Quotes about myth
page 5

“Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. VI (p. 228).

Imagination, Housing

“The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 9, p. 258

“For already the myth is being carefully built up. Hitler is to be the Messiah of organic evolution—the anti-Christ of the will to power, which is not a will to national power but a will to power per se, the liberation of the lustfully destructive from any inhibitions whatsoever.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "Let the Record Speak" 1939, p. 358 (newspaper column: “The Revolution of Nihilism,” May 8, 1939)

Christ

“He who is a legend in his own time is ruled by that legend. It may begin in absolute innocence, but, to cover up flaws and maintain the myth of Divine Power, one must employ desperate measures.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Attributed to Hugo in Old Gods Almost Dead : The 40-year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones (2001), by Stephen Davis, p. 557; but sourced to Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud in Jaco : The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius (2006) by Bill Milkowski, p. iii
Disputed

Time

“The last two centuries were familiar with the myth of progress. Our own century has adopted the myth of modernity. The one myth has replaced the other. … Men ceased to believe in progress; but only to pin their faith to more tangible realities, whose sole original significance had been that they were the instruments of progress. …This exaltation of the present … is a corollary of that very faith in progress which people claim to have discarded. The present is superior to the past, by definition, only in a mythology of progress. Thus one reatins the corollary while rejecting the principle. There is only one way of retaining a position of whose instability one is conscious. One must simply refrain from thinking—and surrender oneself to the vortex of the corollary.”

Charles Baudouin (1893–1963) French-Swiss psychoanalyst

sections 1-7
The Myth of Modernity (1946)

Men, People, Faith, Way

“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world — that is the myth of the "atomic age" — as in being able to remake ourselves.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Prof. Michael N. Nagler in his foreword to Gandhi the Man (1978) by Eknath Easwaran, p. 8 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=v_hpUlMRjWsC&pg=PA8&dq=%22As+human+beings,+our+greatness+lies%22 <br class="br">Misattributed

Age, World

“Mental illness, of course, is not literally a "thing" — or physical object — and hence it can "exist" only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. Yet, familiar theories are in the habit of posing, sooner or later — at least to those who come to believe in them — as "objective truths" (or "facts"). During certain historical periods, explanatory conceptions such as deities, witches, and microorganisms appeared not only as theories but as self-evident causes of a vast number of events. I submit that today mental illness is widely regarded in a somewhat similar fashion, that is, as the cause of innumerable diverse happenings. As an antidote to the complacent use of the notion of mental illness — whether as a self-evident phenomenon, theory, or cause — let us ask this question: What is meant when it is asserted that someone is mentally ill?
In what follows I shall describe briefly the main uses to which the concept of mental illness has been put. I shall argue that this notion has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had and that it now functions merely as a convenient myth.”

Thomas Szasz book The Myth of Mental Illness

"The Myth of Mental Illness" in American Psycholigist, Vol. 15 (1960), p. 113 http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Szasz/myth.htm

Truth, Way, Fashion, Question

“[The title] was the last thing that I chose, after all the songs and the cover art were finished. So none of the songs directly allude to that myth. But the main themes that emerge out of that myth are really close to the themes on the record -- mortality, decadence, an excess of water, isolation, rebirth. The myth is also significant to me because of the way that I encountered it, which relates to one of the huge events the record is about.
I also liked the power of the word itself. I liked how violent and cryptic it felt; it's such a daunting word to encounter. I like how it contrasted this finely rendered, carefully composed front cover -- the painting is information-dense, formal, and stylized; it looks the way something looks when a painter spends a year on it, which is what Benjamin [Vierling] did. So it has all this detail and carefulness to it, which was really important to me and relates very closely to the record. But I also felt like it needed some sort of ballast, or balance, next to it, to reflect the other elements of the record; its innate violence. I wanted a word that was like throwing a brick at the visual on the front cover; I liked that whenever someone looked at that cover they also had to encounter this short, weird word.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Interview with Pitchfork (2006)

Art, Way, Water, Painting

“Sometimes brothers get so hung up on the myth of revolution that they talk about bringing America to her knees and they can't even wipe out one police station. A lot of brothers play revolutionary; they read a little Fanon, a little Mao and some Marx. Although this information is necessary, it is not sufficient, for we must develop a new plan of revolution for black people here in America.”

Maulana Karenga (1941) Political activist

The Quotable Karenga (1967)

People, Reading

“Where the artist is concerned it is a question of the conscious immersion in himself, through which, once he has got beyond the individual and contingent level, he can probe deep down to reach the living germs of total humanity. Everything that is humanly communicable is derived from this, and it is through the discovery of the psychic substrata that all men have in common that the relationship of author-work-spectator is made possible. In this way the work of art has the totemic value of living myth, without symbolic or descriptive dispersion: it is a primary and direct expression.”

Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) Italian artist

Source: For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', Piero Manzoni, 1957, pp. 16-17

Men, Art, Way, Question

“The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

Robert Heller cited in : Jonathon Green (1984) The Cynic's Lexicon: A Dictionary of Amoral Advice. p. 92

Success

“Within the horizon of this [western] myth, love is understood as the artificial restraining of our natural impulses toward unbridled aggression.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 24

Love, Nature

“The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Atheist Delusion (2008)

Religion

“Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed, and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

God, Soul, Forgiveness, Christ

“People have many myths about anger that cause them to categorize the issue in a certain way. For instance, some people consider anger to be biological or hereditary, but this myth does not have any solid foundation. Although some people are more prone to anger due to their psychophysical make-up or emersion in the modes of passion and ignorance, their socialization or quality of association will have a greater impact on their reactions. Although we do bring forth other infl uences into a situation such as our karma, which affects the ways in which we respond to specifi c situations, it is a myth that anger is biological and a permanent, unchangeable aspect of the body.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior IV: Conquering the Enemies of the Mind (Hari-Nama Press, 2004), Chapter 3

People, Way, Passion, Anger

“I'm sure one reason that so many Greek myths deal with terrifying, powerful women — Medea, Electra, the Erinyes, the Bacchae, — is that at some point in the misty past, women held a power that was terrifying — terrifying not because they were women whom men felt threatened by, but because they wielded that power in terrifying rituals that almost certainly involved human sacrifice.
This would not be a popular platform on which to base a feminist agenda.”

Elizabeth Hand (1957) American writer

Apocalypse Descending (2002)

Women, Men, Past

“The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter II, part I, p. 62

Health, Age, Past, Future

“It needs but half an eye to see in these latter days that science, the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture, has reached, without having intended to, a frontier. Either it must bury its dead, close its ranks, and go forward into a landscape of increasing strangeness, replete with things shocking to a culture-trammeled understanding, or it must become, in Claude Houghton's expressive phrase, the plagiarist of its own past. The frontier was foreseen in principle very long ago, and given a name that has descended to our day clouded with myth. That name is Babel. For science's long and heroic effort to be strictly factual has at last brought it into entanglement with the unsuspected facts of the linguistic order. These facts the older classical science had never admitted, confronted, or understood as facts. Instead they had entered its house by the back door and had been taken for the substance of Reason itself.”

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) American linguist

Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 264.

Understanding, Effort, Science, Past

“Multitasking is a myth. …What's actually happening in the brain is sequential tasking. …the brain is rapidly shifting …so quickly and seamlessly that you don't really notice… What you end up with is attention that's been fractionated into little… bits and you're not able to actually sustain attention on any one thing. …You're not saving time. You're wasting time.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

Talks at Google (Oct 28, 2014)

Time

“This has gone on far too long, this spreading of lies about me! None of it is true. NONE OF IT! I love my country. I have never done anything to hurt my country or the men and women who have fought and continue to fight for us. I do not understand what the far right stands to gain by continuing with these myths.”

Jane Fonda (1937) American actress and activist

Blog posting (16 July 2011) http://janefonda.com/qvc-cancelled-my-appearance/

Love, Women, Men, Understanding

“My equestrian figures are symbols of the anguish that I feel when I survey contemporary events. Little by little, my horses become more restless; their riders less and less able to control them. Man and beast are both overcome by a catastrophe similar to those that struck Sodom and Pompeii. So I am trying to illustrate the last stages of the disintegration of a myth, I mean the myth of the individual victorious hero, the 'uono di virtù' of the humanists..”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

Source: Interview with Edouard Roditi' (1958), pp. 87-88

Feeling, Victory, Horse

“Dear Anita, I read your manuscript some time ago and it has lain on my table —.. You have written your dream picture of me — and I am not that way at all. We are such different kinds of people that it reads as if we spoke different languages and didn't understand one another at all. You write of the legends others have made up about me — but when I read your manuscript, it seems as much a myth as all the others. I really believe that to call this my biography when it has so little to do with me is impossible — and I cannot have my name exploited to further it.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

In a letter to Anita Pollitzer, Abiquiu, New Mexico, February 28, 1968); as quoted in The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer, ed. Clive Giboire, Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster Inc., New York, 1990, p. 320
1950 - 1970

People, Dreams, Way, Understanding

“Sober, modern Occidental judgement is founded on a total misunderstanding of the realities depicted in the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedies of redemption. These, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete.”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 2

Truth, World, Reality

“Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

"Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote" (January 1955)
Tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Dreamtigers (1960)
Variant: In the beginning of literature there is myth, as there is also in the end of it.

Literature

“Israel, since its inception, has relied on external support, particularly from the Western world, for justification of its policies in Gaza and the West Bank. These relationships are contingent on many things, including values the West claims to hold dear like freedom, democracy, civil rights and equality. The prospect of a negotiated agreement based on two-states has allowed Israel to stave off the confrontation between the myth of these values and the reality on the ground. But as the notion of a two-state agreement fades firmly into history, the apartheid reality becomes impossible to ignore, and further episodes where Israel will confront masses of mobilized Palestinians demanding their rights will continue to highlight this contradiction.”

