Andy Stanley Quotes

Sometimes groups and their material can get overbloated.

Don't you find that the more you know, the more you don't know and can't ever learn because there's too much stuff out there?

When you try to communicate too many ideas, sometimes you wind up communicating nothing.

There's a direct relationship between how difficult it is to send a message and how strongly it is received.

If the speaker won't boil it down, the audience must sweat it out.

We have to deal in 30 second sound bites. It's not your fault. It's not our fault.

Learning how to communicate to big audiences, and how to frame a message in a way that works in a sound-bite world, that for me is very challenging.

If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem.

We know too much for one man to know too much.

The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.

In the Small group the individual can know the effects of his actions on his several fellows, and the rules may effectively forbid him to harm them in any manner and even require him to assist them in specific ways. In the Great Society many of the effects of a person's actions on various fellows must be unknown to him. It can, therefore, not be the specific effects in the particular case, but only rules which define kinds of actions prohibited or required, which must serve as guides to the individual.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

I'm glad they're taking a step back. A lot of this is happening so quickly that people can't keep up with it.

Nothing great can come of more than three people in a room.

For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

Every big computing disaster has come from taking too many ideas and putting them in one place.

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

I think when there's so much information to be eaten up, and so many ways to do it, people cling to groups. I think we, as monkeys, want to live in smaller groups.

If you want me to speak for two minutes, it will take me three weeks of preparation. If you want me to speak for thirty minutes, it will take me a week to prepare. If you want me to speak for an hour, I am ready now.

If the reader doesn't understand what you're saying, you're talking to yourself.

My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload.

With old inflation riding the headlines, I have read till I am bleary-eyed, and I can't get head from tails of the whole thing. ... Now we are living in an age of explanations-and plenty of 'em, too-but no two things that's been done to us have been explained twice the same way, by even the same man. It's and age of in one ear and out the other.