Critical Lens Quotes

But whether you stay or go, the critical decision you can make is to stop letting your partner distort the lens of your life, always forcing his way into the center of the picture. You deserve to have your life be about you; you are worth it.

Sex discrimination and hate crimes against women don't come from the leather community or its pornography. They occur within contexts like industrial capitalism and marriage that most people take for granted as if they had always existed, like gravity or continental drift. If feminism is going to change the world, it has to focus its critical lens on what most people think is normal, not on what most people think is abnormal.

We must clean the lens of our hearts to see the state of our souls. However, too often the former is too dirty to even know that the latter exists.

Having said that the unliterary reader attends to the words too little to make anything like a full use of them, I must notice that there is another sort of reader who attends to them far too much and in the wrong way. I am thinking of what I call Stylemongers. On taking up a book, these people concentrate on what they call its ‘style’ or its ‘English’. They judge this neither by its sound nor by its power to communicate but by its conformity to certain arbitrary rules. Their reading is a perpetual witch hunt for Americanisms, Gallicisms, split infinitives, and sentences that end with a preposition. They do not inquire whether the Americanism or Gallicism in question increases or impoverishes the expressiveness of our language. It is nothing to them that the best English speakers and writers have been ending sentences with prepositions for over a thousand years. They are full of arbitrary dislikes for particular words. One is ‘a word they’ve always hated’; another ‘always makes them think of so-and-so’. This is too common, and that too rare. Such people are of all men least qualified to have any opinion about a style at all; for the only two tests that are really relevant—the degree in which it is (as Dryden would say) ‘sounding and significant’—are the two they never apply. They judge the instrument by anything rather than its power to do the work it was made for; treat language as something that ‘is’ but does not ‘mean’; criticise the lens after looking at it instead of through it.

Alcoff calls this self-examination “white double-consciousness,” which involves seeing “themselves through both the dominant and the nondominant lens, and recognizing the latter as a critical corrective truth.

Whenever someone helps or hinders you, or praises or criticizes you, remember that they see you only through the lens of their own impressions. If they act or speak from a warped perspective, they hurt themselves—not you.

But whether you stay or go, the critical decision you can make is to stop letting your partner distort the lens of your life, always forcing his way into the center of the picture. You deserve to have your life be about you; you are worth it.

you could approach each situation thinking, “there is something here for me to learn from.” This is an extremely valuable mindset if you want to emotionally mature. It brings a lens of critical reflection to all your interactions, combined with empathy for others.

Our work is making sure that our stories are told and told true. Our work is making sure our artistry is cultivated and expressed, shared and appreciated. Our work is honoring our genius when no one else does. Our work is refusing to surrender, refusing to be silenced, refusing to be rendered simplistically. Our work seems endless, and probably is. But our stories are at the core of our identity, and if they don’t exist, in some critical way we won’t exist, either. We won’t have the glue that holds us together, and gives us perspective on our lives through the lens of history. We have no way to join the Sisterhood.

Viewed through the lens of this critical question, triggers can now be identified for what they rightly are: tools. If we use them properly, they can help us stay on track. If the trigger helps us do the thing we planned to do in our schedule, it’s helping us gain traction. If it leads to distraction, then it isn’t serving us.

Conservative critics saw little reason for government to get into the culture business, and great potential danger. Today we see Johnson’s arts and humanities programs through the lens of the culture wars, when the NEA was accused of blasphemy and obscenity, the NEH of academic insularity and historical revisionism, and PBS of political bias.

Ruth Rendell, Jonathon Kellerman, Len Deighton . . . clever writers, all of them. No romance, or supernatural, or street-level cop novels here. Psychological mysteries. Suspense. Kellerman was even himself a psychologist. Quinn figured the readers of such books got their enjoyment out of trying to outwit the writers. Would Ida or her late husband be the sort to write critical Amazon

Whenever someone helps or hinders you, or praises or criticizes you, remember that they see you only through the lens of their own impressions. If they act or speak from a warped perspective, they hurt themselves—not you. For if someone mistakes truth for falsehood, the truth is not harmed, but only the person deceived. Keeping this in mind, gently turn away any insult or injury. “It seems right to them, though they are mistaken.

