Simplification Quotes

The simplification of anything is always sensational. (G. K. Chesterton)
To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization. View quote
Thomas Malthus
Nor does complexity deny the valid simplification which is part of the process of analysis, and even a method of achieving complex architecture itself. View quote
Robert Venturi
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject - the actual enemy is the unknown. View quote
Thomas Mann
It is easy to talk about tax simplification, and we all know it is very difficult to accomplish; but for the last three Congresses, I have offered a tax simplification bill that would include a paid-for repeal of alternative minimum tax. View quote
Richard Neal
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. View quote
Martin H. Fischer
I believe [...] that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. [...] I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and-if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills-on the businessman's special to Tokyo. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life. View quote
Peace Pilgrim
Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect. View quote
Willa Cather
We should always bear in mind that numbers represent a simplification of reality. (Kenneth Boulding)
One of the most important skills of the economist, therefore, is that of simplification of the model. Two important methods of simplification have been developed by economists. One is the method of partial equilibrium analysis (or microeconomics), generally associated with the name of Alfred Marshall and the other is the method of aggregation (or macro-economics), associated with the name of John Maynard Keynes. View quote
Kenneth Boulding
Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable. View quote
Stanisław Lem
I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity. View quote
C. S. Lewis
A new level of organization means a simplification of system function, and of the corresponding system structure, it also means the initiation of a process of progressive structural and functional complexification. View quote
Ervin László
People are so complex and multidimensional that raising someone to 'hero' status is too great a simplification. View quote
Dalia Mogahed
There are elements of intrinsic beauty in the simplification of a house built on the log cabin idea. View quote
Gustav Stickley
But what is striking about this, in a town that often talks about tax cuts, we could quite easily, Republicans and Democrats working together, do something that everybody in America desires, and that is a simplification of our Tax Code. View quote
Richard Neal
The great defect, for Chamfort, consisted in the public's reluctance to submit its thinking to the rigors of rational examination, and its tendency to rely instead on intuition, emotion, and custom. "One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,” the Frenchman observed, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little more than common nonsense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: "The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that's the tradition.”. View quote
Alain de Botton
Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures. View quote
Tom Peters
My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details. (Joan Miró)
A deep and serene silence filled her structures composed of colors and surfaces. The exclusive use of horizontal and vertical rectangular planes in the work of art, the extreme simplification, exerted a decisive influence on my work. Here I found, stripped down to the limit, the essential elements of all earthly constructions: the bursting, upward surge of the lines and the planes toward the sky, the verticality of pure life, and the vast equilibrium, the sheer horizontality and expansiveness of dreamlike peace. Her work was for me a symbol of a divinely built 'house' which man in his vanity has ravaged and sullied. View quote
Jean Arp
The art of discovery is confused with the logic of proof and an artificial simplification of the deeper movements of thought results. We forget that we invent by intuition though we prove by logic. View quote
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification - framing the debate in terms which ignore the real issues. View quote
Michael Crichton
The economic history of the last half century offers two cases of serious international depressions in countries with an essential orientation towards a market economy: In the first half of the 1930ies and in the middle of the 1970ies. With some simplification one can say that in the former case recovery started after a few years without the aid of much conscious expansionist policy. View quote
Bertil Ohlin