Quotes about distortion
A collection of quotes on the topic of distortion, other, use, people.
Quotes about distortion

Kiyokazu Washida. The Past, the Feminine, the Vain in Talking to Myself (2002), Ch. 2: The Feminine, or the Gap Which Cannot be Filled.

Columbus Day Speech, San Francisco (1992)

As quoted in Sathyam Sivam Sundaram (The Life Story of Sathya Sai Baba) by N. Kasturi, Ch. XXVI : Holy Joy http://www.ineval.org/sai/Teachings/SathyamSivamSundaram/s1026.html
Source: The Outermost House, 1928, p. 25: Ch 2

Letter Nine (4 November 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.
Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

“Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.”
Comprehension
Source: One Minute Wisdom (1989)

“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”
Source: A Bend in the River

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
As quoted in "An Interview with Mark Twain" http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kipling/rudyard/seatosea/chapter37.html, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (1899) by Rudyard Kipling, Ch. 37, p. 180
Commonly paraphrased as: "First get your facts, then you can distort them at your leisure."

“Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”
Source: Selected Diaries

“The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view.”
Misattributed
Source: Often attributed to Kerouac's On the Road, the quote cannot be found in that book, nor in any of Kerouac's other published works.
Lords of the Press (1938)
Incorporates the famous observation of Joseph de Maistre that "every nation gets the government it deserves."

Source: 1950s, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), p. 220

Hat matt nicht die Augen, um sich sie auszureißen und das Herz zum gleichen Zweck? Dabei ist es ja nicht so schlimm, das ist Übertreibung und Lüge, alles ist Übertreibung, nur die Sehnsucht ist wahr, die kann man nicht übertreiben. Aber selbst die Wahrheit der Sehnsucht ist nicht so sehr ihre Wahrheit, als vielmehr der Ausdruck der Lüge alles übrigen sonst. Es klingt verdreht, aber es ist so.
Auch ist es vielleicht nicht eigentlich Liebe wenn ich sage, daß Du mir das Liebste bist; Liebe ist, daß Du mir das Messer bist, mit dem ich in mir wühle.
Letter to Milena Jesenská (14 September 1920) http://www.abyssal.de/zitate/liebe.htm
Variant translations:
In this love you are like a knife, with which I explore myself.
Letters to Milena (1952)

in Denis Rouart (1972) Claude Monet, p. 21 : About his youth
after Monet's death

Interview https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/02/27/inenglish/1519736544_699462.html, El País, 27/02/2018

"That's What America Is," speech given on Gay Freedom Day (1978-06-25) in San Francisco

Letter to C.L. Moore (August 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 574
Non-Fiction, Letters

As quoted in Jamāḷ al-Dīn al-Afghāni: A Muslim intellectual (1984) by Anwar Moazzam, p. 13

Message of Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei To the Youth in Europe and North America http://english.khamenei.ir//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2001, Khamenei.ir (January 21, 2015)
2015

Letter to Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird printed in Weird Tales 3, no. 3 (March 1924), pp. 89-92. Quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 122
Non-Fiction, Letters

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), p. 16 (Quote is from Marx, Early Writings (1964), p. 154).

Nordhaus, William D., and James Tobin. " Is growth obsolete? http://www.nber.org/chapters/c7620.pdf." Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect Vol 5: Economic Growth. Nber, 1972. 1-80.
1970s and later

Source: 1930s, Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), Ch. 16: Power philosophies

April 30, 1945, quoted in "Memoirs: Ten Years And Twenty Days" - Page 442 - by Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz - History - 1997.

Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic

Source: 1920s, Review of The Meaning of Meaning (1926), p. 114

Source: 1950s, My Philosophical Development (1959), p. 213

Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, (1990, concurring), 497 U.S. 502 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?friend=oyez&navby=case&court=us&vol=497&invol=502#520 ; decided June 25,1990).
1990s

2014, Remarks to the People of Estonia (September 2014)

Remarks by President Obama to the United Nations General Assembly https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/28/remarks-president-obama-united-nations-general-assembly (September 28, 2015)
2015
In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Context: Objective knowledge, the idea of unity included, belongs to objective consciousness. The forms which express this knowledge when perceived by subjective consciousness are inevitably distorted and, instead of truth, they create more and more delusions. With objective consciousness it is possible to see and feel the unity of everything. But for subjective consciousness the world is split up into millions of separate and unconnected phenomena. Attempts to connect these phenomena into some sort of system in a scientific or philosophical way lead to nothing because man cannot reconstruct the idea of the whole starting from separate facts and they cannot divine the principles of the division of the whole without knowing the laws upon which this division is based.

2012, Remarks at Clinton Global Initiative (September 2012)
Context: As Bill mentioned, I’ve come to CGI every year that I’ve been President, and I’ve talked with you about how we need to sustain the economic recovery, how we need to create more jobs. I’ve talked about the importance of development -- from global health to our fight against HIV/AIDS to the growth that lifts nations to prosperity. We've talked about development and how it has to include women and girls -- because by every benchmark, nations that educate their women and girls end up being more successful. And today, I want to discuss an issue that relates to each of these challenges. It ought to concern every person, because it is a debasement of our common humanity. It ought to concern every community, because it tears at our social fabric. It ought to concern every business, because it distorts markets. It ought to concern every nation, because it endangers public health and fuels violence and organized crime. I’m talking about the injustice, the outrage, of human trafficking, which must be called by its true name -- modern slavery.

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 208
Context: The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow “expertise” and “theoretical sophistication” (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought. … Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres.

