Quotes About Reality

The myth of war creates a new, artificial reality. Moral precepts—ones we have spent a lifetime honoring—are jettisoned. We accept, if not condone, the maiming and killing of others as the regrettable cost of war. We operate under a new moral code.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed," Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.67

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists. HANNAH ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Our major preoccupation is pleasure. Margaret Atwood, in her dystopian novel Oryx and Crake, observes that as a species "we're doomed by hope."29 The mantra is to be positive, to be happy. This mania for optimism—for happiness—leads to fantasy being mistaken for reality. Reality is dismissed when it is unpleasant.

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.

I took on 'What Would Be Your Miracle' because I wanted to do something far removed from 'Big Brother' and 'The Voice.'

When we constantly ask for miracles, we're unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon.

Look, miracles in the Middle East are a reality.

Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.

Extraordinary miracles, billions and trillions of them, happen all the time, but not because there's a God.

I could hardly believe that she really existed, that she wasn't a dream. There was something miraculous about Dorothy Stratten.

Sure, being a reservist wasn't as glamorous, but I was the one who had to look at myself in the mirror.

I know people who go back and check themselves, but it drives me crazy. Everybody wants to look in the mirror and see Cary Grant looking back at them, but that's just not the case.

What I realized is that the desire for making 'Places' came from the fact that I've got this strange situation with having been born in the glitter, born on the other side of the mirror that everyone fantasizes about.

I don't think anyone wants to look in the mirror and say, 'I'm anti-woman.' They don't see themselves that way, and you can't treat them that way. But you have to tell the truth.

Everybody wants to look in the mirror and see Cary Grant looking back at them, but that's just not the case.

I am an actor and this is holding the mirror up to nature, as it were.

A film is a mirror image of our society. If there's something wrong with the way we make films or the way women are stereotyped, then it means that it's happening in real life.

I'm an A-Level player because I have the strength to look upon myself in the mirror and master my reality.

Mirrors are the essence of movies.

It's the same misconception I used to have. I meet people and think they're millionaires and they're not.

The biggest misconception my whole life is that I'm rich, that I had all this money from my dad, which I did not.

My reality is the misconceptions about me.

I think one of the major misconceptions about me is that I live my life the way people think I lead my life, with hot and cold drinks running everywhere and a party all the time. They think of my life in terms of certain excesses that don't really exist. Things are actually fairly simple.