Quotes About Perception

Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.

It was perfect. I mean . . . not that anything really happened." "Oh, George, it's not how much you do, it's what you feel while you're doing it. You know that. But do you know the real truth?" "No, What?" "The real truth is that whoever you love will be just like me, and not just in the fog. Understand?" "No." "You will

You require me," Atticus said. "To be your magic Negro?

You'd be a better Christian if you learned how to read, Ruby had told him. Cain's mark was a protection; if the mark was his skin color, then God must have turned him white, not black.

my attention was drawn instantly to the girl with the biggest boobs. Her eyes were glowing.

No men and women in heaven?" he heard a soldier behind him grumble. "If I ain't a man anymore, how's that different from just being dead?

White people in his experience were far more transparent. The most hateful rarely bothered to conceal their hostility, and when for some reason they did try to hide their feelings, they generally exhibited all the guile of five-year-olds, who cannot imagine that the world sees them other than as they wish to be seen.

people are most deeply offended by moral failings that mirror their own.

You made love to a dream. Have I ever lied to you, George? Then remember what I told you: Whoever you love will be just like me. Any woman seen through love's eyes is as perfect as you thought me to be." "No," George said. "There's no one like you." "They're all like me, George, if you see with your heart. But some of them stay.

I definitely think we get a lot of respect for what we do, but I definitely think that some people don't like us, which is fine.

I look around. You'd have to be out of your fucking mind to write, as Marcus did, that Black History Month is a ploy to lever more entitlement money out of Congress, but the ho-hum nonresponse of the white crowd reading this bit of transparent insanity is, to me, even weirder.

America is no longer a country that cares about experts. In fact, it hates experts. If you can't fit a story into the culture-war storyline in ten seconds or less, it dies.

Sixty million people were announcing that they preferred one reality to another. Inherent in this decision was the revolutionary idea that you can choose your own set of facts. Blue-state

You can tell a lot about a country by how boring its media is. If you turn on the TV and immediately feel like going to sleep, it generally means the political class feels secure.

TV is the ultimate leveling phenomenon. It makes everyone, rich and poor, equally incapable of dealing with reality. That

as is curiously also the case with high-level politicians, top on-air personalities and print editorialists are never geniuses. They almost never say or write surprising things. They don't dazzle or amaze.

The public largely misunderstands the "fake news" issue. Newspapers rarely fib outright. Most "lies" are errors of omission or emphasis. There are no Fox stories saying blue states have lower divorce rates, nor are there MSNBC stories exploring the fact that many pro-choice Democrats, particularly religious ones, struggle with a schism between their moral and political beliefs on abortion.

Who we hate just depends on what channel we watch.

We rejoiced in the idea that reality was not an absolute but a choice, something we select to fit our own conception not of the world but of ourselves. We are Christians, therefore all world events have a Christian explanation. We hate George Bush, therefore Bush is the cause of it all. And

Images of poor, inarticulate people are disturbing to audiences, especially upscale ones (read: people with disposable incomes who can respond to advertising). That's why we don't show poverty on TV unless we're laughing at it (Honey Boo Boo) or chasing it in squad cars (Cops).

Just looking at Palin up on the podium doesn't impress me. She looks like a chief flight attendant on a Piedmont flight from Winston-Salem to Cleveland, with only the bag of almonds and the polyester kerchief missing from the picture. With

Two data points stood out after 2016. One involved those polls that showed confidence in the media dipping to all-time lows. The other involved unprecedented ratings. People believed us less, but watched us more.

No crowd of millions ever banged down the door of Time magazine and demanded, "We want a president who's a good beer companion.

were used (or misused) is the difference between