David Cross Quotes

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

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

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'.

What I really resent most about people sticking labels on you is that it cuts off all the other elements of what you are because it can only deal with black and white; the cartoon.

I don't believe songs that try to say everything in a simple slogan.

Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.

There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.

It's always easy to describe something complex by applying to it an already known label.

Sometimes we tend to focus more on the personalities and the conflicts, and it really caricatures the issues.

What I really don't like is oversimplification.

I don't think any of us like to be reduced to just one label.

To be a fashion critic is easy because you just say, 'I love it, I hate it,' but life is more than love and hate.

Our society has lost its taste for complexity and nuance…. We want simple answers …. We have almost disabled our politicians from speaking.

People tend to simplify things.

Accusations fit on a bumper sticker. The truth is longer.

… steer clear of bogus simplicity

People like to invent enemies. It spares us the need to address complex worldviews.

People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes.

Stereotypes are convenient. And yet within them, everyone will say there's something that - you know, they don't come for no reason. It's just that it takes time to explore complexity.

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.

You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never.

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.

There are always people who are desperate to put you in your one camp and never let you leave. The idea that you could be interested in the Yazidi community and also in lipstick blows people's minds. It's a really short-sighted, Stone Age attitude; it's boring, actually.