run fast enough to get away'. They are very much like the French in that way.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

People who want a sane, static, measurable world take the first aspect of an event or person and stick to it, with an almost self-protective obstinacy, or by a natural limitation of their imaginations. They do not indulge in either deepening or magnifying.

Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.

We always want to find good and bad guys, and I don't believe in that.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God.

I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.

A long time ago, I became aware that many of us have a tendency to lump nature into simplistic categories, such as what we consider beautiful or ugly, important or unimportant. As human a thing as that is to do, I think it often leads us to misunderstand the respective roles of life forms and their interconnectedness.

Look at the European Parliament. There are a lot of people who are looking for simplistic solutions, for - who are sort of preaching policies of - well, very unfriendly policies.

When you start a sentence with the word 'illegal', you've got nowhere to go. An illegal is illegal.

In Poland a man must be one thing: white or black, here or there, with us or against us -- clearly, openly, without hesitations. . . . We lack the liberal, democratic tradition rich in all its gradations. We have instead the tradition of struggle: the extreme situation, the final gesture.