Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

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

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

I hate bumper stickers, you can't sum anything up. All you do is paint yourself in some caricaturist corner.

For too long, actually, we have either said you're this or that.

What I really don't like is oversimplification.

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

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

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.

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

Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know?

The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification - framing the debate in terms which ignore the real issues.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

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.

There are two words for everything.

Issues are never simple. One thing I'm proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

It is very difficult to deliver nuance in a campaign. Campaigns are about contrasts.

You can not reduce issues to simple yes or no answers in a plebiscite.

There is more than two sides. Facts are often apart from what both sides say about each other.

One of the failures of our politics is that it has been simplistic.

Some things are too important or too complicated to be reduced to bullet points on slides.

… steer clear of bogus simplicity

Simple black-and-white thinking or action is always going to be problematic.

I'd rather not ever make anything overly simple just because I'm scared people won't get it.

There's light and dark in all things, you know?

I think it's common to want to label things as all good or all bad and what I'm finding is that every situation, person, event, has good and bad in it.