Quotes about mythology (182 quotes, page 2)

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Epigraph, p. ix
Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971)

History , Forgetting

“If in the present work I have dwelt at some length on the worship of trees, it is not, I trust, because I exaggerate its importance in the history of religion, still less because I would deduce from it a whole system of mythology; it is simply because I could not ignore the subject in attempting to explain the significance of a priest who bore the title of King Of the Wood, and one of whose titles to office was the plucking of a bough — the Golden Bough”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

from a tree in the sacred grove.
Preface, 1 Brick Court Temple, London, June 1922.
The Golden Bough (1890)

Religion , History , Tree

“How many years had he taken to admit a notion of what Michael Angelo and Rubens were driving at? He could not say; but he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres — perhaps at Lourdes — possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles — but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Feeling

“We live within a cultural mythology that tells us we are separate beings in competitive relation for power, even for survival. We long to return to a culture of inclusiveness, cooperation, and the sharing of gifts.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

Charles Eisenstein, The Longing for Belonging http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-eisenstein/indigeneity-and-belonging_b_8011302.html, Huffington Post, 20 August 2015

““When you get back to Taglios now, Master, you can establish a mighty reputation by explaining the myths in the words of a being who lived through their creation.”
Santaraksita smiled sourly, “You know better, Dorabee. Mythology is one area where nobody wants to know the absolute truth because time has forged great symbols from raw materials supplied by ancient events. Prosaic distortions of fact metamorphose into perceived truths of the soul.”
He had a point. In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.
And that is a truth upon which you can rely.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 97 (pp. 351-352)

Truth , Religion , Smile , Soul

“I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Quoted in [1906, Six Historic Americans, John E., Remsburg, chapter 2, New York, The Truth Seeker Company, 13504056M, 2219498, 74, http://www.archive.org/details/sixhistoricameri00rems], who claimed it to be from a letter to "Dr. Woods." The full letter is never reproduced, and the Jefferson Foundation lists http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/superstition-christianity-quotation the quotation as spurious.
Disputed

World

“A thousand years later we still use a form of the original Aztec name… coyotl, pronounced COY-yoht, accent of the first syllable… Their rich mythology produced numerous coyote gods… Huehuecoyotl, or "Venerable Old Coyote"… sounds so much like the widespread North American god-avatar… that the empire-minded Aztecs may have borrowed him from tribes far northward…”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

God

“The three wise men from the east recognised this planetary importance in the birth of Jesus Christ. Perhaps these wise men saw Dattatreya in baby Jesus. That is how the date December 25 was finalised. It is said in Datta Purana (mythology) that Dattatreya appears as child, Unmatta etc.
In those days the three wise men from the east recognised the power of Jesus. This day the wise men from the west are experiencing Jesus in Datta Peetham. For the men of reality the concept of east and west are just lines in the air.
Understanding the above may not be possible in just one reading. Read it several times and you will understand the underlying and profound concept. Swamiji has seen in a Church in Basel, Switzerland Jesus with three heads like Dattatreya. This potentiates the above statements.
Let us understand the above and from now onwards let us correlate Datta Jayanti and Christmas in our hearts and experience the unified divine power.”

Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji (1942) Indian guru

Christmas · Datta Jayanti (1996)

Men , Birth , Understanding , Reality

“There is a vast mythology surrounding meat, but all the myths are in one way or another related to what I refer to as the Three Ns of Justification: eating meat is normal, natural, and necessary. The Three Ns have been invoked to justify all exploitative systems … When an ideology is in its prime, these myths rarely come under scrutiny. However, when the system finally collapses, the Three Ns are recognized as ludicrous.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), pp. 96-97

Way , Nature

“Even though Kurt died in the most horrific way possible, there is this mythology and romanticism that surrounds him, because he's 27 forever. The shelf life of an artist or musician isn't particularly long. Kurt has gotten to icon status because he will never age. He will always be that relevant in that time and always be beautiful.”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

" Frances Bean Cobain on Life After Kurt's Death: An Exclusive Q&A http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/frances-bean-life-after-kurt-cobain-death-exclusive-interview-20150408" (2015)

Life , Age , Beauty , Way

“Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty... unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of incandescently exotic vision. No amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

H. P. Lovecraft, quoted in the Del Rey edition of The Charwoman's Shadow
About

World , Beauty , Singing

“The sixth pre-Christian century—the miraculous century of Buddha, Confucius and Lâo-Tse, of the Ionian philosophers and Pythagoras—was a turning point for the human species. A March breeze seemed to blow across the planet from China to Samos, stirring man into awareness, like the breath of Adam's nostrils. In the Ionian school of philosophy, rational thought was emerging from the mythological dream-world. …which, within the next two thousand years, would transform the species more radically than the previous two hundred thousand had done.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

World , School , Dreams

“Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.”

