Quotes about misreading

A collection of quotes on the topic of misreading, use, war, reading.

Quotes about misreading

“She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference.”

Thomas Harris The Silence of the Lambs

Source: The Silence of the Lambs

Pain, Learning, Indifference

“You are unnerving the hell out of me, Valkyrie."
"oh" she frowned, petting her bat fitfully " I must have misread the future for the past." she shrugged. "It happens.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: MacRieve

Hell, Past, Future

“The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history—the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen”

Robert Greene book The 50th Law

Source: The 50th Law

War, History

“I know she's not perfect but she tries so hard for me
And I thank god that she isn't 'cause how boring would that be?
It's the little imperfections, it's the sudden change in plans.
When she misreads the directions and we're lost but holdin' hands.
Yeah I live for little moments like that.”

Brad Paisley (1972) American country music singer

Little Moments, written by Brad Paisley and Chris DuBois.
Song lyrics, Mud on the Tires (2003)

God, Change, Perfection

“That spirit, that feeling for one's comrades in the snow, the moonlight, under the blossoms, is also basic to the tea ceremony. A tea ceremony is a coming together in feeling, a meeting of good comrades in a good season. I may say in passing, that to see my novel Thousand Cranes as an evocation of the formal and spiritual beauty of the tea ceremony is a misreading. It is a negative work, and expression of doubt about and warning against the vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has fallen.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)

Beauty, Feeling, Tea, Season

“Experts must read the patterns and judge their usefulness as evidence. Under any of numerous pressures, an expert may wish to misread a pattern or even to alter it. Americans had a touching trust in "experts."”

Dean Koontz book The Good Guy

Krait musing about fingerprints
Source: The Good Guy (2007), Chapter 21, p. 147

Reading

“Today 'nationalism' is out of fashion among the opinion-formers. Thanks to a superficial misreading of history, it is accused of having been responsible for two world wars and has widely come to be regarded as a political sin of the first magnitude, fortunately found only in such antiquated and obsolete figures as General de Gaulle. In fact the real danger comes from ideologies not nationalism; for while a nation may properly respect the nationhood of others, an ideology knows no frontiers…Once [the Tories] lose their claim to be, in the fullest sense, the 'national party', they are left, as they are in danger of being left today, either as the party of the 'individual' – a noble but to most people an austere and forbidding creed – or else as the party of the middle classes, which condemns them to a permanent minority.”

Nigel Lawson (1932) British Conservative politician and journalist

'A Tract for the Tories', The Spectator (1967), quoted in The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London: Bantam, 1992), p. 8.

War, People, World, History

“That’s the trouble with spies, you know. It’s not that they carry information. It’s that they carry fragmentary information, out of context, misconstrued, badly interpreted, incomplete, and misread.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 8, “Of Models, Moonlight, Mystery, and Authority” (p. 197)

“This leads me of course to at least mention here the cruel methods used in the slaughtering of animals and fowls for human consumption. The creatures are treated as if they possessed no feeling or consciousness of their own - and such attitudes show a most unfortunate misreading of natural events. As a direct result, at least as many diseases develop through such procedures as would exist in a highly primitive society with unsanitary conditions.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), p. 197

Disease, Feeling, Nature, Animals

“Montaigne speaks of an “Abecedarian” ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it. The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their A-B-C’s, cannot read at all. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books. They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, “bookful blockheads, ignorantly read.” There have always been literate ignoramuses, who have read too widely, and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all “sophomores.””

Mortimer J. Adler book How to Read a Book

Source: How to Read a Book (1940, 1972), p. 11

Books, Age, Knowledge, Learning

“Many things we misread as meaningful are quite ordinary coincidences. For example, it’s not unlikely that occasionally someone will phone you after you’ve been thinking about them. But we give these things value to make sense of our lives.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Thinking, Sense

“War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.
The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element….”

Norman Angell book The Great Illusion

The Great Illusion (1910)

War, Law, Idea, Parting

“The price for misreading and misinterpreting a woman has become extremely high; divorce battles, custody fights, poisonous interactions, accusations of abuse, incest, harassment, and even rape alongside the everyday unhappiness lead to a need to escape through self-destructive behaviors and addictions. It is "crunch time" for men today. Their personal isolation and dependency on women is greater than ever, while women's anger, withdrawal from relationships with men, and defensive sense of being victimized also are at a peak.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Introduction, p. 1
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Women, Men, Behavior, Sense

“SPAN ID=We_all_inherit> We all inherit a great deal of useless knowledge, and a great deal of misinformation and error (maps that were formerly thought to be accurate), so that there is always a portion of what we have been told that must be discarded. But the cultural heritage of our civilization that is transmitted to us -- our socially pooled knowledge, both scientific and humane -- has been valued principally because we have believed that it gives us accurate maps of experience. The analogy of verbal words to maps is an important one […]. It should be noticed at this point, however, that there are two ways of getting false maps of the world into our heads: first, by having them given to us; second, by creating them ourselves when we misread the true maps given to us.

