Quotes About Subjectivity

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains.

Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.

Films and music videos, like other media works, are machines for generating affect, and for capitalizing upon, or extracting value from, this affect. As such, they are not ideological superstructures, as an older sort of Marxist criticism would have it. Rather, they lie at the very heart of social production, circulation, and distribution. They generate subjectivity, and they play a crucial role in the valorization of capital.

El honor significa una cosa para un hombre, y otra distinta para otro.

It was something of a wonder to discover that the human Jesus has so many different faces and that people, even historical Jesus scholars, tend to view him through the lens of their own needs and proclivities. For some he's a political activist. For others, a miracle worker. He's viewed as rabbi, social prophet, religious reformer, wisdom teacher, nonviolent revolutionary, philosopher, feminist, apocalyptic preacher, and on and on.

People see what they want to see.

Although they sometimes claim objectivity, historians are the most subjective of all writers. Hidden behind the thousands of facts unearthed by research, they safely arrange the world to reflect their own vision.

I'm starting to think that pure truth is impossible, and that all narrators and all people are at least a little unreliable.

Your version of reality is as good as anybody's.

O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

To photograph people is to violate them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

Often something looks, or is felt to look, better in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)

No es del todo erróneo afirmar que no existe una mala fotografía, sino solo fotografías menos interesantes, menos relevantes, menos misteriosas.

Something is neutral only with respect to something else—like an intention or an expectation.

No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

A portrait that declines to name its subject becomes complicit, if inadvertendy in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photograph: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights.

Photographs had the advantage of uniting two contradictory features. Their credentials of objectivity were inbuilt. Yet they always had, necessarily, a point of view.

One person's weed is another person's wildflower. ~

How easily men satisfy themselves that the Constitution is exactly what they wish it to be

In other words, if I say that you abused, neglected, bullied, or traumatized me, then you did. As Haslam writes, evaluations about whether emotional abuse, trauma, or neglect occurred are today based on the child's perception of that behavior, even if that behavior would look benign to an outside observer or exist independently of the parent's intentions or emotions. It's what I feel that matters.

But I did like looking at her. It was harder now, knowing all the ways she sucked, but she was still gorgeous.

It wasn't as absurd a notion as it might sound. Some days, time passed way too slowly here, other days far too quickly, so that what happened in the morning could seem like eons ago while what took place six months earlier was as fresh in our minds as if an hour had yet to pass. It was only natural that on occasion we confused the two.