Distort Quotes & Sayings

Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination. — Jim Carroll

I always believed that photography was subjective, interpretive and certainly did not represent the truth, but I did think that its status as a societal and historical referent needed to be both safeguarded and illuminated ... now photojournalism is devolving into yet another medium perceived as intending to shock, titillate, sell, distort. — Fred Ritchin

There are lots of those who speak but few who do. However, no one should distort the word of God by his own negligence, but it is better to confess your own weakness, not hiding the truth of God, so that together with the breaking of the commandments you do not also appear guilty of an untrustworthy explanation of the word of God. — Maximus The Confessor

Amid the welter of vague political abstractions ... where meanings shift so quickly and so subtly, not only following changes of thought, but often manipulated artificially by political practitioners so as to obscure, expand, or distort ... a certain broad consistency in its relations to other kindred terms is the nearest approach to definition which such a term as Imperialism admits. Nationalism, internationalism, colonialism, its three closest congeners, are equally elusive, equally shifty, and the changeful overlapping of all four demands the closest vigilance. — J. Allan Hobson

For those of you who may be unaware, [Michael] Boskin is the economist/weasel/fraud who helped to officially distort the CPI, making it more or less worthless as a measure of inflation. The Boskin Commission ... was an act of cowardice. Rather than man up and say fix this, its broken, we can't afford it ... — Barry Ritholtz

For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction. — Nigel Hamilton

Prejudices, mysticism, bigotry these things only distort religion, like they have actually done to the most religions of the world. — Abhijit Naskar

I think that the influence of people with power and money to distort democracy and have their interests served before the rest of the population is the biggest problem. That is caused by two things: campaign finance and the way that's structured, and by the Citizen's United supreme court decision. So those two things are keeping democracy from working right. — Shepard Fairey

The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. — Roland Barthes

Color is a big part of what I do. It's like music. There are only so many notes in the scale, but there are endless permutations; there's no limit to the number. Color on the walls or furniture can reflect back and distort the reality of the true colors of lipsticks and eye shadow. — Evelyn Lauder

You will never be able to see clearly when people around you distort your view of truth with their own clouded version. You will begin to read into everything incorrectly and find yourself lost in a delusional story stitched together from the crumbs of over analyzed words once spoken, misunderstandings or speculation. Life should not be wasted by collecting clues or piecing together a puzzle about how someone feels. Love is straightforward and it is clearly seen on the cloudiest days of your life. If someone loves you it will be obvious. They won't let you go, until you ask them to. — Shannon L. Alder

The damage done through abuse is awful and heinous, but minor compared to the dynamics that distort the victim's relationship with God and rob her of the joy of loving and being loved by others. — Dan B. Allender

We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a union of people. Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Now all of us deplore this vast military spending. Yet, in the face of the Soviet attitude, we realize its necessity. Whatever the cost, America will keep itself secure. But in the process we must not, by our own hand, destroy or distort the American system. This we could do by useless overspending. I know one sure way to overspend. That is by overindulging sentimental attachments to outmoded military machines and concepts. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honor and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it. We see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunkenness. But soon they will drink blood instead of wine, they are being led on to it. I ask you, is such a man free? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We know that the far left and their media allies can't beat us on the issues, so instead they'll distort our records. Let's not do the job for them, OK, Republicans? OK, independents? — Sarah Palin

Will they attack us? Yes. Will they smear our backgrounds and distort our records? Undoubtedly. Will they lie about us, harass our families, namecall to try to intimidate us? They will. There's nothing safe about it. But is it worth it? Well, let me ask you. Is freedom worth it? Is America worth it? — Christine O'Donnell

Complex is something that distort our perception of ourselves and the world — Sunday Adelaja

The major strategy of Satan is to distort the character of God and the truth of who we are. He can't change God and he can't do anything to change our identity and position in Christ. If, however, he can get us to believe a lie, we will live as though our identity in Christ isn't true. — Neil T. Anderson

Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. Conformity, compliance, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, guilt and fear arousal, modeling and identification are some of the staple social influence ingredients well studied in psychological experiments and field studies. In some combinations, they create a powerful crucible of extreme mental and behavioral manipulation when synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings where they are applied intensively. — Steven Hassan