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman.
Referring to the life of a fiction writer
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

“Then there are those proverbial “bird brains” of the barnyard, chickens, surely the most maligned and abused animal on the face of the earth, and—just as surely—among the brightest, most social birds we'll find anywhere. … Chickens not only are capable of learning, they are also capable of teaching one another. It turns out that chickens are not as dumb as popular mythology makes them out to be.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 6

Bird , Learning , Animals

“The reason why the music is important is that it's an art form— an ancient art form— that takes in the mythology of our people.”

Wynton Marsalis (1961) American jazz musician

Attributed

People , Art , Music

“In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 1

Dreams

“For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world—!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Life , Men , God , People

“I'm not going to vote. I won't vote for a Catholic and I won't vote for a damned Republican. Maybe I've said that before. My ancestors were all Catholic and not very far back. And I have reason to hate the church.
I feel a curious kinship, though, with the Middle Ages. I have been more successful in selling tales laid in that period of time, than in any other. Truth it was an epoch for strange writers. Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. The slight knowledge which filtered through the monastaries from the ancient sources of decayed Greece and fallen Rome, was so distorted and perverted that by the time it reached the people, it resembled some monstrous legend. And the vague minded savages further garbed it in heathen garments. Oh, a brave time, by Satan! Any smooth rogue could swindle his way through life, as he can today, but then there was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living.
I hate the devotees of great wealth but I enjoy seeing the splendor that wealth can buy. And if I were wealthy, I'd live in a place with marble walls and marble floors, lapis lazulis ceilings and cloth-of-gold and I would have silver fountains in the courts, flinging an everlasting sheen of sparkling water in the air. Soft low music should breathe forever through the rooms and slim tigerish girls should glide through on softly falling feet, serving all the wants of me and my guests; girls with white bare limbs like molten gold and soft dreamy eyes.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Harold Preece (received October 20, 1928)
Letters

Life , God , Hate , Children

“Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

God , Religion , Falseness

“This is a citizenry which is annoyed, confused, insulted, and uncertain of how to protect the structures of the public good they struggled so long to put in place. Abruptly the national élites seem to prefer playing another game in which the public good is subjected to what they say are larger truths. All of these turn out to be either pedantically utilitarian or highly romantic. The utilitarian involves the reduction of society to self-interest. The romantic involves the selling of economic mythology as a new universal religion.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997)

Truth , Religion , Game , Universe

“Greek and Roman mythology had never been a favourite subject of mine at school, but as I grew older I began to appreciate the legends and realize that they contained a vivid world of adventure with wonderful heroes, villains and, most importantly, lots of fantastic creatures.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Source: An Animated Life (2003), p. 151

World , School

“There's nothing noble or selfless about politicians and there never has been. Putting it charitably, Profiles in Courage is a compendium of Democratic mythology, ghostwritten for an ambitious young Massachusetts Senator who never did a thing for himself if he could pay to have it done by others.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Pursuing Invariably the Same Object" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle566-20100418-02.html 18 April 2010.

Courage

““Myth, Symbol, and Tradition” was the phrase I originally wrote at the top of the page, for editors like large, cloudy titles. Then I looked at what I had written and, wordlessly, the words reproached me. I hope I had the grace to blush at my own presumption and their portentousness. How could I, if I lived for a thousand years, attempt to cover more than a hectare of that enormous landscape?
So, I let out the air, in a manner of speaking, dwindled to my appropriate size, and gave myself over to that process which, for lack of a more erudite term, I have coined the phrase “Thinking is linking.” I thought of Kerenyi — “Mythology occupies a higher position in the bios, the Existence, of a people in which it is still alive than poetry, storytelling or any other art.” And of Malinowski — “Myth is not merely a story told, but a reality lived.” And, along with those, the word “Pollen,” the most pervasive substance in the world, kept knocking at my ear. Or rather, not knocking, but humming. What hums? What buzzes? What travels the world? Suddenly I found what I sought. “What the bee knows,” I told myself. “That is what I’m after.”
But even as I patted my back, I found myself cursing, and not for the first time, the artful trickiness of words, their capriciousness, their lack of conscience. Betray them and they will betray you. Be true to them and, without compunction, they will also betray you, foxily turning all the tables, thumbing syntactical noses. For — note bene! — if you speak or write about What The Bee Knows, what the listener, or the reader, will get — indeed, cannot help but get — is Myth, Symbol, and Tradition! You see the paradox? The words, by their very perfidy — which is also their honorable intention — have brought us to where we need to be. For, to stand in the presence of paradox, to be spiked on the horns of dilemma, between what is small and what is great, microcosm and macrocosm, or, if you like, the two ends of the stick, is the only posture we can assume in front of this ancient knowledge — one could even say everlasting knowledge.”

