Quotes About Perspective

Because I would give it all back to have my health.

The problem is that one man's superstition is another man's religion, and vice versa. Many Protestants today still see Catholicism as being rife with superstition, ... while atheists and agnostics would see bien-pensant Protestants as worshiping an equally absurd form of the supernatural.

God is not being unkind to us by not sharing… the point is that we are not built to understand the big picture, precisely because we live in time and God does not. If we could see the end from the beginning, and understand how a billion lives and a thousand generations and unspeakable sorrows and untold joys are all woven into a tapestry of perfect beauty, then we would be God.

Because God lives forever and I will not, I can experience the several different times of my life knowing that they are part of a bigger picture that I cannot see but which is visible to a good and wise God who sees the whole as beautiful.

Those without Christ often abandon themselves to eating and drinking because sometimes it looks as if that's all there is to do before we die. But those who love Christ cherish eating and drinking because it looks a little like what we will do after we die.

It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.

It's about the quality of the worry," I said. "I have happier worries now than I used to.

I think the way to stop it is to shrug it off. Or take it with your tongue in your cheek. Sure, that's the system. At any rate, it's the system that works for you. It's the automatic control board that keeps you out there where nothing matters, where it's only you and the keyboard and nothing else. Because it's gotta be that way. You gotta stay clear of anything serious.

He tried to draw a woman and it looked like a house. He tried to draw a man and it looked like a really old house. He tried to draw a house and it looked like a fucked-up cow.

Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence.

Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously.

For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong. — H. L. Mencken (slightly rephrased)

Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.

indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones.

Reducing all human life to exchange means not only shunting aside all other forms of economic experience (hierarchy, communism), but also ensuring that the vast majority of the human race who are not adult males, and therefore whose day-to-day existence is relatively difficult to reduce to a matter of swapping things in such a way as to seek mutual advantage, melts away into the background.

The Right, at least, has a critique of bureaucracy. It's not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none. As a result, when those who identify with the Left do have anything negative to say about bureaucracy, they are usually forced to adopt a watered-down version of the right-wing critique.

I was walking down the street with a friend the other day and a guy with a gun jumps out of an alley and says "Stick 'em up." As I pull out my wallet, I figure, "Shouldn't be a total loss." So I pull out some money, turn to my friend and say, "Hey, Fred, here's that fifty bucks I owe you." The robber was so offended he took out a thousand dollars of his own money, forced Fred to lend it to me at gunpoint, and then took it back again.

Good' and 'evil' are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because 'good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. 'Good' and 'evil' are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because 'good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another.

Good' and 'evil' are purely human concepts. it would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because 'good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

Reconsider the lobster. Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating. It's unpleasant to throw a struggling creature in a pot of boiling water; one needs to be able to tell oneself that the lobster isn't really feeling it.

All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument.

Always remember it's all ultimately about value (or: whenever you hear someone say that what their greatest value is rationality, they are just saying that because they don't want to admit to what their greatest value really is).

we are all in the situation of the inmate who prefers working in the prison laundry to sitting in the cell watching TV all day.