Quotes About Perspective

Sometimes,' Mr Unsworth said, 'one wants to be influenced by places. Sometimes not.

Much of the skill in doing science resides in knowing where in the hierarchy you are looking – and, as a consequence, what is relevant and what is not.

And like all the people who lost no one, the tourists, who go to New York to cry over the rubble. I want to tell them to go home and hold their children or their lovers or their parents. I want to tell them that they are using that place as an excuse to be sad and afraid when there will be reason enough for that in their own lives if they just wait.

Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.

Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are. Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won't see it... True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead.

We left Vietnam peculiar creatures, with young shoulders that bore rather old heads.

I don't care if your the President of the United States, the Queen of England, the inventor of the microchip, a bankable movie star, or an ordinary Joe or Jill, you're no paragon in my book, but the same as a zebra or gazelle - a source of protein. In fact, I'd rather hunt you, because you're slow and feeble.

They say it's worse to see someone you love getting tortured or hurt than being tortured or hurt yourself.

It is as if there is another world just waiting to be discovered if only we can learn to see in a new way. Up until the seventeenth century most people in England took little notice of the prehistoric monuments that littered the land. Viewing them as a nuisance, they often dismantled them to clear fields or to provide building materials. Even so, folklore and stories lingered around many of them

We in the West are accustomed to thinking that humans are all basically the same underneath our different cultural clothing, that the concerns the middle class struggles with in contemporary society are at bottom the same concerns with which all other classes societies and cultures struggle. To glimpse the possibility that that is not so comes as an unwelcome surprise.

We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.

This approach, built on the "wisdom of the crowd" concept, has been called "the crowd within." The billionaire financier George Soros exemplifies it. A key part of his success, he has often said, is his mental habit of stepping back from himself so he can judge his own thinking and offer a different perspective—to himself.

The truth is, the truth is elusive.

People take things differently. What one person would consider a helpful inquiry another might take as an aggressive criticism.

The more you want to explain about a black swan event like the storming of the Bastille," wrote the sociologist Duncan Watts, "the broader you have to draw the boundaries around what you consider to be the event itself.

Here's my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

explore the similarities and differences between your views and those of others—and pay special attention to prediction markets and other Methods of extracting wisdom from crowds. Synthesize all these different views into a single vision as acute as that of a dragonfly. Finally, express your judgment as precisely as you can, using a finely grained scale of probability.

Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person.

While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.

At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves.

No one played devil's advocate, a figure that every group needs to avoid foolish or even disastrous decisions like this. It was reminiscent of President John Kennedy's "disastrous" decision to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.11

Einstein himself is reported to have said: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.

Zimbardo and Boyd Time perspective is the often nonconscious personal attitude that each of us holds toward time and the process whereby the continual flow of existence is bundled into time categories that help to give order, coherence, and meaning to our lives.