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

"What the Bee Knows" in Parabola : The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, Vol. VI, No. 1 (February 1981); later published in What the Bee Knows : Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story (1989)

People , World , Hope , Art

“You're basing your laws and your whole outlook on natural life on mythology. It won't work. That's why you have all these problems in the world. Name them: India, Pakistan, Ireland. Name them-all these problems. They're all religious problems.”

Jack Kevorkian (1928–2011) American pathologist, euthanasia activist

Quoted in "Years of Minutes"‎ - Page 339 - by Andy Rooney - 2004
2000s, 2004

Life , World , Law , Nature

“As the glossaries lengthen, as the footnotes become more elementary and didactic, the poem, the epic, the drama, move out of balance on the actual page. As even the more rudimentary of mythological, religious or historical references, which form the grammar of Western literature, have to be elucidated, the lines of Spenser, of Pope, of Shelley or of Sweeney Among the Nightingales, blur away from immediacy. Where it is necessary to annotate every proper name and classical allusion in the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in the garden at Belmont, or in Iachimo's stealthy rhetoric when he emerges in Imogen's bedchamber, these marvellous spontaneities of enacted feeling become "literary" and twice-removed.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Feeling , Literature

“For anyone seeking meaning for his life a figure from Greek mythology comes to mind. It is that of Atlas, bearing with endless perseverance the weight of the heavens on his back. — Atlas, resolutely bearing his burden and accepting his responsibility that gives us the example we seek. To seek out and accept responsibility; to persevere; to be committed to excellence; to be creative and courageous; to be unrelenting in the pursuit of intellectual development; to maintain high standards of ethics and morality; and to bring these basic principles of existence to bear through active participation in life — these are some of my ideas on the goals which must be met to achieve meaning and purpose in life.
And finally, the man who knows his purpose in life accepts praise humbly. He knows whatsoever talents we has were given him by the Lord and that these talents must be developed and used. In this way man renders thanks for the Lord's gift — and finds meaning in his life.”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1974)

Life , Way , Idea , Courage

“Amazon society, as mythology, history, and universal male nightmare, represents a culture in which women reign culturally supreme because of their gender. Amazon societies are also important because women were trained to be warriors—military and, presumably, in other ways as well. ...

In Amazon societies, women were mothers and their society's only warriors; mothers and their society's only hunters; mothers and their society's only political and religious leaders. No division of labor based on sex seems to have existed in such societies. Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been … ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression.

In Amazon society, only men, when they were allowed to remain, were, in widely differing degrees, powerless and oppressed.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), pp. 335–336 (emphases in original), and see Women and Madness (1972), pp. 284–285 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

Women , Men , Sex , Way

“When the peace of autumn has become poetic instead of being taken for granted, the last day of the plover become a matter of personal regret, the pony become associated with the history of art and mythology, the evening ice-film on the farm stream become reminiscent of crystal, and the smoke from the chimney become a message to us from those who discovered fire—then the time has come to say goodbye... I had long begun to count the days until I could once again leave home, where I felt an alien, and go out into the alien world, where I was at home. But still I paused for a while over my thoughts of departure, and listened to the silence that had robbed the gods of sleep; and dusk sank slowly over the ponies.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

God , World , Peace , Art

“I grew up in the Bible Belt — not the buckle end, as the cliche goes, but the other end where all the holes are. You know what kind of holes. I don't mean to underestimate them, but if you laugh at these idiots enough — show them up as the phonies most of them are — they'll go away.
I'm concerned about another kind of religious fundamentalism: environmentalism. The Greenies have no more respect for scientific truth and individual liberty than the Goddies do. Both operate on faith, rather than fact. And neither of them has any qualms about dusting off the rack, the pincers, the Iron Maiden, and the red hot branding irons in order to see their mythology ensconced as beyond question.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

Interview, Ari Armstrong, "Catching Up with L. Neil Smith," http://www.freecolorado.com/2006/12/lneil.html 7 December 2006.