If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest. — Berenice Abbott

An assassin can be found for every president. And for every prophet there are a thousand interpreters to distort the essence of the religion, to replace the bright flame with the heat of the inquisitors' pyres. The time came when every book was cast into the fire, when every symphony was reduced to a popular tune and played in all the drinking dens. A sound philosophical basis could be set in place under any vile nonsense. — Sergei Lukyanenko

We should stop the non-scientific, pseudo-scientific, and anti-scientific nonsense emanating from the right wing, and start demanding immediate action to reduce global warming and prevent catastrophic climate change that may be on our horizon now. We must not let the [Bush] Administration distort science and rewrite and manipulate scientific reports in other areas. We must not let it turn the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Pollution Agency. — Edward Kennedy

Can you see the power emotion has to distort our outlook? Makes you wonder, did you have a bad day, or did you make it a bad day. — Brandon Mull

The 'fact' of my actions frequently collide with the 'fiction' of my words. And at what point will I live what I say, so I will avoid what I do? — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The Tea Party elites gained extraordinary influence by being able to funnel millions of undisclosed dollars into campaigns with ads that distort the truth and attack government. — Chuck Schumer

Ron, Hermione, Fred, George, Fleur and Mundungus drank. All of them gasped and grimaced as the Potion hit their throats: at once, their features began to bubble and distort like hot wax. Hermione and Mundungus were shooting upwards; Ron, Fred and George were shrinking; their hair was darkening, Hermione's and Fleur's appearing to shoot backwards into their skulls. — J.K. Rowling

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. — V.S. Naipaul

I reject karma and rebirth not only because I find them unintelligible, but because I believe they obscure and distort what the Buddha was trying to say. Rather than offering the balm of consolation, the Buddha encouraged us to peer deep and unflinchingly into the heart of the bewildering and painful experience that life can so often be. — Stephen Batchelor

When a friend needs to believe in God in order to be able to face life, it feels cruel to announce your atheism and argue that such religious views are bunk. It might also be cruel to hold students responsible for their religious views by giving them the grades they deserve. Nonetheless, there remain many occasions when atheists can and should speak out. We should not let politicians, in particular, base their policies on religion without being questioned. We should not let religion distort academic and popular discussions. — Louise M. Antony

No matter how you cut them, paste them, rotate them, or distort them, lip syncing and air-guitar playing are fundamentally foolish activities, and anyone seen to be engaging in them with anything approaching a straight face is, by definition, taking herself or himself much too seriously. — Walter Kirn

But why must the system go to such lengths to block our empathy? Why all the psychological acrobatics? The answer is simple: because we care about animals, and we don't want them to suffer. And because we eat them. Our values and behaviors are incongruent, and this incongruence causes us a certain degree of moral discomfort. In order to alleviate this discomfort, we have three choices: we can change our values to match our behaviors, we can change our behaviors to match our values, or we can change our perception of our behaviors so that they appear to match our values. It is around this third option that our schema of meat is shaped. As long as we neither value unnecessary animal suffering nor stop eating animals, our schema will distort our perceptions of animals and the meat we eat, so that we feel comfortable enough to consume them. And the system that constructs our schema of meat equips us with the means by which to do this. — Melanie Joy

And I would never, ever mock the power of love. But it can also distort. Slip over into desperation and delusion. — Louise Penny

Without the renewed mind, we will distort the Scriptures to avoid their radical commands for self-denial, and love, and purity, and supreme satisfaction in Christ alone. — John Piper

The only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not. Otherwise, self-involvement and greediness can sneak in and distort your relationship to the work, or the work itself, so that it is off in some way, biased, impure, and ultimately not completely satisfying, even if it is good. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them. — George Santayana

But man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready to distort the truth, ready to hear nor see anything, as long as he can justify his logic. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Live interviews are more difficult to distort. — Bianca Jagger

Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings who oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ — D. A. Carson

The results of that charismatic takeover have been devastating. In recent history, no other movement has done more to damage the cause of the gospel, to distort the truth, and to smother the articulation of sound doctrine. Charismatic theology has turned the evangelical church into a cesspool of error and a breeding ground for false teachers. It has warped genuine worship through unbridled emotionalism, polluted prayer with private gibberish, contaminated true spirituality with unbiblical mysticism, and corrupted faith by turning it into a creative force for speaking worldly desires into existence. By elevating the authority of experience over the authority of Scripture, the Charismatic Movement has destroyed the church's immune system - uncritically granting free access to every imaginable form of heretical teaching and practice. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