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Maps and Territories, p. 32

World, Way, Error, Knowledge

“There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. … As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, although their words are by far the most decisive evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

Giuseppe v. Walling (1944).
Judicial opinions

Way, Decision, Reading

““Did you experience hallucinations or illusions?”
“What’s the difference?”
“An illusion is a misreading of actual sensory data, while a hallucination is seeing something that isn’t there.””

Michael Swanwick book Stations of the Tide

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 7, “Who Is the Black Beast?” (p. 109)

“We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam.”

Chuck Hagel (1946) United States Secretary of Defense

Hagel: U.S. should pull out of 'mismanaged' Iraq, CNN, November 27, 2006, 2016-01-03 http://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/26/hagel.iraq/, <br class="br">2006

“Even where it is manipulated by major talents, deconstruction tends to bear either on marginal texts (Sade, Lautréamont), or on secondary work by a great writer (Barthes on Balzac's Sarrazine). The classics of deconstruction, in Jacques Derrida or Paul De Man, are "misreadings" not of literature but of philosophy; they address themselves to philosophical linguistics and the theory of language. The masks they seek to strip off are those worn by Plato, by Hegel, by Rousseau, by Nietszche or Saussure. Deconstruction has nothing to tell us of Aeschylus or Dante, of Shakespeare or Tolstoy.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 8 (p. 128).

Literature

“Had Japan been a tenth as wise as Abraham Lincoln, had Hitler been a hundredth part as sensible, we today, the United States and England, would not have a chance in this war. Had those two enemies of ours coveted the lands upon subject peoples dwell today and had they whispered the magic word freedom to those peoples, they might have set half the world against us in a moment. But they have lost because they attacked lands already free, and because they have enslaved peoples accustomed to freedom. By this one thing alone, if by no other, they are doomed. They have misread the hearts and minds of men. By their enslavement of the peoples whom they have made subject by force of arms, they have aroused against themselves a greater force than can be found in any army, in any weapon. It is this- the will of men everywhere to be free. Let us learn today from Abraham Lincoln, as we fight this war still so far from victory. He could not win that war until he lit the fire in the hearts of men and women enslaved. Nothing had been enough to make men rise up and shout aloud for victory until that moment. A few men like war and enjoy it as a game. But most men and all women hate war. They will not fight with their whole hearts unless they are set aflame. And the torch is always the same words. Whisper those words and men and women will shout them aloud and sing them as they march. The words are simple but they are the most potent in the universe- they are the spiritual dynamite of victory. The words? "All persons held as slaves… are and henceforward shall be free."”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: What America Means to Me (1943), p. 195

Women, Men, Hate, War

“I'm not saying that his views are anti-American. That was a misreading of what I said and so I don't believe that that's my position.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

WCCO-TV, October 19, 2008 http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/polinaut/archive/2008/10/bachmann_addres.shtml <br class="br">2000s, Hardball Appearance (October 2008)

“Nehamas invokes Nietzsche’s talk of the “eternal basic text of homo natura” (BGE 230, quoted above) as evidence of aestheticism--the view, recall, that “texts can be interpreted equally well in vastly different and deeply incompatible ways” (p. 3). But the talk of “text” in this passage is actually incompatible with aestheticism. For in this passage, as we have seen, Nietzsche asserts that prior claims to “knowledge” have been superficial precisely because they have ignored the “eternal basic text”— ewigen Grundtext—of man conceived as a natural organism. That this text is eternal and basic implies not that it “can be interpreted equally well in vastly different and deeply incompatible ways” but just the opposite: readings which do not treat man naturalistically misread the text—they “falsify” it. It is these misreadings, of course, that Nietzsche, ever the “good philologist,” aims to correct.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

Way, Quotes, Nature, Knowledge

“An intelligent woman herself, the Duchess had overestimated the Marshal’s intelligence. Not an ambitious woman, she had underestimated his ambition. So are many misread by other’s lights.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: Singer from the Sea (1999), Chapter 11, “Various Visitations” (p. 174)

Light, Intelligence