Quotes About Perception

We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as "it" is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To

The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales

We believe there are certain things people "have," certain things people "do," and even certain things people "are." These beliefs do not necessarily reflect the structure of reality they simply reflect an habitual way of talking about reality.

In fact, the assumption that smartness is something you "have" had led to such nonsensical terms as over-and underachievers.

As I write, the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor.

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind.

Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying. As

We may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.

the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.

all television news programs begin, end, and are somewhere in between punctuated with music...It is there, I assume, for the same reason music is used in theater and films - to create a mood and provide a leitmotif for the entertainment...as long as the music is there as a frame for the program, the viewer is comforted to believe that there is nothing to be greatly alarmed about; that, in fact, the events that are reported have as much relation to reality as do scenes in a play.

We know enough about language to understand that variations in the structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called "world view." How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.

Intelligence does not have quantity or magnitude, except as we believe that it does. And why do we believe that it does? Because we have tools that imply that this is what the mind is like.

How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge? Here

Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be thought stupid.

This perception of a news show as a stylized dramatic performance whose content has been staged largely to entertain is reinforced by several other features, including the fact that the average length of any story is forty-five seconds. While brevity does not suggest triviality, in this case it clearly does. It is simply not possible to convey a sense of seriousness about any event if its implications are exhausted in less that one minute's time.

pseudo-event," by which he means an event specifically staged to be reported—

Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.

Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances.

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.