Forgiveness is not a moral issue.
It is an energy dynamic ...
Forgiveness means that you do not carry the baggage of an experience.
When you choose not to forgive,
the experience that you do not forgive sticks with you.
When you choose not to forgive,
it is like agreeing to wear dark, gruesome sunglasses that distort everything,
and it is you who are forced every day
to look at life through those contaminated lenses
because you have chosen to keep them. — Gary Zukav

Science is global. Einstein's equation, E=mc2, has to reach everywhere. Science is a beautiful gift to humanity, we should not distort it. Science does not differentiate between multiple races. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Both porn and religion distort a person's perspectives on women. — Jesse Dangerously

When writing fiction, memories still filter in, and these memories twist and distort and transform until they become living, breathing pieces of the story, as they have here. — Nova Ren Suma

Impatience can be very good by helping us not put up with tyranny, but it can distort our view of what is possible and how to bring about change. We have to cultivate patience so that our perception isn't distorted. — Paul Ekman

The Idea of Anti-imperialism is ... to be considered on several grounds. First, it is traditionally pervasive in the United States, though given its most extreme form in anti-Western academe. Second, it is used as a negative label for any effort by the United States, or the West, to encourage liberties, to block fanaticisms, and to make aid dependent on positive economic policies. Those concerned with the future development of their countries, and of the world, cannot afford to let obsolete resentments distort their aims. — Robert Conquest

The right can distort anything it wants. — David Brock

Whence proceeds this weight we lay
On what detracting people say?
Their utmost malice cannot make
Your head, or tooth, or finger ache;
Nor spoil your shapes, distort your face,
Or put one feature out of place. — Jonathan Swift

English is such a deliciously complex and undisciplined language, we can bend, fuse, distort words to all our purposes. We give old words new meanings, and we borrow new words from any language that intrudes into our intellectual environment. — Willard Gaylin

Why was it not good for man to be alone? If it were only man's loneliness with which God was concerned, he might have provided other companionship. But he provided woman, for she was to be man's helpmeet. She was to act in partnership with him. . . . The Lord God gave woman a different personality and temperament than man. . . .

In the world today there are observed strenuous efforts to distort and desecrate this divine pattern. . . . The conventional wisdom of the day would have you be equal with men. We say, we would not have you descend to that level. More often than not the demand for equality means the destruction of the inspired arrangement that God has decreed for man, woman, and the family. Equality should not be confused with equivalence. — Ezra Taft Benson

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that. — Peter Carey

The world is really a big straight line. Sometimes the world is actually a punchline. There are things that happen and you'll say, 'I can't believe that. Can you believe that?' And for that reason you don't have to tilt your head because the world at that time is coming at you at a forty-five degree angle, so they're out of wack. But most of the world appears to be straight and level, so you've got to tilt your head forty-five degrees and your vision becomes: how can I take that reality and just distort it enough to suit my purposes? To show them the craziness is there but it's just well-disguised. — George Carlin

Everybody knows how awful the world is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things, others with sports, money, love, art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way. — Woody Allen

We believe in a government that is characterized by fairness and reasonableness, a reasonableness that goes beyond labels, that doesn't distort or promise to do things that we know we can't do. — Mario Cuomo

The slow zone, based on the sensor data we're able to get, is approximately one million kilometers across." Holden pointed at the 3D representation on the screen behind him. "There are no visible stars, so the location of the zone is impossible to determine. The boundary is made up of one thousand three hundred and seventy-three individual rings evenly spaced into a sphere. So far, the only one we've been able to find that's 'open' is the one we came through. The fleets we traveled out with are still visible on the other side, though the Ring seems to distort visual and sensor data, making readings through it unreliable. — James S.A. Corey

In healthy individuals, emotions don't distort rationality, they enhance it! — Andy Hargreaves

You can batter your guitar, and it won't distort too much, which is important for me because I play with my hands a lot - I don't really play with picks. — James Vincent McMorrow

