Quotes About Perception

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

Your problem isn't that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you're thinking.

I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.

I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.

Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors.

Don't you see that Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also better to be hated than ignored.

While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.

Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician... had to keep his lips constantly moving.

people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed

I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise. In any case, you can't blame a gay for trying, he said, smiling a smile utterly unlike my own.

As the crapulent major said, A man doesn't need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own.

Noses to the wind, we inhaled a farrago of scents: charcoal and jasmine, rotting fruit and eucalyptus, gasoline and ammonia, a swirling belch from the city's poorly irrigated gut.

I am a sleeper, a spy, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not a misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, though some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.

Some might say I was seeing things, but the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus. We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. Likewise,

The reason for such behavior, her father said, was that the foreign tourists knew only one thing about this country, the war.

For we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It's as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can.

Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world beside our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.

Contrary to some perceptions, revolutionary ideology, even in a tropical country, is not hot. It is cold, man-made.

Ignorance is beneficial when we are aware of it.

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity. Not

All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications.

Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician—which was what the General had become—had to keep his lips constantly moving.

A person's strength was always his weakness, and vice versa. The weakness was there to be seen if one could see it.

By now the only part of me now seating were my eyeballs.