Quotes About Subjectivity

People want to know if I have a moral standpoint that they should be picking up on, and the truth is, I don't. I don't want people to think that I'm trying to tell them to feel a certain way. I think that's cheap filmmaking.

The line between humor and bad taste is your audience, in which some people will find everything offensive, and some people will find nothing offensive, but the truth is that most humor originates in what would be called bad taste.

What you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks - the form, the design, whatever word you want to use.

Draw and paint the subject the way you want it to be, not as it is.

It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.

I'm not staid and unbiased here. I have certain biases I want to convey, and if you disagree, that's fine.

Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven't I the right to paint you as I want?

People see what they want to see.

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

If what you want to paint is the emotive mood in all its strength... then you must not sit and stare at everything and depict it exactly as one sees it.

It beats me how Freud could say "What do women want?" as if we all must want the same thing.

I change lyrics to the songs all the time, too. I don't know if it matters in a lot of ways because you can take what you want from it.

I learnt early on that your audience take the songs in the way they want to rather than the way you might want them too.

People see what they want to see when they need to.

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

People respond differently to the same image and put on what they want or hope or feel onto that image.

No matter the truth, people see what they want to see.

The movie has to be going somewhere. Other than that, you want it to be entertaining, but people usually disagree on what entertaining is and everybody has different tastes.

I don't care too much for thinking about the past. The truth is just another story. You can remember it any way you want; it's never gonna be the same twice.

Scientists are people, and they are subject to the influences of their times. Theories explaining the world change diachronically or vary synchronically not only because of variation in the available data, but because of change and variation in the people producing the theories. Objectivity itself is culturally constituted.

What would it be like to think what a gerbil thinks, from a gerbil's point of view? Kind of like Thomas Nigel's 1974 paper, 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' There's a subjective character of experience that's never captured in reductive accounts. Know what I mean?' 'Um . . . Sure.

This is why reading the scriptures as a scientific text can do violence to their purpose. They are designed to connect us subjectively, consciously, and spiritually to richer truths and meaning.

there is inevitably something of "us" in the stories we tell about the past. This is the historian's predicament, and it is foolish to think there is some method, however well intentioned, that can extricate us from this predicament. (p. 10, paperback edition)

But if oxen (and horses) and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen, and they would make the bodies [of their gods] in accordance with the form that each species itself possesses.