Yousef Munayyer American writer

In Gaza, Israel Aims To Massacre Hope (2018)

World, Democracy, History, Support

“For centuries, Ottoman sultans dreamed of conquest in the name of Islam. When they failed on the battlefield they sought glory in building mosques. Eighty years after the Caliphate was abolished to make way for a Western-style republic, the tradition is being revived by Turkey’s current leaders. Led by the ebullient Recep Tayyip Erdogan and inspired by an ideological hodgepodge labeled “neo-Ottomanism,” they are using urban architecture to kill the European dream of secular Turks. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the republic, adopted the Latin alphabet, purged Turkish of Arabic words and brought mosques and religious endowments under state control. He also enlisted a team of French ethnologists to invent the myth of a Turkish nation related to Hungarians and Finns and stretching from Central Europe to Central Asia. For decades, Turkey’s Islamists tried to undo as much of Ataturk’s “reforms” as possible but failed because a majority of Turks would not vote for a party with an Islamist agenda. Erdogan solved that problem by uniting some 20 different Islamist groups into a new party that made no mention of Islam.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Farewell Ataturk" http://nypost.com/2013/06/27/farewell-ataturk/, New York Post (June 27, 2013). <br class="br">New York Post

Dreams, Way, Problem

“Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 6

Question

“In the religious traditions of the Hindus, the most important author of sacred texts is Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa. He is traditionally credited with the arrangement of the Veda into four texts as well as the composition of the epic Mahbharata (Mbh), many Puranas, and other works. Vyasa, however, has been described as mythical as his existence is impossible to prove except in myths and legends such as are preserved in the epic.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In p. 1.
Sources, Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata

“For those who live inside a myth, it seems a self-evident fact. Human progress is a fact of this kind. If you accept it you have a place in the grand march of humanity. Humankind is, of course, not marching anywhere. ‘Humanity’ is a fiction composed from billions of individuals for each of whom life is singular and final. But the myth of progress is extremely potent. When it loses its power those who have lived by it are – as Conrad put it, describing Kayerts and Carlier – ‘like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedoms’. When faith in the future is taken from them, so is the image they have of themselves. If they then opt for death, it is because without that faith they can no longer make sense of living.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: The Call of Progress (pp. 6-7)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Life, Death, Faith, Sense

“Many Christians have been duped into accepting a false idea: that there is a 'neutral' position they can take in regard to social issues. Some Christians even accept the myth that the U. S. Constitution declares that there should be a separation of church and state. They are hesitant to inject Christian beliefs into politics. God's Word, however, makes it clear that there is no neutral position.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

State of the Nation" webcast], Answers in Genesis (February 16, 2010)

God, Idea, Falseness

“The participants begin to realize that if their analysis of the situation goes any deeper they will either have to divest themselves of their myths, or reaffirm them. Divesting themselves of and renouncing their myths represents, at that moment, an act of self-violence. On the other hand, to reaffirm those myths is to reveal themselves.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

“I appreciated the sense of drama he wanted to inject into my existence and I was flattered that he thought I, or at least some essential if somewhat abstract principle within me, was worth saving.I also felt surging within me a fierce need to be independent. Of course I responded to the appeal of divine hydraulics, this system of souls damned or crowned or destroyed or held in suspense, these pulleys and platforms sinking and lifting on the great stage, and I recognized that my view of things seemed by contrast impoverished, lacking in degree and incident. But the charming intricacy of a myth is not sufficient to compel belief. I found no good reason to assume that the ultimate nature of reality happened to resemble the backstage of an opera house.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Six (p. 203).

Soul, Nature, Reality, Sense

“The vulgarity of the myth of modernity is plainly revealed by the preeminence in its mythology of the factors of quantity; to be modern is always to beat the record in some respect. Distinction, therefore, is opposed to modernity as quality is to quantity.”

Charles Baudouin (1893–1963) French-Swiss psychoanalyst

section 15
The Myth of Modernity (1946)

“Koreans in both the north and the south tend to cherish the myth that of all peoples in the world, they are the least inclined to premeditated evil.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, South Korea's Collective Shrug (May 2010)

People, World, Evil

“We can never be too Pagan when we are truly Christian, and the old myths are eternal truths held fast in the Church’s net.”

Margaret Barber book The Roadmender

Source: The Roadmender (1902), Chapter II

Truth

“My artwork is about resistance, de-colonization, self-definition, self-empowerment and survival. I draw upon myths, family folklore, and indigenismo (a native way of being). I reinterpret and register all these as cultural, visual, iconographic manifestations of my identity. As the subject matter of my art, I exalt a lineage of women, energized from a sacred space of creation.”

Santa Barraza (1951)

Santa Barraza, Artist of the Borderlands (2001)

Women, Family, Art, Way

“I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the "Tree of Knowledge". It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to know.”

Ann Druyan (1949) American author and producer

Ann Druyan interviewed by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. — "Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe … and Carl Sagan" http://www.csicop.org/si/show/ann_druyan_talks_about_science_religion/. Skeptical Inquirer 27 (6). November–December 2003.

Question, Knowledge, Thinking, Tree

“All this points to the importance of social memory; as the example of the relationship between modern and ancient Greeks shows, ethnies are constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: Nationalism and Modernism (1998), p. 192.

