'Who are you going to believe, your eyes, or my words?'

"In one of the Marx brothers' films, Groucho, when caught in a lie, answers angrily: 'Who are you going to believe, your eyes, or my words?' This apparently absurd logic renders perfectly the functioning of the symbolic order in which the social mask matters more than the direct reality of the individual who wears it. This function involves the structure of what Freud called 'fetishist disavowal': 'I know very well that things are the way I see them, that the person in front of me is a corrupted weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge....' So in a way, I do believe his words, not my eyes."

--Slavoj Zizek

Link: YouTube - 911 Mysteries.

via Wit