Berenice Abbott Quotes

Recognizing truth requires selflessness. You have to leave yourself out of it so you can find out the way things are in themselves, not the way they look to you or how you feel about them or how you would like them to be.

Objectivity in the end is an unattainable ideal.

I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see, I swallow immediately. Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful.

Our job is not to set things right but to see them right.

I try to find the picture, not create it.

I'm very old-fashioned - I don't operate with an agenda. If you're a biographer, you want to be passionate about what you're doing but dispassionate about how you do it.

I'm a little concerned about this notion everybody wants us to be objective.

I do not judge, I only chronicle.

Learn to see things as they really are, not as we imagine they are.

I am the kind of person that takes everything as is and then look at it from the outside looking in.

I paint things as they are. I don't comment.

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

I don't know if there's such a thing as objectivity.

Truth is not a matter of personal viewpoint.

Show me a man who claims he is objective and I'll show you a man with illusions.

It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.

When we can see things as they are, without projecting our mental models and fears, we are being objective. When we can understand and consider another person's point of view, we are being objective.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.

People are so conditioned to take sides that a balanced analysis looks to them like hatred.

I don't like to put labels on anyone. I'm a reporter. I'd rather observe and describe and question.

I have my sympathies and also my critical views, and they aren't much of a secret, but my first job is to see and hear and think about what I've seen and heard.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.