Sense, Memory

“Inextricably intertwined in the question was slavery, and it only became the more so in the years that followed. Socially and culturally the North and South were not much different. They prayed to the same deity, spoke the same language, shared the same ancestry, sang the same songs. National triumphs and catastrophes were shared by both. For all the myths they would create to the contrary, the only significant and defining difference between them was slavery, where it existed and where it did not, for by 1804 it had virtually ceased to exist north of Maryland. Slavery demarked not just their labor and economic situations, but power itself in the new republic.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), p. 9

Question

“But we are not just witnessing a relativisation of time according to social contexts or alternatively the return to time reversibility as if reality could become entirely captured in cyclical myths. The transformation is more profound: it is the mixing of tenses to create a forever universe, not self-expanding but self-maintaining, not cyclical but random, not recursive but incursive: timeless time, using technology to escape the contexts of its existence, and to appropriate selectively any value each context could offer to the ever-present. I argue that this is happening now not only because capitalism strives to free itself from all constraints, since this has been the capitalist system’s tendency all along, without being able fully to materialize it. Neither is it sufficient to refer to the cultural and social revolts against clock time, since they have characterized the history of the last century without actually reversing its domination, indeed furthering its logic by including clock time distribution of life in the social contract. Capital’s freedom from time and culture’s escape from the clock are decisively facilitated by new information technologies, and embedded in the structure of the network society.
The transformation of time as surveyed in this chapter does not concern all processes, social groupings, and territories in our societies, although it does affect the entire planet. What I call timeless time is only the emerging, dominant form of social time in the network society, as the space of flows does not negate the existence of places. It is precisely my argument that social domination is exercised through the selective inclusion and exclusion of functions and people in different temporal and spatial frames.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 433–434 as quoted in: Wayne Hope (2006) Global Capitalism and the Critique of Real Time http://www.sagepub.com/dicken6/Sociology%20Online%20readings/CH%202%20-%20HOPE.pdf. Sage publications. p. 289

Life, People, Exercises, History

“Particularly in the case of all professional of press-images which testify of the real events. In making reality, even the most violent, emerge to the visible, it makes the real substance disappear. It is like the Myth of Eurydice : when Orpheus turns around to look at her, she vanishes and returns to hell. That is why, the more exponential the marketing of images is growing the more fantastically grows the indifference towards the real world. Finally, the real world becomes a useless function, a collection of phantom shapes and ghost events. We are not far from the silhouettes on the walls of the cave of Plato.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

New millennium

World, Hell, Reality, Indifference

“Though he [Charles Guignebert] could not accept either the Christ myth theory, which held that no historical Jesus existed, or the Dutch Radical denial that Paul authored any of the epistles, Guignebert took both quite seriously.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Tom Flynn, Richard Dawkins, The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, https://books.google.com/books?id=fsZ26vQxJKMC&pg=PA372, 2007, Prometheus Books, Publishers, 978-1-61592-280-2, 372, Guignebert, Charles]

Christ

“The [Greek] myths were… attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

Feeling

“It’s what they call a “theocracy”—priest-ridden in the extreme, full of dark superstitions and darker myths and legends, where all gods and demons are honoured, doubtless to be on the safe side. The people are cruel, ignorant, dirty and proud—they look down their noses at all other races.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 1, Chapter 2 “The Temple at Teku Benga” (p. 14)
The Warlord of the Air (1971)

God, People

“The mystique of science is an essential tool for technocratic rule. Through it we are all taught that science, as the paradigm of all expert knowledge, has an objective, superior, and special truth that only the superintelligent few can understand. Science education, like it or not, does a great job in foisting these myths on most of us.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 149

Truth, Education, Understanding, Knowledge

“The task of revolutionary leaders is to pose as problems not only this myth, but all the other myths used by the oppressor elites to oppress.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

Problem

“Muslim discourse is currently a tissue of myths, conspiracy theories, and exhortations to recapture the glories of the seventh century.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

2000s, The End of Faith (2004)

“One [film] is based on the Medea myth about a woman who kills her own child -- The Love of Ruins. It is almost a technical exercise to see if I can convince an audience or make an audience sympathetic to a woman who kills her own child.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

In an interview in Film Quarterly, Winter 1991-92
Interviews

Love, Exercises

“I hear so many things about who I am supposed to be I hardly know what to believe. I am willing to tell all, but what Is it? Doubtless all these myths and legends will be straightened out eventually, but It may take years.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Comic interview with Jo Ranson, "Living from Can to Mouth," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn Eagle Magazine, November 24, 1929, p. 5.

“Can the human appropriation of nature ever achieve the elimination of violence, cruelty, and brutality in the daily sacrifice of animal life for the physical reproduction of the human race? To treat nature "for its own sake" sounds good, but it is certainly not for the sake of the animal to be eaten, nor probably for the sake of the plant. The end of this war, the perfect peace in the animal world — this idea belongs to the Orphic myth, not to any conceivable historical reality. In the face of the suffering inflicted by man on man, it seems terribly "premature" to campaign for universal vegetarianism or synthetic foodstuffs; as the world is, priority must be on human solidarity among human beings. And yet, no free society is imaginable which does not, under its "regulative idea of reason," make the concerted effort to reduce consistently the suffering which man imposes on the animal world.”

