Mitchell Reiss Quotes

I've always hated the way Hollywood has portrayed accountants. They're always little nerd balls, wimpy, afraid of everything. Growing up with accountants, I don't see them that way.

I hate bumper stickers, you can't sum anything up. All you do is paint yourself in some caricaturist corner.

The one thing that TV is bad at doing is preaching. There are two extremes, you either turn the people into a punchline or turn them into hero, and both of those things suck, because most people are neither in real life.

There is more than two sides. Facts are often apart from what both sides say about each other.

Accusations fit on a bumper sticker. The truth is longer.

There is a tendency in the media to simplify me to the point that I am somehow a tough guy. I think there is a lot more to me.

Every society has a tendency to reduce it's opponents to caricatures.

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

I saw a hockey game where they threw the puck aside and just started fighting. I saw that, and I'm like, 'So I'm the thug?'

Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.

The media doesn't always reflect reality.

I was quite surprised how easily people wanted to pigeonhole things I've done.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

Television is apparently the enemy of nuance. But nuance is essential for a thoughtful discussion.

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.

It would be wonderful if the public sector were always great, or always terrible; or if the private sector were always great, or always terrible. Alas, reality is more complicated than comforting caricatures. Governments fail, and corporations fail.

What I really don't like is oversimplification.

I don't think any of us like to be reduced to just one label.

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'

The will to label will always prevail over what's being labeled, usually at the expense of either truth or understanding.