Many Christians recognize the brokenness of our world—racism, poverty, and exploitation—and rightly want to do something about it. Contemporary critical theory can be an attractive way of looking at the world because it may seem like a loving and others-centered approach. Don’t we want to free the downtrodden? Isn’t that what Jesus came to do? But the problem with critical theory is that it isn’t just a set of ideas that influences how someone thinks about oppression. It functions as a worldview, a way of seeing the world that answers questions like Who are we? Why are we here? What is wrong with the world? How can this problem be fixed? What is the meaning of life? When people adopt the tenets of critical theory, their answers to these questions are filtered through that lens. It’s no wonder, then, that critical theory stands in contradiction to Christianity at many points.

In order to know someone who is at some level unknowable, you must leave yourself wide open. If you don't, you foreclose the possibility of learning something critical about this person you need, your parent, the person upon whom your survival depends. It's like time-lapse photography; your lens at maximum aperture in order to capture something fleeting and elusive. The problem becomes one of calibration. How to protect yourself in the process. How to capture something without going blind.

Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw--that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil calls Ladislaw 'a schoolgirl's dream, and a vulgar one at that,' while Leslie Stephen complained 'Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,' and depreciated him as 'an amiable Bohemian.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man's critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character. There is a terrible coercion in our deeds wihich may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason -- that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right. The action which before commission has been seen with that blended common-sense and fresh untarnished feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterwards with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike. - Adam Bede p. 359

Self-evaluation proved to be distasteful business. The refraction of light created from an undulating wave of critical self-observation passing through a tarnished lens produces its own morose, self-negating fixations that can result in a dangerous downward spiral. Unless timely arrested, murderous bouts of self-hatred can destroy a person. A person must use self-detestation exclusively as a means to pry oneself away from the haunting specter created courtesy of the clamor, filth, and grunginess of their prior anarchism. Kick starting a stranded person’s emotional motors through reflective contemplation and thoughtful rumination acts to prod loose remote memories seared in the unspoken silence of a person’s unconscious memory bank. Self-discovery is also an uplifting affair. Contemplation helps one confront their streaked presence and realign their inner voice with the sanguine spirits of their ancestors that preceded one in the walk through time.

BELIEVE IN ONE LOVE: Bonding of love between polygamous is nothing but only delusion & seductive-shots called sexuality breeds cynicism, despising, criticism and condemnation; each always looks other through the negative lens and creates separation and hatred. Conversely bonding of love between monogamous is everything full of integrity, purity and heartfelt mingling like diluting of hard clout of soil with pristine rain breeds serenity, bliss and lure like magnetism each always looks other through positive lens and creates union and frequently electrify each other to share and care each other feelings of life for the sole purpose of a shared vision; a road-map of life between two bodies into one soul creating success in life through enacting commitment and trust each on other for a win-win situation is called soul-mate-ship. Therefore, each man and woman should choose a path of monogamous making life enjoyable and praiseworthy at the shake of adultery. I earnestly urge of the mankind to believe in one-love making life fullest.

LEADING LESSONS Criticism can be useful. I’ve taken a beating from the DWTS judges on many occasions. Most of the time, because I’m always aware of the cameras in my face, I just suck it up and take it. Here’s the thing: I realize that maybe they’re seeing something I’m not. Sometimes you’re too close to a situation, too connected to it, to be 100 percent honest with yourself. Or your ego gets in the way and won’t let you improve, because that would mean changing course and admitting you were wrong. I tell my partners to listen carefully when Len, Carrie Ann, or Bruno has a constructive criticism for us. Yes, sometimes it boils down to taste and opinion (and I don’t always agree), but often it’s a valid point. They want us to succeed. The way I see it, you have lots of choices on how to handle it: the first is to lose your temper, get defensive, and spend the rest of the night beating yourself up about it. The second--a natural reaction for most people--is to mentally shut down when someone points out your flaws. Who wants to hear that? Let me just drown it out and ignore it. The third option is your best: keep your mind and your ears open. You can learn about your weaknesses and how you can improve them. A leader is never scared of criticism, but instead knows there is always room to grow and improve. So bring it on.

