“The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.”

Book I, Chapter 3, p. 75
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 8, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were…" by Julian Jaynes?
Julian Jaynes photo
Julian Jaynes 43
American psychologist 1920–1997

Related quotes

Bouck White photo
Armen Sarkissian photo

“The losers on the battlefield were not the soldier and his spirit, but the decision-making officials who were supposed to be ready for a possible war, properly organize and wage it.”

Armen Sarkissian (1953) 4th President of Armenia, Member of the Global Leadership Foundation, one of the directors of Eurasia House, phy…

"In an interview with CivilNet" https://www.president.am/en/interviews-and-press-conferences/item/2020/12/11/President-Armen-Sarkissians-interview-with-CivilNet/ (11 December 2020)

Eldridge Cleaver photo
Thomas Paine photo
Noam Chomsky photo

“A good way of finding out who won a war, who lost a war, and what the war was about, is to ask who's cheering and who's depressed after it's over - this can give you interesting answers. So, for example, if you ask that question about the Second World War, you find out that the winners were the Nazis, the German industrialists who had supported Hitler, the Italian Fascists and the war criminals that were sent off to South America - they were all cheering at the end of the war. The losers of the war were the anti-fascist resistance, who were crushed all over the world. Either they were massacred like in Greece or South Korea, or just crushed like in Italy and France. That's the winners and losers. That tells you partly what the war was about. Now let's take the Cold War: Who's cheering and who's depressed? Let's take the East first. The people who are cheering are the former Communist Party bureaucracy who are now the capitalist entrepreneurs, rich beyond their wildest dreams, linked to Western capital, as in the traditional Third World model, and the new Mafia. They won the Cold War. The people of East Europe obviously lost the Cold War; they did succeed in overthrowing Soviet tyranny, which is a gain, but beyond that they've lost - they're in miserable shape and declining further. If you move to the West, who won and who lost? Well, the investors in General Motors certainly won. They now have this new Third World open again to exploitation”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

and they can use it against their own working classes. On the other hand, the workers in GM certainly didn't win, they lost. They lost the Cold War, because now there's another way to exploit them and oppress them and they're suffering from it.
Forum with John Pilger and Harold Pinter in Islington, London, May 1994 https://web.archive.org/web/20000823015510/http://www.redpepper.org.uk/cularch/xalmeida.html.
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994

Harry V. Jaffa photo
Walter Scott photo

“There is yet spirit in him, were it well directed- but, like the Greek fire, it burns whatever approaches it.”

Source: Ivanhoe (1819), Ch. 43, Malvoisin to Mont-Fitchet

Doris Lessing photo
Norman Mailer photo

Related topics