Thomas J. Sargent Quotes

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

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

They place great stress on the clarity of our language for expressing nuances and showing subtleties.

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.

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

Simplicity should not be identified with bareness.

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

… steer clear of bogus simplicity

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

I think we all ought to be careful about too much generalization on this issue, even as I confess to painting with a pretty broad brush myself!

Damn all false dichotomies to hell

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.

Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.

My personal feeling is that people need to be careful not to start over-analyzing and taking things apart and trying to be critical.

Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish.

The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity.

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

Simplicity and beauty are the signs not of truth but of a well-constructed approximate model of a limited domain of phenomena.

No, Blitz. That's oversimplifying it.

We fail when we try to give simple answers to complicated problems.

Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.

There is more to knowing than just being correct

Man must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification.

You don't have to make things harder then they have to be just to prove a point.

This matter of two sides to every question is bad logic and bad practice: sometimes there are no sides; sometimes there are a hundred.