Quotes About Perspective

It's the quality of our reasons for believing that make us intelligent and thoughtful individuals

It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society, it is belief. -George Bernard Shaw

What would it be like if we dealt with the world around us as a playground, full of children learning and growing? Would this perspective allow us to deal with others in a more compassionate and loving way? (pg. 61)

It is easy enough for modern people to dismiss the crusades as morally repugnant or cynically evil. Such judgments, however, tell us more about the observer than the observed. They are based on uniquely modern (and, therefore, Western) values. If, from the safety of our modern world, we are quick to condemn the medieval crusader, we should be mindful that he would be just as quick to condemn us.

Thomas Frank

I don't blame the tour guide for this mistake. That a regular guy like J. P. Dinsmoor would have opposed U.S. imperialism, well, that's simply unthinkable out here; everyone knows that such views are the affectations of latte-drinking rich kids at fancy colleges, while the average

I honestly thought that Mission Hills, with its castellated palazzi, was normal and that other places were the aberration. I played with the tots of millionaires and convinced myself that America was a classless society, where all that mattered was ability and one's willingness to work.

While its proponents might get the facts wrong, they get the subjective experience right.

If you want to motivate people, then it's more important to think about what they want, rather than what you want.

My parents told me, "Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving." I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job."

Health is not valued until sickness comes.

Comparison, more than reality, makes men happy or wretched.

History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs; privileging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof.

If an ass goes travelling he will not come home a horse.

That's my point: if you own thirty or more books, or you are reading any book at this moment, you may protest all you want, but you were born on the wrong continent.

A person's conclusions can only be as solid as the information on which they are based. Thus, a person who is exposed to almost nothing but inaccurate information on a given subject almost inevitably develops an erroneous belief, a belief that can seem to be "an irresistible product" of the individual's (secondhand) experience.

Chapter 7 takes a psychological truism, "we tend to believe what we think others believe" and turns it around: We tend to think others believe what we believe. This chapter examines a set of cognitive, social, and motivational processes that prompt us to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs, further bolstering our credulity.

As dysfunctional as they may be on occasion, our theories, preconceptions, and "biases" are what make us smart.

By carefully scrutinizing and explaining away their losses, while accepting their successes at face value, gamblers do indeed rewrite their personal histories of success and failure. Losses are often counted, not as losses, but as "near wins.

develop the habit of employing one of several "consider the opposite" strategies. We can learn to ask ourselves, for example, "Suppose the exact opposite had occurred. Would I consider that outcome to be supportive of my belief as well?" Alternatively, we can ask, "How would someone who does not believe the way I do explain this result?"

Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do.

The false consensus effect refers to the tendency for people's own beliefs, values, and habits to bias their estimates of how widely such views and habits are shared by others.

But the wisest person in the room, or around the negotiating table, knows enough not to fall prey to naïve realism and simply assume that meanings are fixed, and shared

People are less aware, however, of another source of divergent beliefs—the fact that the same issue or situation is construed quite differently by different people, even people with the same tastes, values, and orientations. As social psychologist Solomon Asch noted many years ago, differences of opinion between people are not always linked to differences in their "judgment of the object," but often reflect differences in the very "object of judgment" itself.