Reality TV is sleazy, it is manipulative. It is as momentary as anything in popular culture.
Some people, you have to grit your teeth in order to stay in the same room as them, but you get on and ask the questions you assume most of the people watching want to ask.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Navigating difficult relationships often requires patience and courage to address uncomfortable truths.
Morley Safer's quote emphasizes the challenge of interacting with individuals who may be difficult or unpleasant. It highlights the importance of maintaining composure and still engaging in meaningful dialogue, particularly when representing the interests and inquiries of others who may feel similarly. This suggests that even in challenging circumstances, asking the right questions is crucial for fostering understanding and connection.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a team meeting where tensions are high, you might use this quote to encourage open communication despite differing opinions.
More from Morley Safer
All quotes →We don't want anything from the government but that furtive little fellow called the truth - which, by the way, they'll never give you - which you have to go out and find by talking to people.
So much crap passes as information that not only does the audience sometimes miss the distinction between news and crap, the editors sometimes miss the distinction.
Similar quotes
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart and differing, have come together on the dark highway, to repair home together and to rest in her bosom.
Familiarity seems to breed contempt
We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.
You have now reached infatuation’s final destination—the complete and merciless devaluation of self.
Anything that takes you out of the context of being separate is healing. Anything that takes you out of the context of separateness is intimacy.