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn
Context: There are all those things against you. Against you and your great common interests which as you dimly saw are the same thing in effect as justice, there are not only the sword-wavers, the profiteers, and the intriguers.
There is not only the prodigious opposition of interested parties — financiers, speculators great and small, armorplated in their banks and houses, who live on war and live in peace during war, with their brows stubbornly set upon a secret doctrine and their faces shut up like safes.
There are those who admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail like women the bright colors of uniforms; those whom military music and the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with brandy; the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, the superstitious, the savages.
There are those who bury themselves in the past, on whose lips are the sayings only of bygone days, the traditionalists for whom an injustice has legal force because it is perpetuated, who aspire to be guided by the dead, who strive to subordinate progress and the future and all their palpitating passion to the realm of ghosts and nursery-tales.
With them are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the historians — and how many more? — who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of races; there are the worm-eaten genealogists, who forge for the ambitious of conquest and plunder false certificates of philosophy and imaginary titles of nobility. The infirmity of human intelligence is short sight. In too many cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who lose sight of the simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with formulae and trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from books, not the great ones.
And even while they are saying that they do not wish for war they are doing all they can to perpetuate it. They nourish national vanity and the love of supremacy by force. "We alone," they say, each behind his shelter, "we alone are the guardians of courage and loyalty, of ability and good taste!" Out of the greatness and richness of a country they make something like a consuming disease. Out of patriotism — which can be respected as long as it remains in the domain of sentiment and art on exactly the same footing as the sense of family and local pride, all equally sacred — out of patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable idea, unbalancing the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the living force, spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer which culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion and suffocation of armed peace.
They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. So many nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify and twist the truth.
Those are your enemies. All those people whose childish and odiously ridiculous disputes you hear snarling above you — "It wasn't me that began, it was you!" — "No, it wasn't me, it was you!" — "Hit me then!" — "No, you hit me!" — those puerilities that perpetuate the world's huge wound, for the disputants are not the people truly concerned, but quite the contrary, nor do they desire to have done with it; all those people who cannot or will not make peace on earth; all those who for one reason or another cling to the ancient state of things and find or invent excuses for it — they are your enemies!
They are your enemies as much as those German soldiers are to-day who are prostrate here between you in the mud, who are only poor dupes hatefully deceived and brutalized, domestic beasts. They are your enemies, wherever they were born, however they pronounce their names, whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them, in the heaven and on the earth. Look at them, everywhere! Identify them once for all, and be mindful for ever!

Sometimes quoted in grammatically corrected form as "They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed..." but the apparent editing error here is retained in the published versions of this translation.
Siddhartha (1922)
Context: Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.
Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Changing Consciousness (1991)
Context: Culture is shared meaning. 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. <!-- p. 185

Speech in the House of Commons, May 17, 1916 "Royal Assent" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1916/may/17/royal-assent#column_1578.
Early career years (1898–1929)

Source: Strait is the Gate and The Vatican Cellars

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”
A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

“Harry: All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.”
Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Variants (Many of MLKs' speeches were delivered many times with slight variants): An Individual has not started living fully until they can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity. Every person must decide at some point, whether they will walk in light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment: Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'
As quoted in The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Coretta Scott King, Second Edition (2011), Ch. "Community of Man", p. 3
1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)

92nd Street Y Cultural Center (2007)

Not found in any writings of Madison. The earliest known appearance is a 1994 pamphlet from the Militia of Montana. See “In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution”, above, for a sourced quote with a related theme.
Misattributed
Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (Abbruch der Schweigemauer) (1990)

Session 297, Page 136
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 7
What Men Still Don't Know About Transforming Their Relationships, pp. 194–198
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

The real function of these tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us.
Source: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001), Ch. 2: Scrubbing in Maine (p. 59)

“You're an attorney! It's your duty to lie, conceal, and distort everything, and slander everybody.”
Vous êtes avocat! Vous avez le devoir au contraire de recourir à toutes les ruses pour défendre vos clients. Au mensonge. A la calomnie.
The Madwoman of Chaillot, Act II http://books.google.com/books?id=BGPPV09y26AC&q=%22Vous+%C3%AAtes+avocat+Vous+avez+le+devoir+au+contraire+de+recourir+%C3%A0+toutes+les+ruses+pour+d%C3%A9fendre+vos+clients+Au+mensonge+A+la+calomnie%22&pg=PA142#v=onepage
Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev the pianist

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 5
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

Source: The Origins of War in Child Abuse (2010), Ch. 1, JP, Vol. 34. No. 4, p. 299 (each chapter of deMause's book has been published first in his Journal of Psychohistory).

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2010-05-26
Beck says his 8-28 rally will "reclaim the civil rights movement. … We were the people that did it in the first place"
2010-05-26
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201005260024
Walsh
Joan
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin's unholy alliance
2010-08-28
Salon
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/08/28/beck_and_palin_religious_heroes/index.html
reacting to Bertha Lewis of ACORN singing "We Shall Overcome" at an anti Arizona SB 1070 rally
2010s, 2010
Daniel Martin (1977)
Preface, p. 21, sentence 7.
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

“English Aphorists,” p. 103
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

“The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.”
H 7
Variant translation: The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook H (1784-1788)

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

[Fiqh al-Da’wah, Fiqh al-Da’wah, IslamQA, http://web.archive.org/web/20061017053855/http://www.islamqa.com/index.php?ref=43087&ln=eng, 217–222, 2007-11-22, 2006-10-17]

Preface to Humane Biology Projects (1961) by the Animal Welfare Institute

“Now I just don't know who to tell to go to hell
Who put the old devil in the distorted angel?”
Distorted Angel
Song lyrics, All This Useless Beauty (1996)

Adam Schaff (1967) in: "Conversation with Ponzio," in Ponzio 2002; as cited in: Petrilli and Ponzio (2007)
No Man Knows My History, ch. 19 (1945)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Subsidies Distort the Housing Market, September 10, 2003 http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2003/cr091003.htm
2000s, 2001-2005