Quotes about Objectivity

Knowledge is power," Francis Bacon said in a peculiarly prophetic moment. He was right; "modern" scientific knowledge has demonstrated its power for three centuries. With postmodernism, however, the situation is reversed. There is no purely objective knowledge, no truth of correspondence. Instead there are only stories, stories that, when they are believed, give the storyteller power over others.

One of the reasons that problem solving is so difficult is that we are often too close to the problems to truly understand them.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

We have traditionally thought of knowing in terms of subject and object and have struggled to attain objectivity by detaching our subjectivity. It can't be done, and one of the achievements of postmodernity is to demonstrate that. What we are called to, and what in the resurrection we are equipped for, is a knowing in which we are involved as subjects but as self-giving, not as self-seeking, subjects: in other words, a knowing that is a form of love.

The character of faith resolves all tensions between objectivity and subjectivity, For faith has significance only in its orientation to its object - the grace of God.

By the way, do you notice that uneducated people find it very difficult to decide things objectively, and that they allow some more or less fortuitous minor circumstance to turn the scales?

Wisdom is the God-given ability to see life with rare objectivity and to handle life with rare stability.

Of course, Einstein was a very great scientist indeed, and I have enormous respect for him, and great admiration for the discoveries he made. But he was very committed to a view of the objectivity of the physical world.

Results-oriented teams establish their own measurements for success. They don't allow themselves the wiggle room of subjectivity. But this is not easy, because subjectivity is attractive.

In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type. The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information nor to the statistical objectivity of the facts.

A mature person is one who is does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably

We must warn against an incorrect conception of theology, a conception which considers it possible to discuss Holy Scripture apart from a personal relationship of belief in it, as though that alone would constitute true 'objectivity'.