Richard Lewontin Quotes

To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

I'm objective because I tell the truth.

I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.

The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.

Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.

Some people seek to understand, and some people seek to portray what they want to portray.

When someone says his conclusions are objective, he means that they are based on prejudices which many other people share.

If you're coming from America to Iraq, then how are you supposed to be objective? I mean, you could pay lip service to being objective, but how are you going to objective when you're embedded with the Marines? The Marines are saving your life every day and they're protecting you. But when you're sort of living with people who are there, we just press record and let them tell the story.

In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.

There are only two ways to be quite unprejudiced and impartial. One is to be completely ignorant. The other is to be completely indifferent. Bias and prejudice are attitudes to be kept in hand, not attitudes to be avoided.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

I've been accused of being a little pedantic here and there, but I don't buy that criticism. I'm telling it like I see it. You don't have to buy it. You don't have to like it. You don't have to listen to it at all. I'm not trying to convince people of things, other than the fact that I'm trying to make as vivid as I can my own feelings and experiences.

I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.

We think very few people sensible, except those who are of our opinion.

There is no journalist without opinions, and there's no real objectivity, but we can strive toward it.

We always try to interpret things in accordance with what we want and not as they are.

A man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if indeed such a man exists.

In forming a judgment, lay your hearts void of foretaken opinions; else, whatsoever is done or said, will be measured by a wrong rule; like them who have jaundice, to whom everything appears yellow.

When people disagreed with him he urged them to be objective.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

I simply cannot accept that there are on every story two equal and logical sides to an argument.

People project their own dreams, fantasies, and prejudices onto my life. So people are either fans, or jealous, or disagree. Everybody marches to a different drummer.

You cannot have a theory without principles. Principles is another name for prejudices.

Observations always involve theory.