As with real reading the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you don't adequately acquire those skills moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics it's about experience it's about participation it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers and... Wanda Sykes and John Legend... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.

There's a remarkable amount of sexism on TV. When male characters are flawed they're interesting deep and complex. But when female characters are flawed they're just a mess. It's good to put more flawed but interesting female characters out there because it promotes equality.

You need education. You need subsistence protection. We need jobs and social security. These are preconditions under which it will perhaps be possible to deal with these complex circumstances.

One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if it's very complex it's very profound.

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.

It's a complex relationship when your dad happened to be president and you are president and then you have all the amateur psychology that goes on when people try to speculate about motivations.

I have this complex. I don't like too much exposure. I don't know why it is. Maybe it's bred in me because my dad always told me to be humble and don't think you're too good.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

You want hot days to get your fruit ripe but then you want it to cool off nicely at night so that the grapes stay on the vine longer and develop complexity.

There was a great complexity to my father. He was a devoted family man. But in the same breath he simply was not suited to an anchored life. He should have been somebody who had a backpack an old map a bit of change in his pocket and that was it - roaming the world.

Really each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone as is complexity contradiction and an uncertain future.

I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible at least on the scale it occurred.