Kevin Phillips Quotes

The world is interconnected and causations run in many directions at once.

Everything...affects everything

Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

We work because it's a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.

You cannot do only one thing.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

The cause ceasing, the effect ceases also.

The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace.

What happened yesterday affects today; what happens today will affect tomorrow/

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

You can never do merely one thing. The law applies to any action that changes something in a complex system. The point is that an action taken to alleviate a problem will trigger several effects, some of which may offset or even negate the one intended.

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

It is not possible to refer a complex difficulty to a single cause.

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomenon.

What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else

Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed

Reductionism is merciless.

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.

The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was! But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.

I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".