Truth , Faith , Question

“There comes a point where individual mythology and universal mythology are identical. In this context it is clear that there can be no concern with symbolism and description, memories, misty impressions, of childhood, pictoricism, sentimentalism: all this must be absolutely excluded. So must every hedonistic repetition of arguments that have already been exhausted, since the man who continues to trifle with myths that have already been discovered is an aesthete, and worse.”

Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) Italian artist

Source: For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', Piero Manzoni, 1957, pp. 18-19

Universe , Memory , Childhood

“Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

13 January 1857 (p. 338)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

“Meryl Streep, in her Protestant way, is stuck on words; she flashes clever accents as a mask for her deeper failures. (And she cannot deliver a Jewish line; she destroyed Nora Ephron’s snappy dialogue in Hearburn.) Streep’s work doesn’t travel. Try dubbing her for movie houses in India: there’d be nothing left, just that bony, earnest horse face moving its lips. Imagine, on the other hand, lesser technicians like Hedy Lammarr, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner: these women have an international and universal appeal, crossing the centuries. They would have been beautiful in Egypt, Greece, Rome, medieval Burgundy, or eighteenth-century Paris. Susan Hayward played Bathsheba. Try to picture Streep in a Bible epic! Streep is incapable of playing the great legendary or mythological roles. She has no elemental power, no smouldering sensuality.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 16

Women , Beauty , Way , Travel

“In America we have nothing that takes the place of the gods and goddesses and heroes and demigods of the ancient world. There is nothing to connect us with the soil. We have no mythology. It has never been possible to construct one.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

"Home Schooling and Indian Lore"
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)

God , World

“I read myths and fairy tales and books about them a great deal now, but I very seldom read novels. I find modern novels bore me. I can read Tolstoy and the Russians, but mostly I read comparative mythology and comparative religion. I need matter to carry with me.”

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

The Paris Review interview (1982)

Books , Religion , Reading

“The term "ideographic" has been used not only by those who espouse its basic meaning but also by others who do not necessarily accept the concept but use the term out of mere force of habit as an established popular designation for Chinese characters. I find, to my chagrin, that in my previous publications I have been guilty of precisely this concession to popular usage without being aware of the damage it can cause. As a repentant sinner I pledge to swear off this hallucinogen. I hope others will join in consigning the term to the Museum of Mythological Memorabilia along with unicorn horns and phoenix feathers.”

John DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984, p. 148) http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984)

Hope

“One of the oldest mythological fables tells of Mercury playing at dice with Selene and winning from her the five days of the epact (thus totaling the 365 days of the year and harmonizing the lunar and solar calendars).”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Five, Coups And Games With Dice, p. 125

“Here, according to the mythology of the liberals, was a peaceful little country that Nixon attacked. The fact that there were four North Vietnamese divisions within 30 miles of Saigon coming across the border killing Americans—killing 500 a week starting within two weeks of Nixon’s inauguration—was ignored in the debate on Cambodia by protesters emphasizing the technical neutrality of Cambodia and ignoring that its ruler had invited our response.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

On bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam war. From an interview with the Atlantic magazine - "The Lessons of Henry Kissinger" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/12/the-lessons-of-henry-kissinger/505868/ (10 November 2016)
2010s

Peace , Country

“The world is in his cloak -- figures peer out of its folds -- mythological figures and snakes and pigs and flowers, naked fauns and heavy-breasted sirens and horses' heads -- they sprawl on the flagstones at his feet and peep out from under his arms…”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

World , Flowers , Horse

“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

“I'm an atheist, and so I have a philosophical problem with demonology and supporting the mythology of Satan, which involves God and heaven and hell and all that stuff. I'm not just a nonbeliever, I'm an antibeliever - I think it's a destructive philosophy.”

