Quotes About Reality

Oh well, 'really'— it's like a woman isn't it, you look at each other, you think Of course not, she thinks Of course not,— yet the Alternatives hang about, don't they, like Wraiths.

The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light

Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present- not where we wish we were, or where we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact.

Reality does not go away when it is ignored.

The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.

Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.

Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality. Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.

It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.

Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing—and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.

Statistics compiled from what people say may be worse than useless, if they lead to a belief that those numbers convey a reality that can be relied on for serious decision-making about social policies.

In the complexities of real life, seldom is any argument right 100 percent of the time or wrong 100 percent of the time.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.… —John Adams1

Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.

Politics is not about empirical realities, but about popular images. So long as the image of rent control is good, it wins votes at election time-and that is what it is all about, as far as politicians are concerned.

Too much of what is called education is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts. Henry Rosovsky

Moreover, even in the absence of accumulating personal experience, it was difficult to believe that soaring murder statistics reflected simply better record keeping, since it had always been hard to ignore a dead body.

Banning the institution of slavery itself long remained only a distant hope in much of Africa and the Middle East, even after it was a reality in the Western Hemisphere.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.

The civil rights vision tends to view group characteristics as mere "stereotypes" and concentrates on changing the public's "perceptions" or raising the public's "consciousness." Yet the reality of group patterns that transcend any given society cannot be denied.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts."1

Hoje, apesar da liberdade de expressão e da mídia em massa, a visão social predominante está perigosamente próxima de se isolar de qualquer opinião discordante da realidade.