“It takes a great deal of courage to stand alone even if you believe in something very strongly.”
“Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people who present them.”
“It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth.”
“Nine of us now seem to feel that the defendant is innocent, but we're just gambling on probabilities. We may be wrong. We may be trying to return a guilty man to the community. No one can really know. But we have a reasonable doubt, and this is a safeguard that has enormous value in our system. No jury can declare a man guilty unless it's sure. We nine can't understand how you three are still so sure. Maybe you can tell us.”
“Look, this boy's been kicked around all his life. You know-living in a slum, his mother dead since he was nine. He spent a year and a half in an orphanage while his father served a jail term for forgery. That's not a very good head start. He's had a pretty terrible sixteen years. I think maybe we owe him a few words. That's all.”
“TEN [exploding]. Bright! He's a common ignorant slob. He don't even speak good English!
ELEVEN [slowly]. He doesn't even speak good English.”
“Well, it's not easy to stand alone against the ridicule of others. He gambled for support and I gave it to him.”
“This is a quiet, frightened, insignificant old man who has been nothing all his life, who has never had recognition, his name in the newspapers. Nobody knows him, nobody quotes him, nobody seeks his advice after seventy-five years. That's a very sad thing, to be nothing. A man like this needs to be recognized, to be listened to, to be quoted just once. This is very important. It would be so hard for him to recede into the background ...”
“She had a vague notion that dogs preferred football and politics. This”
“But just because a person chooses to not believe something, that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
“The breaking of day changes all things, Snorri. Nothing endures beyond the count of the sun. Pile a sufficient weight of mornings upon a thing and it will change. Even the rocks themselves will not outlast the morning.”
“Negotiation, Information Technology, and the Problem of the Faceless Other,” in Leigh L. Thompson, editor, Negotiation Theory and Research (Psychology Press, 2006).”
“There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it's consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut. All the material in every life is channeled into the glow. Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed.”
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