Quotes About Perspective

Your answers to these basic questions can show you how your family shaped your views on relating to others.

The fatal flaw of human wisdom is that it promises that you can change your relationships without needing to change yourself. When

The fatal flaw of human wisdom is that it promises that you can change your relationships without needing to change yourself.

If I consciously live in light of the fact that I am full in Christ, I will ask for forgiveness whether or not I get to watch the game.

Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved.

The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek those numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity.

This is pluralism: not a synonym of relativism, but rather an antonym. Pluralism accepts the moral reality of different kinds of truth, but rejects the idea that they can all be placed on a single scale, measured by a single value.

Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

Achamos natural que paguemos por um encanador ou um mecânico, mas procuramos por nossas notícias de graça. Se não pagarmos por encanadores ou mecânicos não esperaremos beber água ou dirigir um carro. Por que, então, deveríamos formar nosso julgamento político com base em zero investimento?"(p. 77)

We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgement on the basis of zero investment? We get what we pay for.

Will we in retrospect see the elections of 2016 much as Russians see the elections of 1990, or Czechs the elections of 1946, or Germans the elections of 1932? This,

the view of many reasonable people in 1933, just as it is the view of many reasonable people now.

Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification.

History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework.

Learn from peers in other countries.

To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.

Soviet state destruction made the political perspective of people who had been marginal right-wing national terrorists seem like the mainstream. Lithuanians

the problem with accepting things that are contradictory as possibly right is that you cannot possibly be thinking yourself when you do it.

Double collaboration was noticed by Jews and Poles in these places, but is absent in both Ukrainian and German histories of the war. —

What a person believes is not as important as how a person believes.

He [Shakespeare] was a wordsmith who loved to act and to see things from many points of view.(...) His genius lay in being able to see all sides of an argument.

Movies are movies: they take you back in time, and how it still is for some.