Balanced View Quotes

I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I'm not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who support it. I think only when I've reached that state am I qualified to speak. This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is a very, very important thing in life

We need to stop frowning upon failure whilst criticising those that succeed.

It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.

You want to get both sides of the story and it's my role to try and bring that out of people.

I've learned a couple of things. And one of the things I have learned is that every experience has pluses and minuses.

What I have advocated is not wild radicalism. It is the highest and wisest kind of conservatism.

Things are never as good or as bad as they seem.

I think people will be surprised at some of the things about the shootings by policemen of unarmed African-American men. But I also think it's a balanced view. Balance has become almost a dirty word these days. It seems we're supposed to pick one side or the other. But these issues are extremely complicated. I think people will be surprised at some of that.

Being on TV, there's good and bad, like anything else.

Nothing is as good as it seems and nothing is as bad, but somewhere between reality falls.

One man's word is no man's word; we should quietly hear both sides.

We know there are good sugars and bad sugars, and we don't discuss whether food in general is good or bad for us. We need to be far more nuanced when we talk about the effects of video games.

Listening to both sides does not necessarily bring about a correct judgment.

You're never as good as people say you are and you're never as bad as people say you are. You're always in the middle at some stage.

The typical eye sees the ten per cent bad of an idea and overlooks the ninety per cent good.

I want to provide a well-rounded perspective of life.

When my writing career took off, it was pretty easy to keep my ego in check because old-school martial arts isn't about ego gratification. It's about maintaining a balanced view of the world and your place in it.

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

Being a pessimist is just such a gloomy way of looking at things, so I have to hope for the best - life wouldn't be worth living if we didn't have hope. And I also do think that human beings often do do wonderful, correct, brilliant things. So, on balance, I'd like to be optimistic about the future.

Part of the problem is that if anybody has a gut reaction about an issue, they can go online and have it backed up. That said, they can also find support for their ideas in the mainstream media - because when the mainstream media gives a so-called balanced view, it's often misleading.

Less opinion, more perspective.

I used to tell my mother, 'Mom, when they write really flattering things about your son, don't believe it all. And when they write really negative things about your son, don't believe it all.'

Doubt tempers belief with sanity.

I grew up on the west side of Detroit - 6 mile and Wyoming - so I was really in the 'hood. And I would go to school at Detroit Waldorf, and that was not the 'hood. Growing up in Detroit was good. I had a good perspective, a well-rounded one, and not being one-sided.

Oh My God, the [hip-hop] videos! The imagery is so awful! I just can't get with it at all. The best thing I can say about it is that sometimes you have to see that kind of stuff so as to have a more balanced view about why it's so bad.