False Consensus

Famous quotes containing the words false and/or consensus:

“Chaucer’s remarkably trustful and affectionate character appears in his familiar, yet innocent and reverent, manner of speaking of his God. He comes into his thought without any false reverence, and with no more parade than the zephyr to his ear.... There is less love and simple, practical trust in Shakespeare and Milton. How rarely in our English tongue do we find expressed any affection for God! Herbert almost alone expresses it, “Ah, my dear God!””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.”
—Renata Adler (b. 1938)