Hans Magnus Enzensberger Quotes

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

In a social media age, it seems that everyone lives in their own reality and that when you give consideration to Newt Gingrich, he exists in an alternate reality, at some level, where the things he says are so diametrically opposed to the record.

In general, in all my films, I choose to create a certain mistrust, rather than claiming that what I'm showing onscreen is an accurate reproduction of reality. I want people to question what they are seeing onscreen. In the same way as I used the narrator, I also used black and white, because it creates a distance toward what's being seen. I see the film as an artifact rather than a reliable reconstruction of a reality that we cannot know.

The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.

It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn,—not the material of my every-day existence--but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.

Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn't entirely grounded in your own mind.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

The lack of insight to reality, life and history as well as into God's ways, or sunan in His creation, some people will continue to seek or demand the impossible. They will imagine what does not or cannot happen, misunderstand occurrences and events, and interpret them on the basis of cherished illusions which in no way reflect God's sunan or the essence of Islamic law.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.

Reality is fabricated out of desire.

Propaganda analysis can contribute to world peace by exposing those techniques that lead to armed conflict by creating misapprehension of reality.

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable - if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.

We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.

What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

American media seem to color events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism. Their efforts to create reality on the ground — instead of reporting on it — notwithstanding, here's what we know about the inchoate Egyptian uprising: the movement's members hated their ruler and did what was necessary to be rid of him.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

The world's like a ride in a fairground & when you choose to go on it you think it's real, that's how powerful our minds are