Images are powerful; they can distort memories, recreate reality and change history. — Self

We don't have the capacity to exaggerate God's goodness. We can distort it, or even misrepresent it, but we can never exaggerate it. — Bill Johnson

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide. — Jean Genet

Beliefs and definitions never clarify how Reality works -- they only distort perception of it. — Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Your voice I know. It had me terrified. When I hear it in dreams, from time to time all my life, it sounds like a taunt - but dreams distort sound, for they send it over many waters. During these hard days, I, a pilgrim, am giving my consideration to this. I trudge along the bottom of the river and the questioning goes on in me. What are we made of but hunger and rage? His heels rise and fall in front of me. How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal. — Anne Carson

No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems. — Anne Rice

When we try to describe the truth with words, we distort it and it's no longer truth
it's our story. The story may be true for us, but that doesn't mean it's true for anyone else. — Miguel Ruiz

I confess I've relived it so many times, I hardly remember it anymore. My feelings are strong enough to refract and distort the truth of that journey. But then ... my feelings are the truth of that journey — Ann Brashares

Don't let other people's opinions distort your reality. Be true to yourself. Be bold in pursuing your dreams. Be unapologetically you! — Steve Maraboli

Yes the Jews do many foul things and they distort our foreign policy but not everything that goes bad can be blamed on the Jews. — Tom Metzger

For every prophet there are a thousand interpreters to distort the essence of the religion, to replace the bright flame with the heat of the inquisitors' pyres. — Sergei Lukyanenko

The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can't admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality. Sin ultimately makes long-term gratitude or friendship or meaning impossible. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will. This is what it means to lose your soul. — John Ortberg

You expect two-year olds to wear diapers and make a mess with just about everything they touch. We have to allow the young in Christ to be immature, and yes, make messes. Young and immature prophetic people will act like young and immature prophetic people. The belief that some have tried to impose on the prophetic - that if you made one mistake you are a false prophet - inhibits their maturity, or worse, it can profoundly distort their character. — Rick Joyner

If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image. — Francis Bacon

The attempts to distort the truth and to hide the facts behind blanket accusations have been undertaken at all stages of the Ukrainian crisis. — Sergei Lavrov

We are in control, they are in a state of hysteria. Losers, they think that by killing civilians and trying to distort the feelings of the people they will win. I think they will not win, those bastards. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit. — Robert J. Flaherty

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror. — Anne Roiphe

And each and every one, it seems, falls to stagnation, and in that stagnation evil men rise, through greed or lust for power. Like canker buds, they find their way in any government, slipping through seams in the well-intended laws, coaxing the codes to their advantage, finding their treasures and securing their well-being at the expense of all others, and ever blaming the helpless, who have no voice and no recourse. To the laborers they cry, "Beware the leech!" and the leech is the infirm, the elderly, the downtrodden. So do they deflect and distort reality itself to secure their wares, and yet, they are never secure, for this is the truest rhyme of history, that when the theft is complete, so will the whole collapse, and in that collapse will fall the downtrodden and the nobility alike. — R.A. Salvatore

The truth is that our material possessions, rather than helping us understand our limits and our place in the world, regularly distort out perspective. Put a Coach purse or the key to a BMW M series or the latest Nokia gadget in our hands and it's not uncommon for humility, respect for other people, and appreciation of our environment to drain from out brains. — Dave Bruno

The best formula for a prayer that gives J.O.Y:
J- 1st, Pray to JESUS
O- 2nd, Pray for OTHERS
Y- 3rd, Pray for YOURSELF
Most people distort the formula by praying selfish prayers for their own personal gains. JYO is not the spelling for joy. In JOY, O comes before Y. It means you pray for OTHERS before YOURSELF. — Israelmore Ayivor

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today. — J.L. Granatstein

Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit and distort its experience of reality, and the consequently unreliable nature of much of its thought. Poetry is the means by which we correct the main tool of that thought, language, for its anthropic distortions: it is language's self-corrective function, and everywhere challenges our Adamite inheritance - the catastrophic, fragmenting design of our conceptualizing machinery - through the insistence on a counterbalancing project, that of lyric unity. — Don Paterson