The clear transmission of facts and evidence becomes irrelevant in the hyperemotional space of social media. Facts come from a world external to ourselves—namely, reality. Actually, that’s the whole point. But in the social media world, they are either meaningless or threatening to the self we’re constructing and protecting. The world can’t help but degrade into “It’s all about me.” Deluged with information filtered through the lens of popular self, our internal monitoring causes the world to shrink: Did the news make me feel bad? Turn it off. Did that comment upset me? Blast the messenger. Did that criticism hurt me? Get depressed or strike back. This is the tragedy of self-reference where, instead of responding to information from the external environment to create an orderly system of relationships, the narrow band of information obsessively processed creates isolation, stress, and self-defense.6 Focused internally, the outside world where facts reside doesn’t have meaning. Our communication with one another via the Web generates extreme reactions. Think about how small events take over the Internet because people get upset from a photo and minimal information. There doesn’t have to be any basis in fact or any understanding of more complex reasons for why this event happened. People see the visual, comment on it, and viral hysteria takes over. Even when more context is given later that could help people understand the event, it doesn’t change their minds. People go back to scanning and posting, and soon there is another misperceived event to get hysterical about. One commentator calls this “infectious insanity.”7

Many theologians and psychologists have tried to view the Christian myth through a new lens, to view it as a myth with great power and efficacy for meaning, wholeness, and psychological health. Critics will say that this is an attempt to psychologize Christianity. Adherents will say it's opening up and revitalizing the religion. In the end, each one of us gets to choose and decide. The only tragedy is using this myth as an authoritarian fear tactic to keep people subordinate and infantilized. To me, that is the real evil.

The formula for the new public intellectual seemed simple enough: (1) develop a critical lens and then hold it up to whatever young people are interested in; (2) say something outlandish, seemingly at random; (3) through sophistry arrive at the radical conclusion you blurted out at the argument’s outset.

The running joke is that the lack of sex makes people more intense, winds them up, messes with their heads. But it’s not a joke. It’s a critical need, and in my view, something whose contribution to the human condition and mental health can’t be minimized.

In Luke, we are looking at Jesus’s story through a gentile lens, which viewed the biographies of great men as exemplars for others to emulate. So the great men and women of the Christian tradition must not be shown as muddled, contentious, or craven; and the central figure, Jesus, must be allowed as much dignity and distance from criticism as possible. Thus, in Luke’s treatment of the call of Matthew Levi, the Pharisees and their scribes direct their ire at Jesus’s disciples, not at Jesus himself (as they do in Mark), for eating and drinking with “tax collectors and prostitutes.

Not speaking Hebrew is not a moral flaw, and today’s American Jews have no access to Hebrew because of decisions that other people made. Nor can their lack of knowledge of Hebrew be fairly seen as an indication that American Jews are not wise or do not care. Their lack of facility with Hebrew, however, even on the most rudimentary level, limits them to encountering Israel through the lens of what the English-language press decides they should read, without direct access to Israel’s press, literature, music, television, or culture. How passionate could any human relationship be if almost every interaction was lived through a filter someone else had constructed? WHETHER JUDAISM IS A religion or a people is no mere academic matter. It is also not a matter of right or wrong. American Judaism had good reason to be attracted by Judaism-as-religion. Zionists had equally good reason for opting for peoplehood over religion. What is critical for us to understand is that the divide that Jews now confront reflects the roots of each of these communities and how Jews in each place define what it means to be a Jew.

