I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
Clive JamesRead
Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there
Interpretation
What this quote means
Prejudices can cloud our perception of reality and prevent us from embracing new experiences.
Clive James's quote emphasizes that preconceived notions and biases about a place or experience are often unfounded. Regardless of the negative labels we might attach to something, the truth is that we often engage with those experiences momentarily before fully understanding them, which highlights the importance of keeping an open mind and avoiding judgment.
Themes
PrejudicePerceptionOpen MindExperienceJudgment
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about travel, this quote could be used to remind friends to embrace the unknown instead of judging a location based on hearsay.
More from Clive James
All quotes →Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Clive JamesRead
Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.
Clive JamesRead
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Clive JamesRead
I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.
Clive JamesRead
The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
Clive JamesRead
Similar quotes
Sometimes religion gets in the way of God.
BonoRead
Every true faith is infallible. It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form...The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
C. S. LewisRead
Dear God, help me. Do not forget me on this tiny cinder lost in a galaxy that is lost–a heart no bigger than a speck of dust beating, beating against death, against meaninglessness, against guilt, against sorrow.
Anne RiceRead
If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.
Karl JaspersRead