People are too complicated to have simple labels.

The remark argues against reducing human beings to single categories—moral, political, religious, social, or psychological. “Labels” suggest fixed, simplifying tags that make people easier to judge or manage, but the quote insists that real persons contain contradictions, mixed motives, and changing histories that resist neat classification. In Pullman’s broader imaginative world, characters often blur boundaries between hero and villain, belief and doubt, innocence and experience; the line underscores an ethical stance that favors attention to individual complexity over stereotypes. It also cautions readers that certainty about others can be a form of intellectual laziness or moral overconfidence.