Vincent Bugliosi Quotes

I think I have a very detailed sense of observation. I am interested in the details of people's lives and what information these details give.

Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.

Just look at what is right in front of you. People don't do that. They see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. They only hear the music and not the lyrics of human events.

Intuition makes much of it; I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different; it does not fail to lead us astray quite often.

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye.

The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.

No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.

Most people see what they want to, or at least what they expect to.

If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word “coincidence” exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.

I am always interested in affecting people in some way, making them think about particular areas of history that they have never thought about or that they may have thought about in one way and then changing their view.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

What is originality? To see something that is as yet without a name, that is as yet impossible to designate, even though it staresus in the face. The way it usually is with people, it is a thing's name that makes it perceptible to them in the first place.--For the most part, the original ones have also been the name-givers.

We find what we expect to find, and we receive what we ask for.

If intelligence were a television set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was gray and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle with the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expected or hoped to see than on what was really there.

Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior.

There are so many things admirable people do not understand.

Children notice things first, people later.

We like to think we're superior to the people who, centuries ago, burned 'witches' for no better reason than a neighbor's belief that his crop failure or impotence was caused by that woman's action. But reporters are still prone to the same mental errors that caused these killings: seeing patterns where there are none, finding causes where there is only coincidence, ignoring our sources' political agendas and turning scanty evidence into panic.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

A child sees everything, looks straight at it, examines it, without any preconceived idea; most people, after they are about eleven or twelve, quite lose this power, they see everything through a few preconceived ideas which hang like a veil between them and the outer world.

Einstein says common sense is just habit of thought. It's how we're used to thinking about things, but a lot of the time it just gets in the way.