"Expansion means complexity and complexity decay."
—C. Northcote Parkinson (1909-1993)
"Complexity is a device for evading simple truths"
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
"If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity."
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“Complexity is the worst enemy of security, and our systems are getting more complex all the time.”
— Bruce Schneier
"Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks. In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual content of work at all levels. Work comes to depend on an ability to understand, respond to, manage, and create value from information."
— Shoshana Zuboff
"Our complexity is much more likely to lead us astray than any simplicity we may follow."
— Roger Kimball
“...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”
― Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
"Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it."
—Alan Perlis (1922-1990)
"Considering the inconceivable complexity of processes even in a simple cell, it is little short of a miracle that the simplest possible model - namely, a linear equation between two variables - actually applies in quite a general number of cases."
― Ludwig Von Bertalanffy (1901-1972)
"Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it, the user or the developer (programmer or engineer)."
— Larry Tesler (1945-2020)
"You cannot reduce the complexity of a given task beyond a certain point. Once you've reached that point, you can only shift the burden around."
— Larry Tesler
"The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer"
― Bjarne Stroustrup
“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
— Andy Benoit
"As society becomes more and more complex, cheating will in many ways become progressively easier and easier to do and harder to police or even understand."
— Vitalik Buterin
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
― Confucius (551BC-479BC)
"Some problems are just too complicated for rational, logical solutions.
They admit of insights, not answers."
— Jerome Wiesner (1915-1994)
"Be as simple as you can be; you will be astonished to see how uncomplicated and happy your life can become."
— Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952)
"Politics is far more complicated than physics."
— Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness."
— Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
"There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies.
My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness."
— Dalai Lama
"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple."
— Dr. Seuss (1904-1991)
"Style is a simple way of saying complicated things."
— Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
"Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts."
— Paul Ambroise Valery (1871-1945)
"Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events."
— Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)