Herbert Marcuse book Counterrevolution and Revolt

Source: Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), Chapter "Nature and Revolution," in The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, edited by Andrew Feenberg and ‎William Leiss, Beacon Press, 2007, pp. 240 https://books.google.it/books?id=JqoyBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA240-241

Life, War, World, Peace

“I discovered that I had deluded myself into believing that this world held the answer to the future and that Communism was basically humanitarian in its approach to politics. No one duped me into joining, and the struggle to see through my folly has been a great personal struggle. You don’t discover some morning that everything you believe in, and perhaps have staked your life on, is a myth. The act of breaking with Communism was the most difficult one of my life.”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

As quoted in “Escape Artist: Recalling a YAF hero—the unlikely, liberating journey of Phillip Abbott Luce”, Shawn Steel, California Political Review, July-August (2000) pp. 23-28

Life, World, Communication, Future

“That love loves fidelity [is] a myth woven by men from their insecurities.”

David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas

"Letters from Zedelghem", p. 72 (Nook Edition)
Cloud Atlas (2004)

Love, Men

“Myths are not the stuff of which sensible policy is made.”

Irwin Stelzer (1932) American economist and columnist

Letter from Londonistan (2005)

“It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social and ethical problems in living.
I have argued that, today, the notion of a person "having a mental illness" is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization — namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases.
Moreover, the concept of mental illness also undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Conclusions.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961)

Disease, Problem, Study, Personality

“I don't want to say I'm envious of any other woman's body. It's a bad myth to perpetuate. Women have enough trouble liking themselves.”

Teri Garr (1944) American film and television actress

Quoted in " Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KOVGUVYj2XUC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=%22I+don't+want+to+say+I'm+envious+of+any+other+woman's+body.%22&source=bl&ots=QGbxO9aW4k&sig=WBhGgo5wavMXkC5ElTw-2zwe1SM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Tf36TuPDEs-j8gO5tq3WAQ&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22I%20don't%20want%20to%20say%20I'm%20envious%20of%20any%20other%20woman's%20body.%22&f=false" (2001), p. 37.

Women

“[I am] dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Abstract Expressionism, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 81
after 1970, posthumous

Time

“We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter toward its doom. And at the same time the thought abruptly shot through me, with a joyful, startled amazement, that despite the decay and death of that language it had not been lost, that its youth, maturity, and downfall were preserved in our memory, in our knowledge of it and its history, and would survive and could at any time be reconstructed in the symbols and formulas of scholarship as well as in the recondite formulations of the Glass Bead Game. I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Death, Youth, World, Way

“I grew up very Christian … My family are still very Christian. I am in no way disrespecting them when I say this: it was overbearing. I believed I was touched by Jesus, and I prayed all the time. I was still very Christian when I left the Marines. I would tell everyone about Jesus — it was almost evangelical. I thought all the good things in my life were because of my faith.
When I came back from expeditions, I had some experiences that made me readdress all that. I'd pretty much known all along that Christianity wasn't for me. Ever since then, I've been on my own quest to find another truth. I can't read novels, but I do read books about cosmology, about astrophysics, about genetics. I'm interested in altered states of mind, and creation myths. It's all part of the same thing — I want to know why we think what we think. Now, I'd describe myself as pan-deist, reluctantly verging on atheist.”

Bruce Parry (1969) British documentarian

As quoted in "Bruce almighty: What drives Tribe's presenter-explorer Bruce Parry?" by Ed Caesar in The Independent (11 August 2007) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/bruce-almighty-what-drives-tribes-presenterexplorer-bruce-parry-461007.html

Life, Truth, Books, Family

“We begin again to structure the primordial feelings…from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 17

Feeling

“Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales—which said that Jahna’s people were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human—taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.
But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such non-people as the Old Man’s kind.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 13 “Last Contact” section III (p. 432)

People, Way, Passion

“[T]he Christian philosopher of to-day has larger capacities and fuller knowledge than the Israelite of the time of Moses. What the one accepted as literal truth the other cannot accept save as a myth or figure. The children of Israel received without idealisation the statements of their great lawgiver. To them the tables of the law were true tablets of stone, prepared, engraved, broken, and re-engraved; while the graving tool which thus inscribed the law was held undoubtingly to be the finger of God. To us such conceptions are impossible. We may by habit use the words, but we attach to them no definite meaning.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

p, 125
New Fragments (1892)

God, Children, Truth, Law

“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike; as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called 'diversity' actually perpetuate racism. Their intense focus on race is inherently racist, because it views individuals only as members of racial groups. Conservatives and libertarians should fight back and challenge the myth that collectivist liberals care more about racism. Modern liberalism, however, well-intentioned, is a byproduct of the same collectivist thinking that characterizes racism. The continued insistence on group thinking only inflames racial tensions. The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity. In a free market, businesses that discriminate lose customers, goodwill, and valuable employees- while rational businesses flourish by choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers. More importantly, in a free society every citizen gains a sense of himself as an individual, rather than developing a group or victim mentality. This leads to a sense of individual responsibility and personal pride, making skin color irrelevant. Rather than looking to government to correct what is essentially a sin of the heart, we should understand that reducing racism requires a shift from group thinking to an emphasis on individualism.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

What Really Divides Us https://web.archive.org/web/20120127094927/http://www.ronpaularchive.com/2002/12/what-really-divides-us/ (23 December 2002). <br class="br">2000s, 2001-2005

Color, Understanding, Business, Thinking

“Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people’s lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day.”

