W. J. T. Mitchell Quotes

#1. I think it's very important to distinguish between objectivity - which tends to be open, flexible, skeptical of its own certainty and open to new information - and objectivism - which thinks, "No, we know it all, we've got it, so real thinking and learning can come to an end."

W. J. T. Mitchell

#2. 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.

W. J. T. Mitchell

#3. 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.

W. J. T. Mitchell

#4. 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.

W. J. T. Mitchell

#5. 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.

W. J. T. Mitchell

#6. I see stereotypes as fundamental and inescapable and not as something that is ... The kind of common view is "Oh, we shouldn't think in stereotypes," and I think the reality is we can't help but think in stereotypes.

W. J. T. Mitchell

#7. 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.

W. J. T. Mitchell

#8. Writing, in its physical, graphic form, is an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the "imagetext" incarnate

W. J. T. Mitchell