Our lives are often a continuous betrayal and denial of what came before, we twist and distort everything as time passes, and yet we are still aware, however much we deceive ourselves, that we are the keepers of secrets and mysteries, however trivial. How tiring having always to move in the shadows or, even more difficult, in the half-light, which is never the same, always changing, every person has his light areas and his dark areas, they change according to what he knows and to what day it is and who he's talk to and what he wants ... Sometimes it is only the weariness brought on by the shadow that impels one to tell all the facts, the way someone hiding will suddenly reveal himself, either the pursuer or the pursued, simply in order to bring the game to an end and to step free from what has become a kind of enchantment. — Javier Marias

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. — Mark Twain

As artists, we distort the truth and create the most amazing theories; we create entire philosophies and the most amazing religions; we create stories and superstitions about everything, including ourselves. And this is exactly the main point: We create them. — Miguel Ruiz

He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M'Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within - or sometimes only maim him and distort him! — Charles Dickens

I don't think there is anyone in public life today who can escape the inevitable onslaught of the media. It seeks to pry into and often grossly distort aspects of one's personal and professional life. I guess it just comes with the territory. — Frederick Lenz

If, while I'm painting, I distort or destroy a motif, it is not a planned or conscious act, but rather it has a different justification: I see the motif, the way I painted it, is somehow ugly or unbearable. Then I try to follow my feelings and make it attractive. And that means a process of painting, changing or destroying - for however long it takes - until I think it has improved. And I don't demand an explanation from myself as to why this is so. — Gerhard Richter

Humiliate the reason and distort the soul. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Could he tell her any of this? Of course not. Could he tell her that women almost never qualified for Eternity because, for some reason he did not understand (Computers might, but he himself certainly did not), their abstraction from Time was from ten to a hundred times as likely to distort Reality as was the abstraction of a man. — Isaac Asimov

Always get the facts first. You can distort them later. — Jill Shalvis

The fantasy/reality confusion ... it's just marvelous in her work. I mean, there, it's practically like what we do, the fantasy working as a sort of metalogic, with which she can solve real, aesthetic problems in the most incredible ways
I was actually in a few of her productions last year, a sort of ersatz member of the company. But finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that's what is, as far as she's concerned. But then, I suppose ... ' Bron laughed at the ground, then looked up: they'd just left the Plaza
'that's the right we just fought a war to defend. But Audri, when someone abuses that right, it can make it pretty awful for the rest of us. — Samuel R. Delany

Humans don't really improve on our own functioning, we only interfere with it, distort it, and disguise it. — Frederick Salomon Perls

Journalism is an enemy of rationality. What makes news? The unusual and the spectacular, which by their nature distort reality and pervert our decisions. You read headlines like 15 KILLED IN PLANE CRASH IN WYOMING. You don't read headlines like ANOTHER 2,000 DIED OF HEART DISEASE YESTERDAY. This leads to the Availability Fallacy. Our lazy mind gloms on to the most vivid, emotional examples. When we think of danger, we think of hideous plane crashes or acts of terrorism, even though boring old cars kill eighty-four times more people. — A. J. Jacobs

Alternative therapists don't kill many people, but they do make a great teaching tool for the basics of evidence-based medicine, because their efforts to distort science are so extreme. — Ben Goldacre

Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative - an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary ... That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly - that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do ... — John Wyndham

Listen to us rather than to Arkady Mamontov talking about us. Don't twist and distort everything we say. Let us enter into dialogue and contact with the country, which is ours too, not just Putin's and the Patriarch's. Like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the end, words will crush concrete. Solzhenitsyn wrote, 'the word is more sincere than concrete, so words are not trifles. Once noble people mobilize, their words will crush concrete.' — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

We deny the same love to others that we deny ourselves. We distort others in the same way we distort ourselves. — Vironika Tugaleva

It seems that the desire to oppress others is so ingrained in many humans that they readily distort even a liberating theory or concept into its inverse, creating another wall of defense against positive change. Ultimately, an unbiased observer of human behavior must conclude that most action is not shaped by theory, but rather theories are shaped to conform to actions we have no intention of changing. — Marjorie Spiegel

I think certain types of processes don't allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform - or perhaps distort - yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality. — Haruki Murakami

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not. — Ralph Waldo Emerson