David Cronenberg (1943) Canadian film director, screenwriter and actor

David Cronenberg's Body Language http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/magazine/18cronenberg.html?pagewanted=all (September 18, 2005)

God , Hell , Support , Problem

“Mythology, science, space exploration, these are subjects that have fascinated me since my early childhood. And they were always connected somehow with the music I write.”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

2001

Music , Science , Childhood

“So I agree with a lot of Hindu mythology and theology, and I think Hinduism describes life better than any other religion. It has a vision of the universe that corresponds more closely to the universe I've glimpsed in my 68 years on this planet than other visions of the universe.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

About her intent to practice Hinduism.
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

Life , Religion , Thinking , Universe

“Sometimes, because my position has not been made clear enough, people think I’m a sort of radical anarchist who has an absolute hatred of power. No! What I am trying to do is to approach this extremely important and tangled phenomenon in our society, the exercise of power, with the most reflective, and I would say prudent attitude. Prudent in my analysis, in the moral and theoretical postulates I use: I try to figure out what’s at stake. But to question the relations of power in the most scrupulous and attentive manner possible, looking into all the domains of its exercise, that’s not the same thing as constructing a mythology of power as the beast of the apocalypse.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

"Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual", interview in History of the Present 4 (Spring 1988)

People , Exercises , Question , Thinking

“For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age.”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Epilogue
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)

Life , Age , Past

“Europe is not really even a geographic entity; it is separated from Asia only at one point, the Bosphorus, by a small stretch of water. North of that there is continuity over the russians steppes, a complete terrestrial flow. I suggest that is also true of culture, and indeed of social organization. Indeed Europe has never been purely isolated, purely Christian. Instead of Christian Europe, one has to see the continent as penetrated by the three world religions that originated in the Near East and which indeed had a common mythology or sacred text; in order of arrival these were Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (…) All have equal entitlements to be present, and in this general ('objective') sense none can be considered only as the Other; they are part of Europe, part of our heritage.”

Jack Goody (1919–2015) British anthropologist

Jack Goody, Islam in Europe, Polity, 2004, p.14

World , Religion , Sense , Water

“The great Egyptian age is but a remnant of The Atlantian culture.
The antediluvian kings colonised the world
All the gods who play in the mythological dramas
In all legends from all lands were from fair Atlantis.
Knowing her fate, Atlantis sent out ships to all corners of the Earth.
On board were the Twelve:
The Poet, the Physician, the Farmer, the Scientist,
The Magician and the other so-called Gods of our legends.
Though gods they were”

Donovan (1946) Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist

Spoken prelude (varies slightly among versions)
Atlantis (1968)

God , Fate , Age , World

“However, he had a particular bent for mythology and carried his researches in it to such a ridiculous point that he would test professors of Greek literature – whose society, as I have already mentioned, he cultivated above all others – by asking them questions like: "Who was Hecuba's mother?" – "What name did Achilles assume when he was among the girls?" – "What song did the Sirens sing?"”
Maxime tamen curavit notitiam historiae fabularis usque ad ineptias atque derisum; nam et grammaticos, quod genus hominum praecipue, ut diximus, appetebat, eius modi fere quaestionibus experiebatur: "Quae mater Hecubae, quod Achilli nomen inter virgines fuisset, quid Sirenes cantare sint solitae."

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Cf. Thomas Browne, Urn Burial, Ch. V
Source: The Twelve Caesars, Tiberius, Ch. 70

Girl , Literature , Question , Singing

“One extraordinary fiction of the Egyptian mythology was the supposed intervention of a masculo-feminine principle, to which was assigned the development of the embryo world, somewhat in the way of incubation. For the doctrine was, that when the first chaotic mass had been produced, in the form of an egg, by a self-dependent and eternal Being, it required the mysterious functions of this masculo-feminine demi-urgus to reduce the component elements into organized forms.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 12
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

World , Way , Dependency

“Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.”

Walter Benjamin book Arcades Project

Arcades Project (1927-1940)

World

“Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

Forms, Eulogies, Images and Symbols, p. 157
Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose (2007)

Way , History

“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)

“True believers aren’t real receptive to the idea that what they’re telling you is just mythology.”

Kage Baker book Sky Coyote

Source: Sky Coyote (1999), Chapter 29 (p. 251)

Idea

“As I have noted elsewhere, and with the clarity of hindsight, I think Stan and Jack made a mistake when they decided to make Thor the “real” Thor. “Whosoever holds his hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor(r)!” That was really all I needed to know. But, of course, the rest of the Norse mythology began appearing early on, so it was only natural (if a tad anal) that fans should start writing in wondering what had happened to the real Thor.”

