Quotes About Distortion

As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it—cognitively distorting how the world works.

He had made brilliant and devastating use of innuendo, half truth, and political distortion to exploit the malignancies of American society, especially racism.4Racism was always effective, but it was dangerous to employ and required expert handling. It was not excessively egotistical for the dying man to feel that it was he himself who had made George Bush president in 1988.

The girl reflected back from the window in front of me has poinsettias growing out of her belly and head. She's the shape of a breakfast-link sausage standing on broomstick legs, her arms made from twigs, her face blurred with an eraser. I know that this is me, but it's not me, not really. I don't know what I look like. I can't remember how to look.

It's an antique mirror with little waves on the surface of it. Sometimes it can make you look like an elegant princess trapped in time. Other times, it makes you look like a pig.

Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion, and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways - in science, in politics, in every bold intention.

Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.

Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.

La cultura no puede convivir pacíficamente con la gestión, sobre todo, cuando ésta es molesta e insidiosa, y, más aún, cuando se trata de una gestión dedicada a distorsionar las ansias exploradoras/experimentadoras de la cultura para que encaje en el marco de la racionalidad dibujado por los gestores

To most of us a person, a human being, seems to be a maximum of being, the ceiling of reality; we think that to personify is to glorify. Yet do not some of us realize at times that a person is no superlative, that to personify the spiritually real is to belittle it? A personification may be both a distortion and a depreciation.

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Children are always described from a third-person perspective ("Isn't Chloe a cute/ugly/intelligent/stupid kid?") before they gain the ability to influence their own definitions. Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories of others. But the struggle against distortion continues beyond childhood.

War is a perversion of sex.

Memories Distort Observation

There's a time when things go out of tune. It's not all the time. It's not even a lot of the time. But it is some of the time. And then you have to deal with it all. Everything comes out wrong. You dream about goats and monkeys. People start to look at things wrong. Maybe you think the world looks squashed and flat. Maybe you get stones in the bulgar and you burn the smoked wheat.

With that we have articulated a basic criticism of the most grandiose of all human attempts to advance toward the divine-- by way of the church. Christianity conceals within itself a germ hostile to the church. It is far too easy for us to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in so doing utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea.

The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone's moving furniture underwater.

mirrors reveal so little

When I wanted to know something, I wanted it undistorted by somebody else's imperfect knowledge.

Alcohol is like Photoshop for real life

People who confuse what they wish were true with what is really true create distorted pictures of reality that make it impossible for them to make the best choices.

Making a fixed promise that is subject to high levels of uncertainty and then requiring people to meet that promise at all costs is like putting the performance cart before the horse. The result is likely to be the distortion of profitability over time and, in exceptional circumstances, outright fraud.

But perhaps this is what normality is: a complex of dread and terror which compels the psyche to deny and restructure reality. Those who cannot ensconce themselves within social delusions either distort reality and hallucinate their own mirages, or they go mad.

There are things that can be measured. There are things that are worth measuring. But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know. The costs of measuring may be greater than the benefits. The things that get measured may draw effort away from the things we really care about. And measurement may provide us with distorted knowledge—knowledge that seems solid but is actually deceptive.

Thus, there is a gap between the measureable contribution and the actual, total contribution of the agent. As a result, measured performance (such as an increase in the division's profits or a rise in the company's stock price) may actually lead to the organization getting less of what it really needs from its employees. Moreover, there was an inevitable distortion of incentives created by the quest for simple, quantifiable standards by which to measure and reward performance