Quotes About Perspective

And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

In my reviews, I feel it's good to make it clear that I'm not proposing objective truth, but subjective reactions; a review should reflect the immediate experience.

They give you a smaller glass so it feels like you're getting more

When a movie character is really working, we become that character. That's what the movies offer: escapism into lives other than our own.

Pauline Kael] had no theory, no rules, no guidelines, no objective standards. You couldn't apply her 'approach' to a film. With her it was all personal.

Siskel's Saw. It's amazing how many movies are not as interesting as a documentary of the same actors sitting around talking over lunch. GENE SISKEL

Siskel's classic question, "Is this movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

A man goes to the movies. The critic must admit that he is this man.

Agreement is often based on disagreement. It is as absurd to think, for example, that you should always begin by reaching agreement on the facts as it is for a buyer of stock to try to convince the seller that the stock is likely to go up. If they did agree that the stock would go up, the seller would probably not sell. What makes a deal likely is that the buyer believes the price will go up and the seller believes it will go down.

Chess looks like a zero-sum game; if one loses, the other wins—until a dog trots by and knocks over the table, spills the beer, and leaves you both worse off than before.

It is easy to forget sometimes that a negotiation is not a debate. Nor is it a trial.

The participants should come to see themselves as working side by side, attacking the problem, not each other. Hence the first proposition: Separate the people from the problem.

Recast an attack on you as an attack on the problem.

What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?

Everyday, I think about dying. About disease, starvation, violence, terrorism, war, the end of the world. It helps keep my mind off things.

noone knows and noone sees we lovers doing what we please but people stop and point at these ten milk bottles a-turning into cheese

As historians, we have to remind ourselves that yesterday was once tomorrow.

I am not an advocate of Enlightenment. On the contrary, I see it as a form of light pollution, which prevents us from seeing the stars.

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative', is asking you not to believe him. So don't.

Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person's taste be used to cast judgement on another's? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when comparative judgements merely reflect the taste of the one who makes them?

The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second.

One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.

Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.

how can I know the world as it is? I can have knowledge of the world as it seems, since that is merely knowledge of my present perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings. But can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of how it seems? To put the question in slightly more general form: can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of my own point of view?