Quotes about blind
page 7

Max Wertheimer photo
Tad Williams photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Philo photo
Dorothea Lange photo

“One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.”

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) American photojournalist

As quoted in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life by Elizabeth Partridge (1994)

Aneurin Bevan photo

“The spectacle therefore afforded us by the United States is one of technical brilliance and social blindness.”

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Welsh politician

In Place of Fear (William Heinemann Ltd, 1952), p. 162
1950s

Cornelius Castoriadis photo

“I ask to be able to participate directly in all the social decisions that may affect my existence, or the general course of the world in which I live. I do not accept the fact that my lot is decided, day after day, by people whose projects are hostile to me or simply unknown to me, and for whom we, that is I and everyone else, are only numbers in a general plan or pawns on a chessboard, and that, ultimately, my life and death are in the hands of people whom I know to be, necessarily, blind.”

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) Greek-French philosopher

Je désire pouvoir, avec tous les autres, savoir ce qui se passe dans la société, contrôler l’étendue et la qualité de l’information qui m’est donnée. Je demande de pouvoir participer directement à toutes les décisions sociales qui peuvent affecter mon existence, ou le cours général du monde où je vis. Je n’accepte pas que mon sort soit décidé, jour après jour, par des gens dont les projets me sont hostiles ou simplement inconnus, et pour qui nous sommes, moi et tous les autres, que des chiffres, dans un plan ou des pions sur un échiquier et qu’à la limite, ma vie et ma mort soient entre les mains de gens dont je sais qu’ils sont nécessairement aveugles.
Source: The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), p. 92.

Michael Shea photo

“Is it not unsettling to consider the blind unlikelihoods that shape one’s fate?”

Michael Shea (1946–2014) writer

Source: A Quest for Simbilis (1974), Chapter 7, “The Stronghold of Simbilis” (p. 134)

Rachel Whiteread photo

“I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way.”

Rachel Whiteread (1963) British sculptor

Rachel Whiteread, " Kisses for Spiderwoman http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/oct/14/art2," The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2007: on Louise Bourgeois

Alanis Morissette photo
Gilbert Ryle photo
Georges Bataille photo
Bram van Velde photo

“Painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see, and sees what blinds it.... this tiny little thing, which is nothing, which dominates life.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

short quotes, 31 October 1966; p. 58
1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Carole King photo
Stephen Baxter photo

“The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.”

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section III (p. 132)

Cat Stevens photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“6172. Who so blind as he,
That will not see?”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Daniel Tosh photo
Dave Matthews photo

“Current economic growth has uncoupled itself from the world and has become irrelevant. Worse, it has become a blind guide.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

Source: Steady-State Economics, 1977, p. 108

African Spir photo
George William Curtis photo

“Up to this time, as I believe, slavery had been let alone, as it claimed to be, in good faith. Up to this time it is clear enough in our history that there was no general perception of the terrible truth that slavery was a system aggressive in its very nature, and necessarily destructive of Constitutional rights and liberties. Up to this time there had been a general blindness to the fact that, under the plea, which was allowed, that it was a local and State institution, slavery had acquired an absolute national supremacy, and if not checked would presently declare itself in national law as the national policy. I think that the eyes of the people were opened rather by the frank statements and legislative action in Congress of the slave party; by the speeches of Mr. Calhoun, filtered through lesser minds and mouths than his; at last by the events in Kansas forcing every man to consider whether, while we had let slavery alone, it had also let us alone; and forcing him to see that its hand was already upon the throat of freedom in this country. I think that by the cuts of the slave party, not by the words of the technical abolitionists, the country was at last aroused. The moral wrong and the political despotism of the system were at last perceived, and a reconstruction of political parties was inevitable. For in human society, while the individual conscience is the steam or motive power, political methods are the engine and the wheels by which progress is effected and secured.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Charles A. Beard photo
Anne Brontë photo
Temple Grandin photo

“Ultimately, all addictions are the same. What distinguishes one from the other is only that some are visible and socially unacceptable, whereas others fall into cultural blind spots and get applauded. The latter are the addictions society seems to need in order to keep the system and economy going.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

The Personal Journey of Masculinity: From Externalization to Disconnection to Oblivion, pp. 27–28
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

John Milton photo

“Blind mouths! That scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook.”

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 119

Ilya Prigogine photo
Ralph Ellison photo

“Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. […] For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison and destroy.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 81.

Raghuram G. Rajan photo

“I think we have still to get to a place where we feel satisfied. We have this saying - "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."”

Raghuram G. Rajan (1963) Indian economist

We are a little bit that way.
On India's performance amid the 2015 world economy slow down, as quoted in " India 'one-eyed' king in land of blind, says Rajan http://www.business-standard.com/article/finance/india-one-eyed-king-in-land-of-blind-says-rajan-116041600663_1.html", Business Standard (16 April 2016)

William Lloyd Garrison photo
Wyndham Lewis photo
Ai Weiwei photo
Janet Jackson photo

“Like a moth to a flame
Burned by the fire.
My love is blind
Can't you see my desire?”

Janet Jackson (1966) singer from the United States

That's the Way Love Goes
janet. (1993)

Carol Ann Duffy photo

“Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.”

Carol Ann Duffy (1955) British writer and professor of contemporary poetry

Valentine, from Mean Time (1993).

