Quotes About Strangers

The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary.

We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.

We should also accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers. In the interrogation of KSM, there were two sides. James Mitchell and his colleague Bruce Jessen were driven by the desire to make KSM talk. On the other side, Charles Morgan worried about the cost of forcing people to talk: what if in the act of coercing a prisoner to open up, you damaged his memories and made what he had to say less reliable? Morgan's more-modest expectations are a good model for the rest of us.

Chamberlain was acting on the same assumption that we all follow in our efforts to make sense of strangers. We believe that the information gathered from a personal interaction is uniquely valuable.

Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?

If we were more thoughtful as a society, if we were willing to engage in some soul searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers Sandra Bland would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.

They were strangers to each other. If we were more thoughtful as a society—if we were willing to engage in some soul-searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers—she would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.

Transparency is the idea that people's behavior and demeanor—the way they represent themselves on the outside—provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside. It is the second of the crucial tools we use to make sense of strangers. When we don't know someone, or can't communicate with them, or don't have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.

with strangers, we're intolerant of emotional responses that fall outside expectations.

This is the first of the ideas to keep in mind when considering the death of Sandra Bland. We think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame them when they default to truth. When we try to send people like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in positions of authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers—without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy (p. 50).

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy (p. 50)

We have no choice but to talk to strangers in our modern, borderless world. We aren't living in villages anymore. Police officers have to stop people they don't know. Intelligence officers have to deal with deception and uncertainty. Young people want to go to parties explicitly to meet strangers... Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can't (p. 342).

But with strangers, we're intolerant of emotional responses that fall outside expectations.

A key ingredient to success, I learned, is relying on not only the kindness of strangers, but the kindness of colleagues.

Consumers today have become a cynical mob of buyers who believe the reviews and ratings of complete strangers much more readily than your brand's promises and distinctions.

I know you want me to feel some sympathy for them, but that's not who I am. I care only about those I know, and even then, not all that deeply. Strangers get nothing from me.

I had always thought that the relationships we make strangers are the hardest and the relationships we have with family the easiest. For me the opposite had been true. The family I was born into was not really my family anymore, while the family I made for myself out of strangers was mine.

For the first time I have conquered restlessness, my imagination does not wander to all the far places towards all the far strangers, questing, expecting what? For the first time my body and soul are together, and the sound of a window closing, a door closing, is no more alarming than the wings of an icon closing over a figure praying.

o a gente de paso.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate

Our friendship, for example, and how quickly we passed through each other, from fascinated strangers to loyal chums to relics of each other's world. We'd been pawns of proximity, choiceless as brothers.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.