Quotes & Sayings About Distortion

The (method of) correction shall by a turn become distortion, and the good in it shall by a turn become evil. — Lao-Tzu

Everything took on the color of blood. — Barbara W. Tuchman

We tune differently, and we use some tricks. There's just the two of us for much of a concert, so we want a big sound. We do use some guitar effects, distortion and delay. Playing cello with distortion sounds so good. — Luka Sulic

For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts' paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of early ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. — Thomas S. Kuhn

Assimilated by the deceit of its divine origin, its tenets are reward for obedience, punishment for transgression, both holding good for all time (this world and another). This moral code is a dramatised burlesque of the conceptive faculty, but is never so perfect or simple in that it allows latitude for change in any sense, so becomes dissociated from evolution, etc; and this divorce loses any utility and of necessity for its own preservation and the sympathy desired, evolves contradictions or a complication to give relationship. Transgressing its commandments, dishonesty shows us its iniquity, for our justification; or simultaneously we create an excuse or reason for the sin by a distortion of the moral code, that allows some incongruity. (Usually retaing a few unforgiveable sins- and an unwritten law.) — Austin Osman Spare

Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art. — Marcel Duchamp

I also realized it wasn't so much that people read the same Word of God differently, but that many weren't reading it at all - not the scripture itself - at least not in a manner that allowed them to fit every piece of it into one cohesive picture of the truth. Instead, people were reading materials their religions published for study. Often these were selective - preserving some threads of the truth while excluding others - so that the total picture was so incomplete it became a distortion. — Avraham Gileadi

They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of those legends, including Christianity, to which the world clings began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion. — James Baldwin

While local economies may experience significant price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely in the United States, given its size and diversity. — Alan Greenspan

If I have viewed them from a certain angle, it is because, seen from there, that is how they looked
which may be due to prismatic distortion, but which is therefore what they also are, though unaware of being it. — Jean Genet

Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Today, Islam effectively resists secularization primarily because of its use of shame. Within the community, each person's sexuality is tied to his or her family and to the community. To violate the sexual rules of Allah violates both the family and the community. This powerful distortion allows Islam to remain isolated from secular sexual influences. The terror of social sanction or violence keeps young people from following their heart. It prevents healthy sexual exploration and development in men and women. — Darrel Ray

Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Of course there's conscious manipulation! Everything about a movie is manipulation ... If you like it, it's an interpretation. If you don't like it, it's a lie - but everything about these movies is a distortion. — Frederick Wiseman

But unlike people with psychotic conditions like schizophrenia, they are not going insane at all. They are, if anything, suddenly overly aware of reality and existence and of the ways in which their own experience is a distortion of a "normal" sense of a real self. Depersonalization, — Daphne Simeon

When you're first starting out, there's always the temptation to hide behind distortion because it lets you get away with murder. But, when it comes to rhythm work, you've gotta back off that gain control a bit, especially if you're playing with another guitarist. — Kirk Hammett

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

[P]olitical freedom can easily provide the legal frame for economic slavery, with the underprivileged 'freely' selling themselves into servitude. We are thus brought to demand more than just political democracy: we need democratization of social and economic life. In short, we have to admit that what we first took as the failure fully to realize the noble principle of democratic freedom is a failure inherent to this principle itself. Learning how the distortion of a notion, its incomplete realization, is grounded in the distortion immanent to this notion is a big step in political education. — Slavoj Zizek

Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want. — Siri Hustvedt

Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily. — Harold Bloom

Distortion upon distortion: ... the more one uses the mind, the more confused one becomes. — Laozi

In the debate over guns, both sides are angry. The pro-gunners are angry at the ignorance, lies, and distortions of the anti-gunners, and the anti-gunners are angry with the pro-gunners for presenting facts. — Dave Champion

