“Innumerate people characteristically have a strong tendency to personalize—to be misled by their own experiences, or by the media’s focus on individuals and drama.”

Introduction (p. 6)
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988)

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John Allen Paulos48

American mathematician 1945

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

The Way In (2000)

“What media loves is to focus on the candidates. What the American people, I believe, want is for us to focus on them, not the candidates, not anymore.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

as interviewed by Amy Goodman, "Bernie Sanders Warns That Corporate Media Threatens Democracy," Alternet, (28 December 2016) http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bernie-sanders-warns-corporate-media-threatens-democracy <br class="br">2010s, 2016

“A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Source: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988), Chapter 2, “Probability and Coincidence” (p. 35)

“All a person can do in this life is gather about him his integrity, his imagination, and his individuality – and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience.”

Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Postmodernists place an overriding emphasis on the limited, partial, subjective character of people's individual experiences--rejecting the strategy of collective struggle against institutions of oppression and exploitation to instead focus on individual and " in any particular situation.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

“The media of the technological age have very different characteristics. Their content is the Insignificant, the "news."”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Tomorrow it will no longer have the least interest. There is even good reason to believe that there is no interest at the time of the event. The medium is the televised image, instead of the permanent to which one must return in order to grow on one's own. It continually falls into a nothingness from which it will never be able to leave. The media world thus does not offer a self-realization of life; it offers escape. For all those whose laziness represses their energy and thus always leaves them discontent with themselves, it offers the opportunity to forget about their discontent. This forgetting recurs at each moment with each new rise of Force and Desire. Each weekend, students from the Parisian suburbs spend an average of twenty-one hours in front of their televisions, just like their teachers. At least they will have something to talk about the next day.
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)
Source: Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 141

“The fastest way, the most powerful way, the most effective way to experience the characteristics of divinity is to be a cause of another person experiencing the characteristics of divinity.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

“Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experiences.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in Leslie Halliwell, Halliwell’s Filmgoers’ Companion ( 1984 http://books.google.com/books?id=SAAqAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Paul+Newman+Acting+is+a+question+of+absorbing+other+people's+personalities+and+adding+some+of+your+own+experience%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage)

“Ministries that focus on manufacturing spiritual experiences may actually be retarding spiritual growth by making people experience-dependent.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

“A gifted noble people; a people of wild strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noble-mindedness, of genius.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

“Innumerate people characteristically have a strong tendency to personalize—to be misled by their own experiences, or by the media’s focus on individuals and drama.”

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John Allen Paulos48

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