The people who are suspicious of certain things are the very ones who are the most capable of doing that of which they are suspicious. - Sydney J. Harris

"Long ago I used to mutter (as you probably do), "Very interesting," and cast a desperate glance around for the punch-bowl. This banal comment fools no one, least of all the artist, and you quickly find you have lost a friend and alienated a roomful of people, all of whom are pretending they like the pictures with a grim kind of appreciation."

The personality of man is not an apple that has to be polished, but a banana that has to be peeled. And the reason we remain so far from one another, the reason we neither communicate nor interact in any real way, is that most of us spend our lives in polishing rather than peeling... Almost everything in modern life is devoted to the polishing process, and little to the peeling process. It is the surface personality that we work on — the appearance, the clothes, the manners, the geniality. In short, the salesmanship: We are selling the package, not the product.

For most people read not with their minds, but with their emotions and prejudices. They read into or read out of a piece of writing what they want to. And when they disagree, it is usually not with what the writer says, but with what they imagine he said... People filter what they read through the fine strainer of their feelings and preconceptions, their prejudices and fears.