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) English children's fantasy writer

'About the Author', The Many Worlds of Diana Wynne Jones http://www.dianawynnejones.co.uk/author/default.aspx (HarperCollins, 2005). Retrieved June 14 2005.

People

“Just as the mother influence is formative with a man's anima, the father has a determining influence on the animus of a daughter. The father imbues his daughter's mind with the specific coloring conferred by those indisputable views mentioned above, which in reality are so often missing in the daughter. For this reason the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life and full of wishes and judgments about how things "ought to be," prevents all contact with life. The animus appears in many myths, not only as death, but also as a bandit and murderer, for example, as the knight Bluebeard, who murdered all his wives.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Animus, a Woman's Inner Man, p. 319 - 320

Love, Life, Death, God

“The purpose of education, so one would think, is to introduce the young into life, and that means: into the society where they are born and into the physical universe that surrounds the society. The method of education often consists in the teaching of some basic myth. The myth is available in various versions. More advanced versions may be taught by initiation rites which firmly implant them into the mind. Knowing the myth, the grown-up can explain almost everything (or else he can turn to experts for more detailed information). He is the master of Nature and of Society. He understands them both and he knows how to interact with them. However, he is not the master of the myth that guides his understanding.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924–1994) Austrian-born philosopher of science

How To Defend Society Against Science (1975)

Life, Education, Understanding, Nature

“Myth was the mystery plus the fantasy — gods, anthropomorphized animals and birds, chimera, phantasmagorical creatures — that posits out of the imagination some sort of explanation for the mystery. Humans and their fellow creatures were the materiality of the story, but as Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote, 'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

God, Art, Imagination, Bird

“We are captive to systems of power until we can name the dominant myths and the intricate systems of coercion and control that extinguish our freedom.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Speech at the American Political Science Association, September 3, 2016 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_intellectuals_we_abandon_20160904

Freedom

“The Romantic painters were already addicted to a cult of the horse as an aristocratic beast.... From Géricault and Constantin Guys [both Romantic French painters] to Degas and Dufy, this cult of the horse found its expression in a new attitude towards sport and military life... In Odilon Redon’s visionary renderings of horses and later in those of Picasso and Chirico, we then see the horse become part of the fauna of a world of dreams and myths.”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

Source: Interview with Edouard Roditi' (1958), p. 86

Life, World, Dreams, Guy

“The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point — more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance — and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss book Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 13 : Pioneer Zone, pp.123-124

Knowledge, Loss

“I don't want to offend people right out of the gate. I know that some of you believe and I certainly don’t want to mock the myths that define some of you, but um. I choose not to believe in god. That's ok still, i can do that, right? It's my choice to go through life filled with dread, panic and fear... because I think that's a more objective and real way to live. Just be like…"Aaaaahh' what's gonna happen?!" I think that's needed, honestly. And again I don't want to make fun of what you believe in. I think the reason Jesus is so popular, just on a celebrity level, is that he died at the peak of his career, ok. He was…hear me out…. he was young, he was hot. He was well spoken from all accounts. I really think it would have been different had he lived longer, alright. Say had he gotten old enough to get bitter. Alright, just hear me out. Picture there's a third testament to the bible' alright. This point Jesus is in his 50's. He's got one apostle left. And the book opens with him knee deep in water saying, "I used to be able to do this!" The apostle's saying, "Come on…don't yell at the water, Jesus. Come on in. It's not your day, buddy. Come on. People are gathering for the wrong reason. Can we just go, please. Let's go to the deli…we'll have a sandwich. We'll try again tomorrow. Come on, yes you are god, come on. And again, you know, if you're a religious person, I understand why you believe. It makes you feel better, you know. But a lot of us do not have the patience or disposition to have faith or belief. Thank god there's medication for those people because if you're properly medicated, it will provide roughly the same effect as religion, you know. If you're on the right combination of anti-depressants, it will alleviate your ability to see the truth clearly and provide a false sense of hope.”

Marc Maron (1963) Comedian

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/zt2b7c/comedy-central-presents-faith-medication
Comedy Central Presents (2007)

Life, God, People, Truth

“As Malaparte saw it, Naples was a pagan city with an ancient sense of time. Christianity taught those who were converted to it to think of history as the unfolding of a single plot – a moral drama of sin and redemption. In the ancient world there was no such plot – only a multitude of stories that were forever being repeated. Inhabiting that ancient world, the Neapolitans did not expect any fundamental alteration in human affairs. Not having accepted the Christian story of redemption, they had not been seduced by the myth of progress. Never having believed civilization to be permanent, they were not surprised when it foundered.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Frozen Horses and Deserts of Brick (p. 22)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

