Quotes About Perspective

But this truth actually supports rather than contravenes the Beard and Moore theses. Most

Of course people live in the short run, and the average worker trying to make ends meet during economic downturns in, say, 1841 or 1857 lacked the molifying perspective of an historian.

When he goes to a wedding he wants to be the bride, and when he goes to a funeral he wants to be the corpse. (Commentary about Teddy Roosevelt, who was president when he came to give away his niece to Franklin).

We have taught an entire generation to be so open-minded that their brains fell out.

I asked her who he was and she said, "He was a man ahead of his time." She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys—any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about "the white devil" Mommy simply felt those references didn't apply to her.

when folks wanna believe something, the truth ain't got no place in that compartment.

He didn't look mad, but he didn't look like Martin Luther King neither.

didn't matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.

Fact is, I never knowed a Negro from that day to this but who couldn't lie to themselves about their own evil while pointing out the white man's wrong, and I weren't no exception.

To not take sides was to take sides.

Well, I reckon to really understand the world, you got to die at least once.

It doesn't matter. They're all dead now, or in Florida," which in her mind is the same as being dead. "I'll never retire to Florida," she vowed. Riding past a graveyard one day, she looked over and remarked, "That's Florida Forever.

It must be one of life's little jokes... how we take everything, even life itself, for granted. We waste our childhoods wishing for what we don't have, longing for the future, dreaming of ways to speed the time so we can hurry up and see the world. And in our later years, we'd give anything just to slow things down and go back to what we once had.

If we think in terms of our existence here, it means operating within the limits of life on earth. If we are thinking of time, it means disregarding the eternal and thinking only of the "now.

Be happy to, I said, cringing to hear such a dumb, folksy locution escape my lips, then launched into my well-rehearsed precis. The fact that humankind now finds itself in a post-Darwinian epistemological condition, I explained, need not trouble us from an ethical perspective.

It's not death if you refuse it... It is if you accept it.

one's capacity for happiness depends largely on how deeply one has suffered.

There was a time when that kind of thing looked like the kingdom of heaven, but somewhere along the line it had lost its glow. Maybe that was just the cost of growing up. And maybe the cost of growing up was too high.

If he set out right now to make a list of the things he had taken for granted in his life, he'd go broke buying paper.

And yet I'm sure, Cheeser, that in this world of ours, science doesn't hold the only key; it only unlocks one of the doors – and perhaps the side door at that.

What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.

Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail. A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to an horizonal way of seeing.

Still, I could not imagine how being poor could be worse than being rich and hating yourself. I had seen enough of what it was like to be dead. It was time to try living.

People, my god; people. Nature gave them tongues, technology gave them loudspeakers, and they all believe that because they can use both, whatever they say is important.