Quotes About Perspective

papar decided the country had become too crowded—even though it

He says when your grandmother died your mother cried solidly for a week, solidly. She was crying with relief he says, it was like as if a door had been unlocked and she'd been let outside, she said to me I'm safe now. He waits, and he says this kid, when it's born, you mustn't ever let it think it's anything other than a gift and a blessing, do you hear me?

The world didn't always sound right when it was first explained.

So what can we, in our time, learn from the past, even while we're getting knocked in the head? That the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. That compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And that we learn the most from those who came before not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly but by looking them in the eye and taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.

Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they

it's shrewd to put new words to an old tune, especially if you're trying to turn the familiar on its head.

Where Goldwaterites saw the world in black and white, Rockefeller noted shades of gray.

Intellectually I know America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country," the novelist Sinclair Lewis

By closing our minds to the even remote possibility that a political leader with whom we nearly always disagree might have a point about a particular matter is to preemptively surrender the capacity of the mind to shape our public lives.

In Greek, the word for "hate," miseo, is best understood as "loving less" rather than as viewing something with hostility.

If Mrs. Roosevelt were writing today, she might put it this way: Don't let any single cable network or Twitter feed tell you what to think.

If you treat people as monuments you limit the capacity to teach. (on Armchair Expert podcast)

If you ever sit here, you will learn that you cannot, just by shouting from the housetops, get what you want all the time.

We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other's ideas are challenged, but each other's motives." He

Too often, people view their own opportunity as dependent on domination over others, which helps explain why such people see the expansion of opportunity for all as a loss of opportunity for themselves.

Plenty of philosophical men live in abstract regions, debating types and shadows. The rarer sort is the reader and thinker who can see the world whole.

Son," Johnson said, "I've served in the House. And I've been privileged to serve in the Senate, too. And they're both good places to serve. So I wouldn't begin to advise you what to do, except to say this—that the difference between being a member of the Senate and a member of the House is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit." The former president paused. "Do I make my point?

I am the neurological opposite of a psychopath, in that I feel anxious almost all the time. It must be great to not constantly feel like you've got someone living inside your face, shooting you with a mini Taser.

Given all of this, you'd think LeBon's work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane.

I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture- like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.

How you feed your family is not how we feed our family. For real. We're not out here just for the fun and just for the show-and-tell. This is real life." I am finding myself ostentatiously nodding at everything the crack dealers are saying, I suppose in the hope that if the shooting starts they'll remember my nods and make the effort to shoot around me.

He had experienced only kindness and forgiveness. Actually, it wasn't kindness and forgiveness. It was something much better than that. It was nothing. He experienced nothing.

Maybe – as my friend the documentary maker Adam Curtis emailed me – they're turning social media into 'a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.' We express our opinion that Justine Sacco is a monster. We are instantly congratulated for this – for basically being Rosa Parks. We make the on-the-spot decision to carry on believing it.

what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.