World, History, Thinking, Sense

“Every naturalism begins as involuntary naïveté. Initially, we cannot help thinking that the “order of things” is an objective order. For the first glance falls on the things and not on the “eyeglasses.” In the work of enlightenment, this first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of naïveté and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience. It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn to the eyeglasses, i. e., to one’s own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naïveté loses its charm, becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fascism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation of the world was taken; in simulated naïveté, an artful stupefaction (Verdummung) is at work—the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social orders.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 59

World, Art, Nature, Thinking

“It has been long understood that “consumer sovereignty” is a myth. To make fundamental changes in the commodity economy it is necessary to have power over production.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Interview with Left Voice, 2017

Change

“[Per the Gospels] Every single story bears the marks of fiction, with earlier versions ruling out later ones, with extrabiblical parallels providing abundant nonhistorical analogies, while current experience provides no historical parallel. The Gospels certainly do not put us in touch with the faith (whatever it may have been) of the earliest Christians. They do not tell us whether the resurrection of Jesus was even part of the first Christian faith(s). Everywhere we have looked, we have found naught but legend and myth, fiction and redaction.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?, https://books.google.com/books?id=GmlB-KXsX8kC&pg=PA347, 2003, Prometheus Books, Publishers, 978-1-61592-028-0, 347]

Faith, Parting

“While early American society was an agrarian society, it was fast becoming more commercial, and commercial goals made their way among its agricultural classes almost as rapidly as elsewhere. The more commercial society became, however, the more reason it found to cling in imagination to the noncommercial agrarian values. The more farming as a self-sufficient way of life was abandoned for farming as a business, the more merit men found in what was being left behind. And the more rapidly the farmers' sons moved into the towns, the more nostalgic the whole culture became about its rural past. The American mind was raised upon a sentimental attachment to rural living and upon a series of notions about rural people and rural life that I have chosen to designate as the agrarian myth. The agrarian myth represents a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins.
Like any complex of ideas, the agrarian myth cannot be defined in a phrase, but its component themes form a clear pattern. Its hero was the yeoman farmer, its central conception the notion that he is the ideal man and the ideal citizen.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter I, part I, p. 23

Life, Men, People, Way

“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"The Great Ennui".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Sense, Past

“I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student — thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here

Men, God, World, Communication

“Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

River out of Eden (1995)

Faith, Support

“Myth: There’s conflict between selfish free markets and a benevolent world of human sympathy.”

Ted Malloch (1952) American businessman

Source: Doing Virtuous Business (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 10.

World, Selfishness

“In the last decade, the backlash has moved through the culture's secret chambers, traveling through passageways of flattery and fear. Along the way, it has adopted disguises: a mask of mild derision or the painted face of deep “concern”. Its lips profess pity for any woman who won't fit the mold, while it tries to clamp the mold around her ears. It pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy: single versus married women, working women versus homemakers, middle- versus working-class. It manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, elevating women who follow its rules, isolating those who don't. The backlash remarkets old myths about women as new facts and ignores all appeals to reason. Cornered, it denies its own existence, points an accusatory finger at feminism, and burrows deeper underground.”

Susan Faludi book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Pages 16-17.
Backlash (1992)

Women, Secret, Fear, Way

“Just as 'beauty' is not related to sex, neither is it related to love. Even having it does not bestow love on a woman, though the beauty myth claims that it must. It is because 'beauty' is so hostile to love that many beautiful women are so cynical about men. […] The beautiful woman is excluded forever from the rewards and responsibilities of particular human love, for she cannot trust that any man will love her 'for herself alone.' A hellish doubt inheres in the myth that makes impersonal 'beauty' a prerequisite for love: Where does love go when beauty vanishes? And, if a woman cannot be loved 'for herself alone,' for whom is she being loved?”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 5 : 'Sex', p. 172

Love, Women, Men, Hostility

“I grew up in an Israeli culture where suicide attackers are really heroes. Look at Samson, who in order to fight the Philistines in Gaza made the theatre collapse on himself and all the civilians there. He is a very big hero among Jewish children. I grew up on the myth of better suicide than surrender. So what is so special about suicide bombers?”

Leah Tsemel (1945) Israeli lawyer

"The Israeli who defends suicide bombers," 2003

Children, Suicide, Fight

“More than other subjects there’s a myth that you have to be an absolute genius to be good at maths and to enjoy it, so I think it’s less accessible for people. Even the word “maths” makes people screw their face up.”

Rachel Riley (1986) television presenter

Interview, The Observer, 12 Oct 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/oct/12/rachel-riley-countdown-stop-saying-girls-arent-good-at-maths

People, Thinking

“It is a myth that the Patriot Act empowers the government to be overly intrusive, giving it power that could someday be used to pry into innocent Americans’ personal lives. The fact is that the Patriot Act was born of a well-established criminal justice and national security structure as well as vibrant bi-partisan debate in Congress, both upon its establishment and its renewal. The Act was written to help the law enforcement and intelligence communities to protect Americans and fight the war on terror. It, in fact, answered the call of career, rank and file law enforcement to update our laws to match law-enforcement tools with modern technology. The Patriot Act simply ensures that law enforcement and national security personnel have the tools they need to keep us safe from terrorism — and in many cases those tools were already available to law enforcement in other contexts — while also ensuring that those tools are consistent with the Constitution and include appropriate safeguards against government over-reaching.”