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

2007
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=20511&PN=1&TPN=3
Regarding Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s version of Thor

Nature , Thinking , Appearance

“In greek mythology, Antaeus was a giant who was strong as long as he had contact with the earth. When he was lifted from the earth he lost strength. So it is with engineers. They must not become isolated from the real world…”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

The Rickover Effect (1992)

World , Strong

“For example, Rothko and I came to an agreement on the question of the subject matter; if we were to do something which could develop in some direction other than the accepted directions of that time, it would be necessary to use different subjects to begin with, and 1942, we embarked on a series of paintings that attempted to use mythological subject matter, preferably from Greek mythology. I did a series of paintings on the theme of Oedipus and Rothko did a series of paintings on other Greek themes….. this offered a possibility of a way out [of a. o. Social Realism and Cubism ]”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

In an interview (March 1960) with David Sylvester, edited for broadcasting by the BBC first published in ‘Living Arts, June 1963; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 31
1960s

Way , Question , Time , Painting

“I loved to talk about music to Nicky … His influence came from people like The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and he had these ideas about layering vocals, painting landscapes with music. Roma knew about Irish mythology, told stories, wrote poetry and had this special feeling for lyrics. My grounding came from the classics.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Women's Weekly interview (2006)

Love , People , Music , Feeling

“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

“How odd—disturbing, in fact—to hear someone address a god with such profane irreverence. But I suppose that the history of mythology is nothing if not proof that celestials are the instructors of man’s worst sins.”

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

Source: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004), Chapter 77 “The Two Sovereigns” (p. 438)

God , History

“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 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

“[A] number of points are worth making at once [that challenge Foucault’s Madness and Civilization]: (1) There is ample evidence of medieval cruelty towards the insane; (2) In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the mad were already confined, to cells, jails or even cages; (3) ‘dialogue’ or no ‘dialogue’, even madness during those times was frequently connected with sin -- even in the Ship of Fools mythology; and, to that extent, it was regarded in a far less benevolent light than suggested by Foucault (pre-modern minds accepted the reality of madness -- ‘madness as a part of truth’ -- just as they accepted the reality of sin; but this does not mean they valued madness, any more than sin; (4) as Martin Schrenk (himself a severe critic Foucault) has shown, early modern madhouses developed from medieval hospitals and monasteries rather than as reopened leprosaria; (5) the Great Confinement was primarily aimed not at deviance but at poverty -- criminal poverty, crazy poverty or just plain poverty; the notion that it heralded (in the name of the rising bourgeoise) a moral segregation does not bear close scrutiny; (6) at any rate, as stressed by Klaus Doerner, another of critic of Foucault (Madmen and the Bourgeoisie, 1969), that there was no uniform state-controlled confinement: the English and German patterns, for example, strayed greatly from the Louis Quatorzian Grand Renfermement; (7) Foucault’s periodization seems to me amiss. By the late eighteenths century, confinement of the poor was generally deemed a failure; but it is then that confinement of the mad really went ahead, as so conclusively shown in statistics concerning England, France, and the United States; (8) Tuke and Pinel did not ‘invent’ mental illness. Rather, they owe much to prior therapies and often relied also on their methods; (9) moreover, in nineetenth-century England moral treatment was not that central in the medicalization of madness. Far from it: as shown by Andrew Scull, physicians saw Tukean moral therapy as a lay threat to their art, and strove to avoid it or adapt it to their own practice. Once more, Foucault’s epochal monoliths crumble before the contradictory wealth of the historical evidence.”

José Guilherme Merquior book Foucault

Source: Foucault (1985), pp. 28-29

Truth , Age , Fools , Art

“It doesn’t matter what our out-dated, hate-filled, prejudicial doctrines and man-made mythologies might have said. There is no such thing as a ‘religion of peace’. Religion only knows how to react violently because they don’t understand reason and have never practiced tolerance. That’s why secular humanist diplomats will be necessary in order to end wars and other violations of human rights.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, How is secular humanist governance better than theocracy? http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/09/07/how-is-secular-humanist-governance-better-than-theocracy/ (September 7, 2013)

Hate , War , Peace , Religion

“Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Other Inquisitions

"The Wall and the Books" ["La muralla y los libros"] (1950)
Variant translation: Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.
Other Inquisitions (1952)

Music , Time , Happiness

“The magic that you hear in tales and things was all based around the Celtic mythology of England, which is Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. I just drain from that source. I just drain everything. So the magic is there.”

