Quotes About Misunderstanding

Es un error creer que cualquier problema importante puede solucionarse con ayuda de unas patatas.

The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig," and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration.

What's he saying?" asked Trillian. "Nothing," said Zaphod, "he just phoned to wash his head at us.

Look," said Zaphod, "will you get it into your heads? That's just a recorded message. It's millions of years old. It doesn't apply to us, get it?

You're a jerk," repeated the alien, "a complete kneebiter.

I decided to call him Ford Prefect. (This was a joke that missed American audiences entirely, of course, since they had never heard of the rather oddly named little car, and many thought it was a typing error for Perfect.) I explained in the text that the minimal research my alien character had done before arriving on this planet had led him to think that this name would be "nicely inconspicuous." He had simply mistaken the dominant life form.

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the "Star-Spangled Banner," but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.

Hey," he said, "I thought you said you didn't want to shoot us!" and ducked again. They waited. After a moment a voice replied, "It isn't easy being a cop!

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels

But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents' generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.

She learned her first two signs five weeks later, on—let's see here—June 4, 1967. They were hug and me. On June 6, she spontaneously signed Hug me Jennie to Mrs. Archibald, her surrogate mother. Mrs. Archibald was under the impression that Jennie's first sign had been directed at her. I didn't correct that misapprehension. Why? I should suppose the reason's obvious.

Jennie had a set of values, but she didn't realize they were different values from the rest of us. She never could understand why she was always in trouble. In the end, I mean. She didn't know what it was that made her angry all the time. I'll tell you what it was. It was very simple: it was our society trying to break her, trying to make her a nice middle-class person.

Anyway, these conclusions came from people who had never spent any time with chimpanzees. You can't tell anything from a two-hour videotape. I spent five years with five chimpanzees. There are so many modes of communication between human and chimp that can't be quantified. Body language. Vehemence and speed of gesture, facial expression. You had to be there with Jennie to understand the depth of communication. With our enemies out there, and a Senator against us, we got hammered.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

when you really parsed what the man had said, he in fact had said nothing.

She became particularly irritable toward me and Sandy. She would not allow us to approach her, let alone touch her, and she often broke into loud screams if we approached. She also became curiously incommunicative and ignored many of our efforts to sign to her. Lea and I knew well that chimpanzees become difficult when they reach puberty. And yet, we had managed to persuade ourselves that Jennie would be different. We felt we knew Jennie even better than we knew each other. We were wrong.

Because of an innocent misunderstanding you think that you are a human being in the relative world seeking the experience of oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.

Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

Do you not realize, Hastings, that each and everyone of us is a complete mystery with layers. We each try to judge each other, but nine times out of ten, we are wrong.

The spoken word and the written - there is an astonishing gulf between them. There is a way of turning sentences that completely reverses the meaning.

These blondes, sir, they're responsible for a lot of trouble.

My sister continued: 'What did she die of? Heart failure?' 'Didn't the milkman tell you that?' I inquired sarcastically. Sarcasm is wasted on Caroline. She takes it seriously and answers accordingly. 'He didn't know,' she explained.

Don't you know, you idiot, that that is what every fool of a woman says about her child? Miss Bulstrode's thoughts.

You weren't quite accurate just now." "I? Not accurate?" Poirot sounded affronted.