Quotes About Perception

We think we control our environment but in fact it controls us.

The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong.

There is never anyone in the other boat. When we are angry, we are screaming at an empty vessel.

People who believe they can succeed see opportunities where others see threats.

It's not about you. It's about what other people think of you.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV…. Hot media are… low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

The medium is the message.

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists between antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power is manifest in the famous story "The Emperor's New Clothes".