Distortion Quotes - Page 4

• Lies and distortions can be spread, via the Internet, in an inexpensive way, and the effects are astounding.

  Tony Campolo

  Lying, Way, Internet

  "Why the Religious Right Will Dominate" by Tony Campolo, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 4, 2010.

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• Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime.

  Harry Elmer Barnes

  War, Writing, Emotional

  Harry Elmer Barnes (1980). “Revisionism: A Key to Peace and Other Essays”

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• Probably, the nature of homophobia will never be widely interrogated, while we will continue to be excluded from school curricula, subjected to vicious media distortions, or entirely ignored, denied basic civil rights while our demands are ridiculed and derided. But in the midst of all this only one thing has changed for certain. We have changed. We will never go back into the closet.

  Sarah Schulman

  School, Rights, Media

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• I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way.

  Shelby Foote

  Historical, Way, Modern

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• There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Knowing, Humanity

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.208, Vintage

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• Religious traditions can be reinterpreted in a manner that assists healing, corrects distortions, and expands vision.

  Larry Graham

  Religious, Healing, Vision

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• . . . the upsurge of Spirit is the only plausible way to stop the ecological destruction of our planet. Even people who have no interest in a communal solution to the distortions in our lives will have to face up [to] this ecological reality. Unless we transform our relationship with nature, we will destroy the preconditions for human life on this planet.

  Michael Lerner

  Reality, People, Way

  Michael Lerner (2000). “Spirit Matters”, Hampton Roads Publishing Company Incorporated

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• Common sense is science exactly in so far as it fulfills the ideal of common sense; that is, sees facts as they are, or at any rate, without the distortion of prejudice, and reasons from them in accordance with the dictates of sound judgment. And science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

  Thomas Huxley

  Science, Common Sense, Sound

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1920). “An Introduction to the Study of Zoology”, Concept Publishing Company

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• Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which leades to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Spiritual, Thinking, Ego

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• When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal insanity.

  David Korten

  Money, Suicidal, Acceptance

  "When Corporations Rule the World". Book by David Korten, January 1, 1995.

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• Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

  Dan Simmons

  Mean, Reality, Thinking

  Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.236, Spectra

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• The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.

  Wilfred Owen

  Night, Sight, Broken

  Wilfred Owen (1965). “The Collected poems of Wilfred Owen”, p.22, New Directions Publishing

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• The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are.

  Anne Lamott

  Mean, Writing, Dark

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.234, Anchor

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• Steve has a reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.

  Walter Isaacson

  Reality, Schedules, Fields

  Walter Isaacson (2011). “Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein”, p.169, Simon and Schuster

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• Government intervention in the economy - through taxes, regulation and, most importantly, currency inflation - causes distortions and misallocations of capital that must eventually be unwound. The distortions degrade the general standard of living, and the economy goes into a recession (call that an incomplete cleansing). Or it goes into a depression - wherein the entire sickly structure comes unglued.

  Doug Casey

  Government, Regulation, Cleansing

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• I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can't find it in nature. It's basically some kind of distortion of fear.

  Etgar Keret

  Believe, Hatred, Emotion

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

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• Seeing any war through the distortion of comedy is healthy. There is just too much absurdity and irony at play in a combat zone not to pay attention to it. At least that's how it struck me; others may have had an entirely different war experience.

  Dave Abrams

  War, Play, Healthy

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The net effect of the distortion of the First Amendment is to require that wherever the state is, religion must be excluded.

  Pat Swindall

  Christian, Religious, Firsts

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• The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards.

  Michael Medved

  Christian, Religious, War

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• When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.

  Ayn Rand

  Reality, Mind, Absolutism

  Ayn Rand (1964). “The Virtue of Selfishness”, p.35, Penguin

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• In my opinion, the continued popularity of these gross distortions of Iran in the U.S. seems to reveal more about certain aspects of America than about Iran. It seems that the popularity of these memoirs is largely due to the fact that, while claiming to do the opposite, they regularly reinforce the dominant representations of Iran in America by constructing an exotic, backward, and barbaric Iran principally based on U.S. archives.

  Mohammad Marandi

  Iran, Opposites, America

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.

  Bell Hooks

  Romantic Love, Expression, Want

  Bell Hooks, Cornel West (1991). “Breaking bread: insurgent Black intellectual life”, South End Pr

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• The very nature of limiting something from an infinite to moments in time creates distortion; analog recording methods create all kinds of distortion, they're just not digital distortion.

  Kevin Shields

  Digital, Kind, Infinite

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

  Noam Chomsky

  Lying, Class, Training

  Institute Professor Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky (2010). “American Power and the New Mandarins”, p.404, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Like medieval theologians we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion... The perniciousness of the anti-Communist ideology of the Truman Doctrine arises not from any patent falsehood but from its distortion and simplification of reality, from its universalization and its elevation to the status of a revealed truth.

  J. William Fulbright

  Lying, Philosophy, Reality

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