There is no excuse for anyone to misunderstand God's Word if he will, like a child, accept the Bible for what it says, and be honest enough to consecrate himself to obey it. He must accept the Bible as God's Word. He must believe that God could not be honest if He sought to hide from man the very things He will judge him by in the end. He must accept the Bible as the final Court of Appeal on its own subjects, and forget man's interpretations and distortion of the Word. He must believe that God knows what He is talking about; that He knows how to express Himself in human language; that He said what He meant, and meant what He said; and that what He says on a subject is more important than what any man may say about it. — Finis Jennings Dake

What Warcollier demonstrated is compatible with what modern cognitive neuroscience has learned about how visual images are constructed by the brain. It implies that telepathic perceptions bubble up into awareness from the unconscious and are probably processed in the brain in the same way that we generate images in dreams. And thus telepathic "images" are far less certain than sensory-driven images and subject to distortion. — Dean Radin

I can't prove it yet know it when I seem it. — Brian Spellman

You could say that everything had become weirdly distorted because I'd broken the rules so many times. — Fuminori Nakamura

The Beatles had some juice when it came to distortion, but Clapton was finally able to break through those early studio engineers' fear of overloading. He defined the sound that guitarists spend the rest of their lives trying to get. — Joe Perry

Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time. — Henri Matisse

...human beings have a distorted view of risk. They don't see the whole picture. Our perceptions are twisted by stories in the media, by films, by our own personalities and experiences. So, despite the unlikely odds, we still worry about being raped or murdered. We hear a sound in the night and think of burglars, not mice... It's kind of a protective pessimism: if we worry about the worst happening, it may miss our door. — Ruth Dugdall

The more we allow God's "wine" (the Holy Spirit, see Eph 5:18) to purify our hearts through holy drunkenness, the more we experience a "real and deep victory" over the distortion of lust (see TOB 45:4). — Ascension Press

The vast bulk of Murdoch's news output, including the huge majority of any falsehood and distortion, is simply the spontaneous product of his highly commercialised newsrooms. It sells. — Nick Davies

the media, at least in the U.S., tends to focus on pain pill use, abuse, and addiction by people who do not have chronic pain.
Even if these stories offhandedly mention that these pills are used to treat pain in people whose physical pain does not go away, however, the stories of those who use pain medicine responsibly -- or, worse, accused of drug-seeking behavior because they need certain types of pills for chronic pain -- are usually overshadowed by the "How can we prevent pain pill addiction?" concern, instead of asking, "How can we treat chronic pain more effectively? — Anna Hamilton

Every call to worship is a call into the Real World ... I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am. — Eugene H. Peterson

power is creation, and that when power takes the form of coercion and violence, that is actually a diminishment and distortion of what it was meant to be. — Andy Crouch

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. — Henry Beston

Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture? — David Bohm

When we respond to attacks of doubt, distortion, and deceit with the truth of God's Word, the fiery dart is extinguished and the enemy takes another hit. — Beth Moore

Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion, and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways - in science, in politics, in every bold intention. — Shirley Temple

I write almost all my songs on an acoustic guitar, even if they turn into rock songs, hard rock songs, metal songs, heavy metal songs, really heavy songs ... I love writing on an acoustic because I can hear what every string is doing; the vibrations haven't been combined in a collision of distortion or effects yet. — Corey Taylor

Worship me, she says, worship the mistery of the bleeding goddess, and you do it. You stop at nothing. You lick it. You consume it. You digest it. She penetrates you.
What next, David? A glass of her urine. How long before you would have begged for her feces? I'm not against it because it's unhygienic.
I'm not against it because it's disgusting. I'm against it because it's falling in love. The only obession everybody wants: 'love'. People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. She was a foreign body introduced into your wholeness. And for a year and a half you struggled to incorporate it. But you'll never be whole until you expel it. You either get rid of it or incorporate it through self-distortion. — Philip Roth

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century. — Marcel Duchamp

Art is the distortion of an unendurable reality ... Art is correction, modification of a situation; art is communication, connection ... Art is social, self-sufficient, and total. — Jean Tinguely

Man cannot be reduced to slavery if he is not distorted first. The politician and the priest have been in a deep conspiracy down the ages. They have been reducing humanity to a crowd of slaves. They are destroying every possibility of rebellion in man - and love is rebellion, because love listens only to the heart and does not care a bit about anything else. — Osho

Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind. — Stanislaw Lem

what makes it funny to people is that it's a gross distortion of something very familiar. For — Neal Shusterman

An extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its suppression. Here, too, the borderline between good and bad faith can be vague; behind the "I don't know" and "I do not remember" that one hears in courtrooms there is sometimes the precise intent to lie, but at other times it is a fossilized lie, rigidified in a formula. — Primo Levi

If you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. it's a distortion of nature, it goes against God's laws, for in all the world's woods and forests he did not create a single leaf the same as another. — Paulo Coelho

A person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.24 — Melissa V. Harris-Perry

What is a lie? It's a distortion of reality, presented as reality. — James Patterson

Christians recognize that all social organizations exist as parodies of eschatological hope. And so it is that the city is a poor imitation of heavenly community;13 the modern state, a deformed version of the ecclesia;14 the market, a distortion of consummation; modern entertainment, a caricature of joy; schooling, a misrepresentation of true formation; liberalism, a crass simulacrum of freedom; and the sovereignty we accord to the self, a parody of God himself. As these institutions and ideals become ends in themselves, they become the objects of idolatry. The shalom of God - which is to say, the presence of God himself - is the antithesis to all such imitations. — James Davison Hunter

The distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces. — Sigmund Freud

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy. — Darin Strauss

Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program. — Richard Dawkins

The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves. — Alain De Botton

Astronomers are obsessed with building larger and larger telescopes. There are two promises that we make with bigger telescopes: that they can see fainter things and that they see more detail. But it's been really hard to follow through on that second promise because of atmospheric distortion. — Andrea M. Ghez

Distortion and suppression of the truth is encouraged by a prevailing attitude of scientism, not science itself but rather a certain attitude of veneration toward science as the exclusive means of obtaining truth — Angus J.L. Menuge

The creation of a work of art must of necessity, as a result of entering into the specific dimensions of pictorial art, be accompanied by distortion of the natural form. For, therein is nature reborn. — Paul Klee

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

The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interest, where any chosen emphasis supports some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial, or national or sexual. — Howard Zinn

Our identities are tremendously warped and distorted by yesterday's trauma and tomorrow's expectations. — Bryant McGill

It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality. — Jean Baudrillard

When I think of a lot of the players I admire, they could always play their parts without hiding behind distortion and sustain. Put the time in. Hear your mistakes. Yeah, it sucks, it's humbling, it makes you want to throw the guitar out the window. But if you work on your mistakes, they'll eventually go away, and you'll become a strong player. — John Petrucci

In a world in which everything bears the indelible impress of Man, it is refreshing to escape from time to time from this wall-to-wall humanisation. Hence the American enthusiasm for national parks and outdoor activities. It is seductive to see the world as though we were not there to see it. We can always dream of perceiving things as they are in themselves, without the buzz and distortion of human meaning. We can take a vacation now and then from the intolerable burden of sense-making, rather as we do when we treat human flesh as something to be mindlessly indulged. We can shuck off language and confront reality in the raw, as we imagine an innocent child might do. — Terry Eagleton

The Natural Law which God has written into our beings cannot be entirely eradicated, but it can be gravely deformed, leading to distortion of consciousness and conscience, and hence our actions. — Michael O'Brien

No sane creator, setting out from scratch to design a flat-fish, would have conceived on his drawing board the absurd distortion of the head needed to bring both eyes round to one side. — Richard Dawkins

We must learn to outgrow our egos in exchange for constructive dialogue rather than debate. In addition, we must be capable of stating problems and proposing solutions clearly and succinctly, without distortion of meaning or misunderstanding, even when these solutions are radically opposed to accepted norms. — Jacque Fresco

When our mind is calm, it reflects reality accurately, without distortion. Breathing, sitting, and walking with mindfulness calms disturbing mental formations such as anger, fear, and despair, allowing us to see reality more clearly. — Thich Nhat Hanh

