"When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute." (Walter Lippmann, "The Public Philosophy", 1955)
"The more complex a civilization, the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flow." (Stanislaw Lem, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", 1961)
"[Human] communication is rendered more complex by the use of differing sets of sound-symbols, called languages and by the fact that a given set of symbols tends to change with the passage of years to become an entirely new language." (Howard L Myers, "The Creatures of Man", 1968)
"Isn’t the measure of complexity the measure of the eternal joy?" (Ursula K Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow", 1971)
"Time is no longer a line along which history, past or future, lies neatly arranged, but a field of great mystery and complexity, in the contemplation of which the mind perceives an immense terror, and an indestructible hope." (Ursula K Le Guin, 1977)
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." (William Gibson, "Neuromancer", 1984)
"Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses - viruses generated from within itself." (Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash", 1992)
"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." (Marc S Zicree, "Survivors" [episode of Babylon 5], 1994)
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