Quotes About Perception

In order to protect our jobs, our visas, our profits, our chances of receiving good grades, our sanity, we pretend not to see, we sanitise our own perception, filtering out the pain, pretending that it is not here but out there, far away, in Africa, in Russia, a hundred years ago, in an otherness that, by being alien, cleanses our own experience of all negativity.

He was not talking with US, but with his IMAGE of us.

The delusion lies in the fact that no matter how well we think we know the Other, we still judge from within the imprisoning framework of our own limited cultural criteria, we still speak within the cliché of the stereotype." That

I believe that before we can truly dialogue with one another we must first perceive intellectually, and then at the profoundest emotiomal level, that there is no Other - that the Other is simply Oneself in all the significant essentials. This alone is the key that can unlock the prison of culture. It will neutralize the poisons of the stereotype that allow men to go on benevolently justifying their abuses against humanity.

I traveled from city to city in those days, and the view from within the ghettos was terrible and terrifying. While white people in the periphery were arming themselves against the day when they would have to defend themselves from attack by blacks (and really believed someone was fomenting a racial war in which black people would rise up and attack them), black people mostly without arms huddled inside the ghettos feeling that they were surrounded by armed whites.

The vast difference between what this country was saying and apparently believing, and what the black man was experiencing, was embittering.

The core concept in Griffin's writings about racism—that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and "as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture"—was intuited in Black Like Me and articulated in a seminal essay, "The Intrinsic Other

I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white once again, could say the things that needed saying but would be rejected if black men said them.

Racists are not the pipe-smoking type, I thought to myself.

Night coming tenderly Black like me.

I was a newly created Negro who must go out that door and live in a world unfamiliar to me.

God is invoked … and He is invoked against the God of the spirit, of intelligence and love - excluding and hating this God. What an extraordinary spiritual phenomenon this is: people believe in God and yet do not know God. The idea of God is affirmed and at the same time disfigured and perverted.

He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.

measure up - disillusion us by showing

Logic is relative.

All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be trouble.

Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you

Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.

It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.

A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.

This is a writer's lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.