Selected simplification quotes

1. If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.

2. It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.

3. We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

4. Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

5. Jeet Kune Do, It's just a name, don't fuss over it. There's no such thing as a style if you understand the roots of combat.

6. To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical. 'To illustrate a principle,' says Bagehot, 'you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.' As to the quantity of absolute truth in a thought: it seems to me the more comprehensive and unobjectionable a thought becomes, the more clumsy and unexciting it gets. I like half-truths of a certain kind - they are interesting and they stimulate.

7. 'Think simple' as my old master used to say. Meaning, reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

8. The simplification of anything is always sensational.

9. The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

10. Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality... :-)

11. All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the 'fifties' or 'sixties,' as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.

12. 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.').

13. The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child ; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.

14. My theory of hitting was just to watch the ball as it came in and hit it. [2]

15. Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

16. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification - the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

17. I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done, so now I just have to fill in the rest.

18. Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

19. All you have to do is kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will crumble to the ground.

20. Well, the first cause is not...it's lightning striking a mud puddle. See, and this is what the evolutionists say. And by the way, they may be right -- you know, I'm not a scientist, they could be right.

21. We're sucking the gooey cellulite from modern music. Reductive synthesis. We do it all for you.

22. Genius is the ability to look at things simply.

23. Pour qu'un ensemble de sensations soit devenu un souvenir susceptible d'etre classe dans le temps, il faut qu'il ait cesse d'etre actuel, que nous ayons perdu le sens de son infinie complexite, sans quoi il serait reste actuel. Il faut qu'il ait pour ainsi dire cristallise autour d'un centre d'associations d'idees qui sera comme une sorte d'etiquette. Ce n'est que quand ils auront ainsi perdu toute vie que nous pourrons classer nos souvenirs dans le temps, comme un botaniste range dans son herbier les fleurs dessechees.

24. He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand.

25. Jim 'The Waco Kid' (Gene Wilder): 'My name is Jim, most people call me... Jim.'

26. The five attitudes are: Upper, Middle, Lower, Right Side, and Left Side. These are the five. Although attitude has these five dimensions, the one purpose of all of them is to cut the enemy. There are none but these five attitudes. Whatever attitude you are in, do not be conscious of making the attitude; think only of cutting.

27. [Noam Chomsky has] become the guru of the new anti-capitalist and Third World movements. They take his views very uncritically; it's part of the Seattle mood - whatever America does is wrong. He confronts orthodoxy but he's becoming a big simplifier. What he can't see is Third World and other regimes that are oppressive and not controlled by America. --Fred Halliday, January 2001 [215]

28. Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life.

29. We know more than we need to know.

30. We'll use a signal I have tried and found far-reaching and easy to yell. Waa-hoo!

31. When eating an elephant take one at a time.

32. Making technology work simpler, he was at the heart of that from the first days at Apple. Jef Raskin is one of the most important people in personal computers, to this day. ~ Steve Wozniak

33. It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.

34. I should like to take the wind and water and sand as a motif and work with them, but it has to be simplified in most cases to colour and force lines, just as music has done with sound.

35. Physics has in the main contented itself with studying the abridged edition of the book of nature.

36. Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it? How has it entered in so definite a way into our exprerience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine. Let us pass on. ... And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left only with pointer readings.

37. You know what causes sexual thoughts? I'm gonna clear the air for you tonight. I'm gonna end this debate, hopefully once and for all while on this planet, 'cause outer space awaits our presence, we are better and more unique creatures than this and all eternity is our playground, so let me go ahead and clear this one issue up once and for all and let's move on to real issues. Here's what causes sexual thoughts: having a dick.

38. Then they'd beam down to an oval of gravel with 6 big rocks in the back : every week. 'Oh Captain, strong deja-vu here.' And they'd get out these machines: Widly-we widly-we widly-we widly-we widly-we 'Captain, this entire planet is made of widly-we. And so are you Captain, and Chekov, and Sulu, and Uhura, and everything we've ever thought of is widly-we. I think this might just be a box with widly-we written on it.''

39. Children and fools want everything, because they want wit to distinguish; there is no stronger evidence of a crazy understanding than the making too large a catalogue of things unneccesary.

40. You gotta boil it down to the essentials. It's like Cube says, 'Life ain't nothing but bitches and money.'

41. Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

42. 'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' the manager said. 'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' Bruce said and gazed. 'Echolalia, Bruce, echolalia,' the manager said. 'Echolalia, Bruce-' 'Okay, Bruce,' the manager said, and shut the cabin door behind him, thinking, I believe I'll put him among the carrots. Or beets. Something simple. Something that won't puzzle him.

43. And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

44. All you need is love.

45. J. C. Watts is the only black member of the Republican Party in leadership. He's going to resign from Congress. He's been there seven and a half years. He's had enough. Nobody can believe it. Nobody in Washington can believe it... In an interview two days ago, Watts said, Here's the problem with Washington: 'If you are explaining, you are losing.' If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem. Six years after this battle began, we're still explaining. We're still explaining and we are losing. They frame this as a massive battle to stop theft, to protect property... They extend copyrights perpetually. They don't get how that in itself is a form of theft. A theft of our common culture. We have failed in getting them to see what the issues here are and that's why we live in this place where a tradition speaks of freedom and their controls take it away.