Donovan (1946) Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist

Interview in Rolling Stone (9 November 1967)

“I have designed a decorative and monumental work as a group of subjects representing the three ages of sacred and profane mythology: the Golden Age, the Silver Age and the Iron Age. I have symbolised these different ages by dividing each one into compositions representing the three phases of the day: morning, noon and evening.
The Golden Age comprises three compositions (Adam and childhood):
:1. Prayer at sunrise.
:2. A walk in Paradise or the ecstasy before nature.
:3. All nature asleep.
The Silver Age. The second phase is taken from pagan mythology (Orpheus and youth):
:1. The dream nature is revealed to the senses of the inspired poet.
:2. The song.
: 3. Orpheus in the forest, his lyre broken and he longs for unknown countries and immortality.
The Iron Age (Cain and the maturity of man):
:1. The Sower making the earth productive (production).
:2. The Ploughman (work).
:3. Death (Cain and Abel).
Fourth panel:
The Triumph of Christ.
These three periods of humanity also correspond to the three periods in the life of a man:
The purity of childhood: Adam –
The poetic and unhappy aspirations of youth: Orpheus –
The grievous sufferings and death of mature age: Cain with the redemption of Christ.
D— thought it was an extremely ingenious and intelligent device to have used a figure from pagan antiquity for the cycle of youth and poetry instead of a Biblical figure, because intelligence and poetry are far better personified in these periods which were devoted to art and the imagination than in the Bible which is all sentiment and religiosity.
The Golden Age: the beginning of the world, naïveté, candour, purity. The morning: prayer. Noon: ecstasy and evening: sleep. No passion, nothing but elementary feelings. —
The Silver Age, corresponding to the civilization of humanity, already begins to feel emotion; it is the age of poets. I can only find this cycle in Greece. The morning: inspiration. Noon: song. Evening: tears. —
The Iron Age. Decadence and fall of humanity. I shall represent Cain ploughing and Abel sowing. Noon: Cain rests while Abel tends the altar of the Lord from which smoke, a symbol of purity, rises straight to the heavens. The evening: death at the hands of Cain.
The first death corresponds to the other deaths in the two other paintings: sleep and death of the senses; tears and the death of the heart. Do you understand the progression?
Sleep, though sad, is gentler than tears which, though painful, are gentler than death. Ecstasy is more delightful than song, which is gentler than work. Prayer is superior to dreaming which is more elevated than manual work.”

Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) French painter

Notes to his mother, on The Life of Humanity (1884-6) http://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-moreau/humanity-the-golden-age-depicting-three-scenes-from-the-lives-of-adam-and-eve-the-silver-age-1886, his composition of a ten image polyptych, p. 48 · Photo of its exhibition on the 3rd Floor of Musée National Gustave Moreau http://en.musee-moreau.fr/house-museum/studios/third-floor
Gustave Moreau (1972)

Life , Death , Pain , Youth

“We are all creators. We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 222
Context: Not the wretchedest man or woman but has a deep secretive mythology with which to wrestle with the material world and to overcome it and pass beyond it. Not the wretchedest human being but has his share in the creative energy that builds the world. We are all creators. We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials.

World

“Superman is nothing more than a popular retelling of the Christ story, or Greek mythology.”

Christopher Reeve (1952–2004) actor, director, producer, screenwriter

Caught in the Act : New York Actors Face to Face (1986) by Don Shewey and Susan Shacter, p. 18
Context: Superman is nothing more than a popular retelling of the Christ story, or Greek mythology. It's an archetype, watered down and made in vivid colors for twelve-year-old's mentality. It's pop mythology, which extends to the actor, then seeps over to a demand that that actor reflect the needs of the worshipers. The worship doesn't only go on in the temples — it goes on in the streets, and restaurants, in magazines. But, you know, I'm from New Jersey, I'm not from Olympus or Krypton, so back off 'cause I can't take the responsibility.

Christ

“God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, that has royal perogatives. God in Indian mythology is the self, Satcitananda. Which means sat, that which is, chit, that which is consciousness; that which is ananda is bliss.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

The Nature of Consciousness http://deoxy.org/w_nature.htm; also published as What Is Reality? (1989)
Context: If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death — or shall I say, death implies life — you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. So, say in Hindu mythology, they say that the world is the drama of God. God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, that has royal perogatives. God in Indian mythology is the self, Satcitananda. Which means sat, that which is, chit, that which is consciousness; that which is ananda is bliss. In other words, what exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the fullness of total joy.