Jorge Majfud photo
Paul Bourget photo

“There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 5 "Countess Steno"

“Why reel I thus, confused and blind?
What madness mars my sober mind?”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book XII, p. 436

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Annie Besant photo
Pete Doherty photo
George William Russell photo
Peter Gabriel photo

“Cover me, when I sleep
Cover me, when I breathe
You throw your pearls before the swine
Make the monkey blind
Cover me, darling please.
Monkey, monkey, monkey.
Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Shock The Monkey
Song lyrics, Peter Gabriel (IV), Security (1982)

Hermann Hesse photo
Joseph Massad photo
Jürgen Klopp photo

“How do you explain to a blind person what colour is?”

Jürgen Klopp (1967) German association football player and manager

When asked by Schalke fan what is the secret to winning the Bundesliga

Harry Emerson Fosdick photo
William James photo

“Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anesthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he also is afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it - so importantly - is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

"What Makes a Life Significant?"
1910s, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1911)

Albert Pike photo
Shashi Tharoor photo
Paul Krugman photo
Francis Parkman photo
Khalil Gibran photo
Gangubai Hangal photo
Iain Banks photo

“You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.”

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 4 (p. 69)

John Shelby Spong photo
Julian of Norwich photo

“How senseless is the sordid love of gain;
Blind to all else the mind that's set on profit.”

Diphilus Athenian poet of New Comedy

Fragment 13
Fabulae Incertae

Ralph Steadman photo
Karl Jaspers photo
El Lissitsky photo
Carlos Fuentes photo

“The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you.”

Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) Mexican writer

"How I Started to Write", in Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (eds.) The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1988); cited from Myself With Others (London: Pan, 1989) p. 5.

Nat Friedman photo
Chris Cornell photo
Benito Mussolini photo

“The Truth Apparent, apparent to everyone's eyes who are not blinded by dogmatism, is that men are perhaps weary of liberty. They have a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer the virgin, chaste and severe, to be fought for … we have buried the putrid corpse of liberty … the Italian people are a race of sheep.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Written statement (1934), quoted in Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind : A Bridge Between Mind and Society (2006) by Israel W. Charny, p. 23
Variant translation: The truth is that men are tired of liberty.
Attributed to Mussolini in Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (2007) by Derek Swannson, p. 507; similar remarks are also attributed to Adolf Hitler
A similar statement appears in "Forza e Consenso" Gerarchia magazine (March 1923), excerpted in Cos'è il fascismo https://www.liberliber.it/online/autori/autori-m/benito-mussolini/cose-il-fascismo/ (1983)
1930s

Joshua Sylvester photo

“And look upon you with ten thousand eyes
Till heaven wax'd blind, and till the world were done.”

Joshua Sylvester (1563–1618) English poet

Poem: Love's Omnipresence http://www.bartleby.com/106/25.html

Robert Frost photo
Theodore Zeldin photo

“No history of the world can be complete which does not mention Mary Helen Keller… whose overcoming of her blindness and deafness were arguably victories more important than those of Alexander the Great, because they have implications still for every living person.”

Theodore Zeldin (1933) English academic

Theodore Zeldin in An Intimate History of Humanity (1994) This quote seems to obviously refer to Helen Adams Keller, but why she is referred to as "Mary Helen Keller" is not clear.
An Intimate History of Humanity (1994)

Terence McKenna photo
Bernard Cornwell photo

“The Rifles were a new kind of regiment, prizing skill and intelligence above blind discipline.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Prey (2001)

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson photo
Peter Kropotkin photo

“Practised for centuries, repression has so badly succeeded that it has but led us into a blind alley from which we can only issue by carrying torch and hatchet into the institutions of our authoritarian past.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)

Ben Jonson photo

“Seven cities claimed blind Homer, dead,
Through which blind Homer, living, begged his bread.”

Avram Davidson (1923–1993) novelist

Vergil in Averno (1987)

Isaac Asimov photo

“To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was “system,” an indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was “industry,” indecision when right was “caution,” and blind stubbornness when wrong, “determination.””

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation and Empire (1952), Chapter 12 “Captain and Mayor”

Jimmy Carter photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“Taking the points in order, it's fairly easy to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy's bad guy. He's not just bad in himself but the cause of badness in others. While he survives not only are the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples compelled to live in misery and fear (the sheerly moral case for regime-change is unimpeachable on its own), but their neighbors are compelled to live in fear as well.

However—and here is the clinching and obvious point—Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion. It has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Like the Ceausescu edifice in Romania, it is a pyramid balanced on its apex (its powerbase a minority of the Sunni minority), and when it falls, all the consequences of a post-Saddam Iraq will be with us anyway. To suggest that these consequences—Sunni-Shi'a rivalry, conflict over the boundaries of Kurdistan, possible meddling from Turkey or Iran, vertiginous fluctuations in oil prices and production, social chaos—are attributable only to intervention is to be completely blind to the impending reality. The choices are two and only two—to experience these consequences with an American or international presence or to watch them unfold as if they were none of our business.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2002-11-07
Machiavelli in Mesopotamia
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2002/11/machiavelli_in_mesopotamia.html: On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2002

Henry James photo
Douglas MacArthur photo
Raymond Poincaré photo
L. Ron Hubbard photo

“This is useful knowledge. With it the blind again see, the lame walk, the ill recover, the insane become sane and the sane become saner. By its use the thousand abilities Man has sought to recover become his once more.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

On Scientology in Scientology: A History Of Man (1952).

Bill Hicks photo

“Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against Bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, anti-Semitism, the Reich's darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold that all had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, with the reins of power at last now firm in his grasp, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.”

William Manchester (1922–2004) (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004) American author, journalist and historian

Source: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone 1932-1940 (1988), p. 688-689

Hillary Clinton photo
Henry Adams photo

“Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

George Strong in Ch. VII
Esther: A Novel (1884)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Oliver Cowdery photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo