Peter Dicken Quotes

Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.

It would be wonderful if the public sector were always great, or always terrible; or if the private sector were always great, or always terrible. Alas, reality is more complicated than comforting caricatures. Governments fail, and corporations fail.

The truth is complicated, and few people are actually monsters.

That's what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

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

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

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.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

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

What I really don't like is oversimplification.

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.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

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

The world you perceive is a drastically simplified model of the real world.

Reality is complex, but the politicians and the public demand simple answers.

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

… steer clear of bogus simplicity

It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.

Facts are often complicated.

Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most.

Reality has always proved to be much more sophisticated and subtle than any preconceived philosophy.

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

...everything looks worse in black and white.