#perception

Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to Firing Line when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#cable-television #cable-television-in-the-us #conservatism #conservatism-in-the-us #gore-vidal

There is no fixed physical reality, no single perception of the world, just numerous ways of interpreting world views as dictated by one's nervous system and the specific environment of our planetary existence. ↗

— Deepak Chopra

#environment #existence #fixed #interpreting #just

Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. ↗

— Stephen Colbert

#apart #argument #came #case #certainly

Major social movements eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience. ↗

— Freda Adler

#become #diminished #eventually #experience #fade

In the perception of a tree we can distinguish the act of experiencing, or perceiving, from the thing experienced, or perceived. ↗

— Samuel Alexander

#distinguish #experienced #experiencing #perceived #perceiving

I think that the legitimacy of the court would be undermined in any case if the court made a decision based on its perception of public opinion. ↗

— Samuel Alito

#based #case #court #decision #i

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom. ↗

— Henri Bergson

#feeds #form #freedom #matter #movements

My point in mentioning this is only to say that people who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#perception #regret #anger

Sure, there's a chunk of African-Americans out there who associate the Republican Party with racism, frankly particularly in the Deep South. It's an unfair perception, but it exists. Over a period time, that perception will die away if Republicans are focusing on issues that happen to impact African-Americans. ↗

— Artur Davis

#away #chunk #deep #deep south #die

But any perception of this application being speeded up requires me to take responsibility. ↗

— David Blunkett

#application #being #me #perception #requires