I know stereotypes have a bad reputation, people say, "Oh, you shouldn't stereotype people," but I think it's important to recognize that we couldn't function in the world without stereotypes.

Objectivism is basically the same thing as faith-based science or for that matter faith-based foreign policy, where you start out with the assumption "We are good, they are evil," or "We know what is good and right and we know what is wrong," so all questions are settled in advance by a set of ideological prejudices.

Images are not only visual. They're also auditory, they involve sensuous impressions, bundles of information that come to us through our senses, and mainly through seeing and hearing: the audio-visual field.

I know stereotypes have a bad reputation, people say, "Oh, you shouldn't stereotype people," but I think it's important to recognize that we couldn't function in the world without stereotypes.

The great moment I think in human consciousness is when you realize that the object in front of you is perhaps not nameable or is new, it does not fit a stereotype, and so you need to reconfigure your whole structure of knowledge to account for it.

Stereotypes, I want to say, have to be thought of not just as these invidious, bad things that we could get rid of, but as images that we cannot get rid of, that we have to live with.

When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes.