John McCarthy Quotes

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

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.

As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

President Bush should learn to focus on the shades of grey

The more one-dimensional an explanation of something complex and far reaching, the greater the grounds for skepticism.

People who want to see things in stark dualities are not going to get much out of my music.

We grow up to respect the gray. Black or white, one or the other, is childish. It represents the worldview of someone who does not know the world.

Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable.

Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.

Damn all false dichotomies to hell

The world is complicated and full of grays, but there's still truth there to be found.

Truth is always paradoxical.

Frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who has a strong opinion on a complicated issue.

I guess if you want to know one single thing I'm about, it's that I'm against easy answers.

To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.

It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source. Thus it is that we are often not at liberty to do violence to error, because at the same time we do violence to truth.

A lot of the issues that I see, it is not an either-or situation.

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

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

Always seek the general and never quite trust it.

If a man's wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores, splitters of hairs.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.