George Orwell
Writer, Journalist
"The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history."
Objectivity quotes
Objectivity
226 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Gore Vidal
Writer, Essayist, Playwright
"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent."
Nikola Tesla
Inventor, Electrical Engineer
"But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile."
Stephen Jay Gould
Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
"Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do)."
Andre Gide
Novelist
"A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside objectivity — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Objectivity quotes (page 1 of 12)
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"The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it."
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"Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity."
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"But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods."
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"What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context."
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"[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion."
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"Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because there is nothing to be gained by him."
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"He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right."
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"The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears."
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"Objectivity can only be the author's and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel."
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""Is," "is," "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment."
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"News objectivity is a twentieth-century myth. We only complain about propaganda when we don't agree with it."
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"I've always been a visual person, I'm formerly a graphic designer. I've always seen myself as an observer. I like to maintain objectivity and don't get too intimately involved in my subjects."
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"More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality."
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"There are so many factors when you think of your own films. You think of the people you worked on it with, and somehow forget the movie. You can't forgive the movie for a long time. It takes a few years to look at it with any objectivity and forgive its flaws."
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"The virtual suppression of ethical discussion after 1845 produces the semblance of purely descriptive analysis, dressed in the mantle of positivist objectivity, analysis which is, in fact, strung to a framework of crude, because unexplicated, moral assumptions."
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"Inaction, letting be, neither creating nor destroying--that is my evil. And also the knower as one without desire."
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"Darwin paid particular attention to disconfirming evidence. Objectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you're going to be a great thinker."
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"Your life must focus on the maximization of objectivity."
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"I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing."
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"Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say."
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