Quotes About Distortion

I always need to clear up what I do. With everyone else, there is no problem, but with me, all hell is raised up.

Like human memory, the surface of our planet distorts the record, emphasising more recent events and letting the rest pass into vagueness - or at least into unimpressive joints in worn down mountain chains.

Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it's necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything - that's part of how you teach people they can't do anything, they're helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

Beware of the people of power, and avarice, and wealth. Because the more intelligent they are, the better they'll be at distorting reality and convincing us that what's good for them is good for the world when it's just the opposite.

With a little industry and application, anyone who is willing to extricate himself from the system of shared ideology and propaganda will readily see through the modes of distortion developed by substantial segments of the intelligentsia. Everybody is capable of doing that. If such analysis is often carried out poorly, that is because, quite commonly, social and political analysis is produced to defend special interests rather than to account for the actual events.

The business classes, which largely run the country, are highly class conscious. It is not a distortion to describe them as vulgar Marxists, with values and commitments reversed.

So, think about the enormous effort, the enormous, strenuous, and continuous effort to persuade people that things that they merely want are really things that they must have, that they need. And this is the business of marketing and advertising. And as Noam pointed out previously, this completely distorts the notion of the so-called free market in which rational people make rational choices based on real needs.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology, and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the "responsibility of peoples," given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.

Which is why God has erected such a firewall between the living and the dead: because the predead always distort whatever the postalive tell them. Jesus or Mohammad or Siddharta, whenever any dead person has come back to offer some banal bit of advice, the living recipient misinterprets every word of it.

Cuando la fe se atrofia, parece como que se deforma o desfigura. ¿Acaso no hemos visto también en el terreno cultural, es decir, no sólo a escala individual sino social, cómo la fe reprimida degenera en superstición?

Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.

But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty - it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life - froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty.

Ma la bellezza non era tutto. La bellezza aveva questo guaio: veniva troppo immediatamente, veniva troppo completamente. Fermava la vita - la gelava. Ci si dimenticava le piccole agitazioni; l'arrossire, il pallore, qualche strana distorsione, qualche luce o ombra, che rendeva per un momento riconoscibile la faccia e tuttavia le dava una qualità che in seguito si vedeva per sempre.

Beauty had this penalty—it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life—froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty.

Szellemi lábjegyzetként, amely valamikor még jól jöhet, Vanban fölvillant a gondolat: a napszemüveg vagy bármely egyéb vizuális segédeszköz, amely kétségkívül eltorzítja a "tér"-érzékelésünket, vajon nincs-e hatással a beszédstílusunkra is.

Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it—which reminds one of the tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl's black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village.

Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running, water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions.

my knees were reflections of knees in rippling water

I hate to distort history by saying the wrong thing. But that's just what happens with time. Your own thought in your mind how it happened 30 years later, but it really didn't happen that way.

Evil, then, is a far deeper thing than the moral codes conceive of. It is antilife. Life is dynamic, pulsating force; it is energy and consciousness, manifested in many ways; and there is no evil as such unless there is resistance to life. The resistance is the manifestation of what is called evil. Energy and consciousness in distortion create evil.

This is how sin works: it whispers to us about the goodness of something not good. It makes distortions feel good. It tells us we'd be better off with pleasure in hell than sanctification in heaven.

In the case of the earliest Connection Survival Style, for example, focusing on changing distorted cognitions is particularly difficult because with early trauma, the cortex is not yet fully developed, and it is mostly the underlying bottom-up nervous system and affective imbalances that drive the cognitive distortions.

Architecture must concern itself continually with the socially beneficial distortion of the environment.