psychological distancing Quotes

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

It's so easy to begin to demonize someone you think is so far removed and as the demonization begins to expand, it ends up being everybody but your friends. After a while everybody else but you. That is a slippery slope that is so easy to slide down, and that's what is dangerous.

As an actor, I know that any feelings you're showing are manufactured. But I still don't want to fool my mind into thinking my wife's into another guy.

The distance at which all shooting weapons take effect screens the killer against the stimulus sensation which would otherwise activate his killing inhibitions. The deep, emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the fact that the crooking of the finger to release a shot tears the entrails of another man.

Create some psychological space between you and your project by imagining you're doing it for someone else or contemplating what advice you'd give to another person in your predicament.

One death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.

We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

I think he just gets like this sometimes. Like he needs to pull away. I think of it like winter. During winter, it isn't that the sun is gone (or cheating on you with another planet). You can still see it in the sky. It's just farther away.

I would rather not watch myself in movies. I enjoy the experience, but I won't really see the film until they're on cable deep on into my life so I can pretend it's someone else at another time.

The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community.

We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.

This merely formal conceiving of the facts of one's own wretchedness is at the same time a departure from them--placing them in the object. It is not idle, therefore, to observe reflexively that in that very Thought, one has separated himself from them, and is no longer that which empirically he still sees himself to be.

I've started to kind of hate people, and it's not because I have anything against them. It's just, I enjoy it. It's recreation.

When people are too present, too familiar or too in our face, something happens to us psychologically. We begin to tune them out, we begin to get sick of them, we begin to know them so well and become so familiar with who they are that we loose a bit of respect for them. You pass a certain threshold with the fact that you're too present in their lives, too much in their face and once that threshold is passed you're never going to repair it they have lost a certain respect for you.