Alberto Gonzales (1955) 80th United States Attorney General

Speech regarding Civil Liberties and the War on Terrorism (November 20, 2006)

War, Justice, Law, Intelligence

“As is always the case when you are with the actual human being behind the celebrity or legend, there is something human about the man or woman that makes things less than myth.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 33 (p. 677)

“In one African myth the word for God is even identical with skill and capacity. The Godhead is defined as that thing which appears in man as the mystery of an unusual skill or capacity. It is something divine, a spark of the divinity in him, not his own possession or achievement, but a miracle.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Creation Myths (1972), Deus Faber, p. 140 - 141

God, Appearance

“Why did so many antique myths agree that hell was a circular place?”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)

Hell

“Much has been dissected from among the myths to explore the significance of the mortal endurance and experience of pain. Pain, we are told, purifies the body, expands the mind, prepares the novice for the tests of life and therefore for initiation into the clan, the sect, the tribe, the gang, the squadron, the priesthood, the academy, the coven, or the board. It is clear that such suppositions regarding physical or emotional pain are true; little more need be said on such matters.”

Malcolm Azania book The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad

Appendix (p. 527)
The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004)

Life, Pain

“Well, I think he shatters the myth of white supremacy once and for all.”

Charles B. Rangel (1930) Recipient of the Purple Heart and politician

Rangel (2005) in an interview on New York Public Television (March 28, 2005): On George W. Bush

Thinking

“There is a city myth that country life was isolated and lonely; the truth is that farmers and their families then had a richer social life than they have now. They enjoyed a society organic, satisfying and whole, not mixed and thinned with the life of town, city and nation as it now is.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Source: Old Home Town (1935), Ch. 1.

Life, Truth, Family, Country

“Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences — experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)
Context: Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.
Writers can do something to combat these clichés of our separateness, our difference — for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences — experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

Life, Literature

“Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.”

Jacques Ellul book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965)
Context: Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.

Feeling, Motivation, Knowledge

“In short, myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred (or the "supernatural") into the World. It is this sudden breakthrough of the sacred that really establishes the World and makes it what it is today. Furthermore, it is as a result of the intervention of Supernatural Beings that man himself is what he is today, a mortal, sexed, and cultural being.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

Myth and Reality (1963)
Context: Myth is an extremely complex cultural reality, which can be approached and interpreted from various and complementary viewpoints.
Speaking for myself, the definition that seems least inadequate because most embracing is this: Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the "beginnings." In other words myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality — an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a "creation"; it relates how something was produced, began to be. Myth tells only of that which really happened, which manifested itself completely. The actors in myths are Supernatural Beings. They are known primarily by what they did in the transcendent times of the "beginnings." hence myths disclose their creative activity and reveal the sacredness (or simply the "supernaturalness") of their works. In short, myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred (or the "supernatural") into the World. It is this sudden breakthrough of the sacred that really establishes the World and makes it what it is today. Furthermore, it is as a result of the intervention of Supernatural Beings that man himself is what he is today, a mortal, sexed, and cultural being.

World, Sex

“Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)
Context: We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao.
What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy. Indeed, it is in itself ekstasis. Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

Life, God, Faith

“Friend Monkey is really my favorite of all my books because the Hindu myth on which it is based is my favorite — the myth of the Monkey Lord who loved so much that he created chaos wherever he went. … when you read the Ramayana you’ll come across the story of Hanuman on which I built my version of that very old myth.
I love Friend Monkey.”

P. L. Travers (1899–1996) Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist

I love the story of Hanuman. For many years, it remained in my very blood because he’s someone who loves too much and can’t help it. I don’t know where I first heard of him, but the story remained with me and I knew it would come out of me somehow or other. But I didn’t know what shape it would take.
The Paris Review interview (1982)

Love, Books, Reading

“The true fairytales … come straight out of myth; they are, as it were, minuscule reaffirmation of myths, or perhaps the myth made accessible to the local folky mind.”

P. L. Travers (1899–1996) Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist

Source: Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins (2007), Ch. 2, p. 39
Context: The true fairytales … come straight out of myth; they are, as it were, minuscule reaffirmation of myths, or perhaps the myth made accessible to the local folky mind. One might say that fairytales are the myths falling into time and locality … is the same stuff, all the essentials are there, it is small, but perfect. Not minimized, not to be made digestible for children.

Fairytale

“Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus
Context: You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.

Life, Imagination

“We clothe ourselves in flame
And trade new myths for old.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

"We March Back to Olympus" in Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns (1977), p. 11
Context: We clothe ourselves in flame
And trade new myths for old.
The Greek gods christen us
With ghosts of comet swords;
God smiles and names us thus: "
"Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!"

Clothes

“Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.”

Sri Aurobindo book Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol

Savitri (1918-1950), Book One : The Book Of Beginnings
Context: An instant's visitor the godhead shone.
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood
And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve.
Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.

Beauty, Sense

“There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Essay as "Mr. X" (1969)
Context: When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.
There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day.

Error, Problem

Quotes about myth page 5

Quotes about myth
page 5