Quotes About Perception

The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news… and it's not entirely the media's fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news.

Some of what we learned early on turned out to be true (the earth is round; if you want a friend be a friend; cleanliness is next to impossible) and some of it turned out to be false (Santa Claus; the Tooth Fairy; Kansas is more fun than Oz).

Jim Reston: Walking through the crowds of air-kissing politicians, actors and high fliers, it was tough to tell where the politicians stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference.

As Steve has said to me on more than one occasion: "The Chinese are the most rational people in the world. Until they aren't.

The lake is always east. East is always the lake. Anywhere else he's ever been he never knows where he is.

For me, all stories are fiction. The only question is: Does it rattle the soul or not?

They seemed to dispense with the need to represent space in the interests of directly manifesting it.

I am only the image I can force upon the town.

one half of his face drooping lower than the other, as if it had melted like a Dalí watch.

but the easiest way isn't necessarily the true one.

All she knew was what she read in the papers, where it seemed that people no longer lived their lives, but had life-styles instead.

The truth is rarely as liberating as people would have us believe; it often binds more than it frees.

Obviously one man's Utopia is another man's hell.

Looking back, she began to wonder if perhaps it was all just a story. As the years race inexorably on, and as all the people we know and love die, does the past turn into fiction, an act of the imagination populated by ghosts, scenes and images suspended forever in water glass?

This is where it begins to get mind-bending. The colors we experience are just appearances in the mind. The light itself does not have color; it is simply energy with a particular frequency, the color coming from the representation of that frequency in the mind. The same is true of every other quality we experience. We seem to be experiencing the world directly, but in truth all that we experience is a representation of the world out there appearing in our field of knowing.

Shakespeare can show us what we are like at moments when we cannot see ourselves.

The basic reality is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

The best insights about problems to be addressed often come from the worm's-eye view.

We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?

A majority of people in these surveys also said that America gives too much aid--but when they were asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid 'cut' to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!

Many people who think nothing of buying factory-farmed ham or chicken from a supermarket are quick to condemn hunting; yet hunting is more defensible than factory farming.

In the United States, 97 percent of those classified by the Census Bureau as poor own a color TV.

It's a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.