One lesson is that if you want to predict voter turnout, you should ask whether at least one candidate is attracting high levels of enthusiasm - not whether the stakes are high, or even perceived to be high. That fits the historical pattern.
During my time as a political strategist, one of the most vexing problems was figuring out why so many people vote against their perceived interests.
When we make the cerebral state the beginning of an action, and in no sense the condition of a perception, we place the perceived images of things outside the image of our body, and thus replace perception within the things themselves.
Even leaving aside government policy, whole industries are already making expensive changes around the perceived need to 'go green.' Al Gore and countless other prophets of global catastrophe are making megamillions pushing these expensive solutions. Schoolchildren around the globe are being frightened by tales of impending calamity.
You might think that shifting your thoughts is as easy as setting your mind to it. But stressful thoughts aren't held in place through choice or will power. They're held in place through perceived truth value.
Ultimately, the problem is that sex is perceived as a personal, intimate thing, not in the realm of science. But that's not true. It's physiology; it's anatomy. It deserves to be studied.
My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.
If I was as relaxed as what I perceived myself to be, I would not be able to multi-task the way I multi-task.
A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions.
I don't really care how the Patriots are perceived, truthfully. I really don't. I really don't. Look, if you're a fan of our team, you root for us, you believe in our team, and you believe in what we're trying to accomplish. If you're not a fan of us, you have a different opinion.
With young people, I always say, 'You're not doing anyone any favours by withholding your power.' As women, we do that a lot because we are afraid of being misunderstood or perceived as too strong. But the older I'm getting, the more I realise you have to let that go.
Fish cakes are perceived as being quite British, and they're always a bit brown and a little dull.
My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.
For me it was sort of career suicide to work in color, but I did it because I perceived myself from an early stage to be interested in seasonality - the changing of the seasons - that's what I deeply loved.
Sometimes spending time with someone who is perceived as 'successful' can make us feel less successful.
I don't categorize myself. I don't think I'm perceived as a female act by my audience. My fans include just as many men as women.
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.
Menshn is a play on the word mention, and in the U.S. that's how it'll be perceived. Like Tumblr or Flickr. People in the U.K. thought that I'd named it after myself.
For many years prior to the 1990s, European integration was embraced and supported by a large majority of citizens. A united Europe, bound by commonly-held democratic values, was perceived as an essential and effective buffer against the Soviet empire. A united Europe made a repeat of the First and Second World Wars almost unthinkable.
I essentially started out with a Western series for WildStorm/DC but didn't want to be perceived as a 'Western artist.' I did a couple of super-hero things at Marvel but didn't want to be one of those guys, either. I loved all these genres and wanted to play in a very big toy box. Enter 'Planetary.'
I have no idea how I'm perceived in America because I don't live the reality of America.
I have a theory that there's almost this primal viewpoint on women in the business, that once you're beyond childbearing age, you are perceived as nonthreatening, nonsexual, noncastable. Sure, I already knew it before I got into it. I just didn't know I'd end up making my living from low-budget, independent films.
Fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim.
I wasn't a big fan of Instagram at first. I felt it was watering down the way music is perceived 'cause it made things seem more normal.
It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.
A relatively young woman is perceived as younger than a relatively young man.
Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.
The atmosphere of Catholicism in Korea is quite different to the way it is practised and perceived in Europe or the U.S.
If you're one of the only women on a set - if it's you and a bunch of men - you feel like your value doesn't come from your thoughts and your talent and what you say: your value comes from how you look and how you're perceived by the men around you.
I'd like to think that maybe the average person is rational, and they realise that I'm not this crazy monster that, at times, I've been perceived to be.
Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.
We got to make sure that the Democratic Party is not just Democratic, but seen to be Democratic. That means we got to have systems in place that makes sure that everybody who participates in a primary is perceived to have an equal shot with everybody else.
In general, fiction is divided into 'literary fiction' and 'commercial fiction.' Nobody can definitively say what separates one from the other, but that doesn't stop everybody (including me) from trying. Your book probably will be perceived as one or the other, and that will affect how it is read, packaged and marketed.
The great difficulty with Guantanamo is it was perceived correctly as being a place where people were not being detained subject to rules. I don't think the world thinks that you can't detain suspected terrorists - the world thinks you can do that, but you have to do it pursuant to rules and to clear charges.
I've been fortunate. I've worked in a lot of things where I had those kinds of experiences with actors who were perceived as very macho guys, everybody from Lee Marvin to Charlie Bronson to Harrison Ford to Robert Shaw.
When I was a kid in Nebraska, a cantankerous farmer, known for plinking with his '22 at passing cars in which he perceived enemies, ingeniously rigged up a shotgun in his house, trained on the inside of his front door so as to widely distribute any intruder.