If our parents fell short in soothing our emotions and thinking about what we needed, we’re more likely to regard our partner’s failure of responsiveness as an emergency. Say you are trying to talk to your wife and she appears bored or critical. If you grew up in a family where people responded to your needs and emotions, and misattunements were generally followed by repair, you will likely apply a nondire lens to this situation. Uncomfortable and frustrating, yes; desperate, no. But what if the adults you depended on were dismissive toward your emotions or so easily overwhelmed that they couldn’t offer a calming perspective? What if they were so depressed or self-absorbed or even, frankly, crazy that you had the repeated experience of being left alone with your fear or anger or sadness without any reassurance that comfort would be reliably offered? Perhaps you were even blamed or punished for having your feelings at all. In that case, when your wife fails to tune in empathically, you will likely be sent right back into the soup of your troubling childhood emotions. No one helped you make sense of your emotions back then, after all; no one received your signals in a way that helped you integrate them into an understanding of what they meant, or how to manage them.

Conventional theological reflection tacitly reinforces systems of oppression by focusing solely on personal piety and spirituality while ignoring power, privilege, and systems. This is theological negligence that leaves the status quo intact and unscrutinized. Critical theological reflection, on the other hand, scrutinizes the flesh and blood realities of social life. Using the lens of sacred ideals, it is a tool for reimagining our world.

The theory’s basic teaching is that racism is systemically embedded within the fabric of society and can only be addressed by first interpreting the world through the lens of minority experience. While critical race theory accomplishes deconstruction, the sub-theory “intersectionality” accomplishes construction. It is this element which has become, perhaps, the most important concept for understanding the modern social justice movement.

When informed by critical race theory and its postmodern attachment to finding truth through an oppressed lens, this creates a knowledge hierarchy whereby less social power means greater access to knowledge about systemic oppression in society.

Three Better Place Lessons 1. In ecosystems, we must monitor the burn rate of partner patience just as carefully as the burn rate of investment capital. 2. A strategy of ecosystem reconfiguration must incorporate within it a strategy for setting ecosystem boundaries. Establishing a Minimum Viable Ecosystem (chapter 8) is a critical element of any such plan. 3. In a world of ecosystems, great execution is no longer sufficient for success, but it remains a necessary condition.

The material and ethical assertions of [Critical Social Justice] CSJ are controversial. Most people with apparently oppressed identities don’t think about the world through this ideological lens—it is an artifact of academia.

computers will continue to grow more sophisticated cognitive capacities such as critical thinking, systems thinking, and even cultural agility. But they will lack the very human lens from which we view life, learning to interpret contexts to assess, act, and make sound decisions. Human beings possess this lens because we learn from experience.

There is, in fact, a reason the subtitle of this book refers to “Trump haters” rather than “Trump critics.” Many thoughtful Americans, and many thoughtful political writers, have issues with our 45th president—myself included. But the critics have also worked to do that very hard thing of judging Trump via the same lens they have judged past presidents. They praise him when he gets things right. They criticize him when he gets things wrong. This is the usual and long-held method of political accountability. But the “haters” can’t abide nuance. To the Resistance, any praise—no matter how qualified—of Trump is tantamount to American betrayal. And by extension, any criticism of the Resistance is equally heretical. If you are a Trump hater, this is an excellent way of shutting down challenges to your tactics or arguments. But it’s a rotten way of furthering public debate, and the ensuing vacuum of meaningful discussion has already led the Resistance to overindulge. It is now engaging in behavior that is proving far more corrosive to our institutions and

While emptiness serves to explain reality ontologically and epistemologically, it also provides a critical lens for valuing human life. This line of reasoning raises the following query: if human life is empty of any true nature—if we are to abandon notions of an "I" and a self—what, then, is destroyed in killing a person?

Alcoff calls this self-examination “white double-consciousness,” which involves seeing “themselves through both the dominant and the nondominant lens, and recognizing the latter as a critical corrective truth.” But

Only myopics judge people, relationships, businesses with short term lens. Any startup or public company that survived the dot com bust and 9/11 came out bigger than anyone imagined. If India wants an ecosystem like USA or China, new age companies need nurturing & patience vs. criticism or outcast.

The board of directors should take an outlier’s lens to criticize the business strategy via questioning wisely.

Framing. While common sense suggests we should start to plan by defining goals, it also helps to study the lens through which we see problems and solutions. By examining needs, wants, feelings, and beliefs, we’re better able to know and share our vision and values. Imagining. By expanding our awareness of paths and possibilities, we create choice and inform strategy. We search and research for information, then play with models to stray beyond knowledge. Sketches draw insights that help us add options and refine plans. Narrowing. After diverging, it’s critical to converge by prioritizing paths and options. This requires study of drivers, levers, estimates, and consequences, as the value of a strategy is tied to time and risk. Deciding. While decisions are often made in an instant, the process of committing to and communicating a course of action merits time and attention. Instructions are essential to the rendering of intent. Words matter. So do numbers. Define metrics for success carefully. Executing. The dichotomy between planning and doing is false. In all sorts of contexts, we plan as we travel, build, or get things done. Reflecting. While it helps to ask questions throughout the process, we should also make space to look back at the whole from the end. Long before the invention of time, people used the North Star to find their way in the dark. In the future, I hope you will use these principles and practices to make your way in the world. Figure 1-10. Principles and practices of planning.

What you cannot criticize makes a fool of you. It doesn’t matter if it's religion, history or political doctrine. There can be nothing more valuable than your own rational thinking. Increase your intuitive critical approach to everything, there can be no sacred opinions or propositions that should be beyond any criticism. Free your mind from any presupposition concerning what is real, what an illusion is, until you come up with strong confidence about it yourself. Rely on your intuition more than any widespread public opinion. Be a reasonable agnostic, who believes nothing without any evidence which is plausible to himself. You can engage in science, otherwise you will only deal with ideology and its various forms, such as religion, history, morality, If and only if you can be a reasonable agnostic. In most cases, if there is religion, there is a mystification of reality; if there is a history, there is a distortion of reality; in general, if there is any ideology, there is a manipulation of the masses by the elite. Through religion or history you are given a ‘lens’ to see the reality — if this ‘lens’ are red, everything seems red, if the ‘lens’ blue, then everything is blue. If you want to know what reality is, take off your lens and look at the truth with your naked eyes.

During the process of redesigning the NPR News mobile app, senior designer Libby Bawcombe wanted to know how to make design decisions that were more inclusive to a diverse audience, and more compassionate to that audience’s needs. So she led a session to identify stress cases for news consumers, and used the information she gathered to guide the team’s design decisions. The result was dozens of stress cases around many different scenarios, such as: • A person feeling anxious because a family member is in the location where breaking news is occurring • An English language learner who is struggling to understand a critical news alert • A worker who can only access news from their phone while on a break from work • A person who feels upset because a story triggered their memory of a traumatic event13 None of these scenarios are what we think of as “average.” Yet each of these is entirely normal: they’re scenarios and feelings that are perfectly understandable, and that any of us could find ourselves experiencing. That’s not to say NPR plans to customize its design for every single situation. Instead, says Bawcombe, it’s an exercise in seeing the problem space differently: Identifying stress cases helps us see the spectrum of varied and imperfect ways humans encounter our products, especially taking into consideration moments of stress, anxiety and urgency. Stress cases help us design for real user journeys that fall outside of our ideal circumstances and assumptions.14 Putting this new lens on the product helped the design team see all kinds of decisions differently.

With the lens of Jobs to Be Done, the Medtronic team and Innosight (including my coauthor David Duncan) started research afresh in India. The team visited hospitals and care facilities, interviewing more than a hundred physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, and patients across the country. The research turned up four key barriers preventing patients from receiving much-needed cardiac care: Lack of patient awareness of health and medical needs Lack of proper diagnostics Inability of patients to navigate the care pathway Affordability While there were competitors making some progress in India, the biggest competition was nonconsumption because of the challenges the Medtronic team identified. From a traditional perspective, Medtronic might have doubled down on doctors, asking them about priorities and tradeoffs in the product. What features would they value more, or less? Asking patients what they wanted would not have been top of the list of considerations from a marketing perspective. But when Medtronic revisited the problem through the lens of Jobs to Be Done, Monson says, the team realized that the picture was far more complex—and not one that Medtronic executives could have figured out from pouring over statistics of Indian heart disease or asking cardiologists how to make the pacemaker better. Medtronic has missed a critical component of the Job to Be Done.