Interview at Achuka Children's Books 
Context: I knew I was telling a story that would be gripping enough to take readers with it, and I have a high enough opinion of my readers to expect them to take a little difficulty in their stride. My readers are intelligent: I don't write for stupid people. Now mark this carefully, because otherwise I shall be misquoted and vilified again — we are all stupid, and we are all intelligent. The line dividing the stupid from the intelligent goes right down the middle of our heads. Others may find their readership on the stupid side: I don't. I pay my readers the compliment of assuming that they are intellectually adventurous.
                                    
“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”
Source: Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus
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John Dominic Crossan 1
American academic 1934Related quotes
“Once you told yourself a story enough times, it was so easy to keep on believing it.”
                                        
                                        Part 2: "The Habit of Truth", §5 (p. 35) 
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
                                    
2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)
"What's in a Sign?", in Signs of Orality. The Oral Tradition and its Influence in the Greek and Roman World, ed. E. Anne MacKay (1999), p. 3
                                        
                                        Book One : The Church of the Conquerors, "The Priestly Lie" 
The Profits of Religion (1918) 
Context: When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness—that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.
                                    
                                        
                                        Speaking with the local news outlet GDS  http://georgiatoday.ge/news/4776/Ivanishvili-Refuses-to-Denounce-Georgia%E2%80%99s-Stalin-Worshipers- 
See also: Stalin