History will remember him as a savage, but that's because we write the histories. — A.H. Septimius

Until you realize how easily it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else's game. — Evita Ochel

A religiously ambiguous Thomas Jefferson is not useful to the Christian right. — Matt McCook

When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist's perception of his discipline's past. More than the practitioners of other creative fields, he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline's present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field. — Thomas S. Kuhn

I'm a teen distortion, survived abortion. — Marilyn Manson

To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely. — Willard Gaylin

With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion. With Barack Obama we will close the book on the old politics of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay. — Edward Kennedy

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

The Silvertop and the Goldtop both had subtlety where it was needed but lots of definition as well. I liked the different voicings of the distortion/fuzz elements. — Dweezil Zappa

I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle ... In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing - not perfect. — Henry Moore

TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I've ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob. — John Perry Barlow

It's not enough to be compassionate. You must act. — Dalai Lama

Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us - an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof 'God did it' and 'I did it' are both true descriptions. — C.S. Lewis

Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwhelmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life. As Rank so wisely saw, projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man cannot live closed upon himself and for himself. he must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it. We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves. Technically we say that transference is a distortion of reality. But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one's inner self to surrounding nature. In other words, transference reflects the whole of the human condition and raises the largest philosophical question about that condition. — Ernest Becker

It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces. — Lewis Thomas

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, the candle is the egoism of any party now absent. — George Eliot

History loved to lie, through simple distortion or complete fabrication. Lies were the cosmetics of history, and when history could not be beautiful, it preferred to be shocking. — Sean DeLauder

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth. — Flannery O'Connor

The ego says, 'I shouldn't have to suffer,' and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it. — Eckhart Tolle

Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have imagined the sort of scientific utopia which is coming to pass, but already their nightmare fancies are hopelessly out of date. A vast, air-conditioned, neon-lighted, glass-and-chromium broiler-house begins to take shape, in which geneticists select the best stocks to fertilise, and watch over the developing embryo to ensure that all possibilities of error and distortion are eliminated. — Malcolm Muggeridge

What moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time. Of — Bill Bryson

The core tenant of what I teach is there are no facts inside the building. When we come up with a new idea, we tend to slide into our own reality distortion field to convince ourselves and others. And that's not healthy. — Steve Blank

The study of plant diseases for their own sake is proving an increasingly intricate game, to which modern scientists have devoted many wasted hours. Such studies would be amusing if they were not tragic, for no disease in plant, animal, or man can properly be viewed unless it is looked on as an interference with, or to speak more plainly, as the distortion or negation of that positive aspect of the growing organism which we call health. — Albert Howard

Hypocrisy and distortion are passing currents under the name of religion — Mahatma Gandhi

The more distortions we have the less attention we can pay to realizing our potential and self- actualization of our personality — Sunday Adelaja

Inside each of us resides the truth, the absolute truth. But sometimes the truth is hidden in a hall of mirrors. Sometimes we believe we are viewing the read thing, when in fact we are viewing a facsimile, a distortion ... We too, must shatter the mirrors. We must look into ourselves and root out the distortions until that thing which we know in our hearts is perfect and true, stands before us. Only then will justice be served. — Garth Stein

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

We are training not isolated men but a living group of men, - nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, - not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the lory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife and longing; by ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered search for Truth ... and weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an abortion. — W.E.B. Du Bois

The old and simple truth that it is natural for men to help and to love one another, but not to torture and to kill one another, became ever clearer, so that fewer and fewer people were able to believe the sophistries by which the distortion of the truth had been made so plausible. — Mahatma Gandhi

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded. — Sylvia Plath

Jesus Christ is the most famous Jew of all time, but is today remembered as a Christian. Surprisingly, the Jewish community has accepted this distortion of history, and tends to regard Jesus as an apostate. How odd that the Jews would accept a Christian version of one of their brethren rather than seeking to discover the man entombed beneath the myth. — Shmuley Boteach

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia. — Martin Parr

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