God

“To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday
Context: To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity

Truth , History , Sense , Falseness

“It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may very well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid.”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 1
Context: It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may very well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood.

“Yeah, the mythology is kind of a pattern. I'm very taken by mythology. I read it at a very early age and kept on reading it. Before I discovered science fiction I was reading mythology. And from that I got interested in comparative religion and folklore and related subjects. And when I began writing, it was just a fertile area I could use in my stories.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

"A Conversation With Roger Zelazny" (8 April 1978), talking with Terry Dowling and Keith Curtis in Science Fiction Vol. 1, #2 (June 1978) http://web.archive.org/web/20070701010155/zelazny.corrupt.net/19780408int.html#2
Context: Yeah, the mythology is kind of a pattern. I'm very taken by mythology. I read it at a very early age and kept on reading it. Before I discovered science fiction I was reading mythology. And from that I got interested in comparative religion and folklore and related subjects. And when I began writing, it was just a fertile area I could use in my stories.
I was saying at the convention in Melbourne that after a time I got typed as a writer of mythological science fiction, and at a convention I'd go to I'd invariably wind up on a panel with the title "Mythology and Science Fiction". I felt a little badly about this, I was getting considered as exclusively that sort of writer. So I intentionally tried to break away from it with things like Doorways in the Sand and those detective stories which came out in the book My Name Is Legion, and other things where I tried to keep the science more central.
But I do find the mythological things are creeping in. I worked out a book which I thought was just straight science fiction -- with everything pretty much explained, and suddenly I got an idea which I thought was kind of neat for working in a mythological angle. I'm really struggling with myself. It would probably be a better book if I include it, but on the other hand I don't always like to keep reverting to it. I think what I'm going to do is vary my output, do some straight science fiction and some straight fantasy that doesn't involve mythology, and composites.

Age , Religion , Science , Reading

“I think what I'm going to do is vary my output, do some straight science fiction and some straight fantasy that doesn't involve mythology, and composites.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

"A Conversation With Roger Zelazny" (8 April 1978), talking with Terry Dowling and Keith Curtis in Science Fiction Vol. 1, #2 (June 1978) http://web.archive.org/web/20070701010155/zelazny.corrupt.net/19780408int.html#2
Context: Yeah, the mythology is kind of a pattern. I'm very taken by mythology. I read it at a very early age and kept on reading it. Before I discovered science fiction I was reading mythology. And from that I got interested in comparative religion and folklore and related subjects. And when I began writing, it was just a fertile area I could use in my stories.
I was saying at the convention in Melbourne that after a time I got typed as a writer of mythological science fiction, and at a convention I'd go to I'd invariably wind up on a panel with the title "Mythology and Science Fiction". I felt a little badly about this, I was getting considered as exclusively that sort of writer. So I intentionally tried to break away from it with things like Doorways in the Sand and those detective stories which came out in the book My Name Is Legion, and other things where I tried to keep the science more central.
But I do find the mythological things are creeping in. I worked out a book which I thought was just straight science fiction -- with everything pretty much explained, and suddenly I got an idea which I thought was kind of neat for working in a mythological angle. I'm really struggling with myself. It would probably be a better book if I include it, but on the other hand I don't always like to keep reverting to it. I think what I'm going to do is vary my output, do some straight science fiction and some straight fantasy that doesn't involve mythology, and composites.

Thinking , Science

“I invented something called The Oxford Muse. The Muses were women in mythology. They did not teach or require to be worshipped, but they were a source of inspiration. They taught you how to cultivate your emotions through the different arts in order to reach a higher plane.”

Theodore Zeldin (1933) English academic

About The Oxford Muse http://www.oxfordmuse.com/index.htm Foundation in an article at The Gurteen Knowledge Website http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/0/241B42CCD52603DF802569D40049FA6D/
Context: I invented something called The Oxford Muse. The Muses were women in mythology. They did not teach or require to be worshipped, but they were a source of inspiration. They taught you how to cultivate your emotions through the different arts in order to reach a higher plane. What is lacking now, I believe, is somewhere you can get that stimulation not information, but stimulation where you can meet just that person, or find just that situation, which will give you the idea of invention, of carrying out some project which interests you, and show how it can become a project of interest to other people.

Women , Art

“[…] Tradition is not a childish and outmoded mythology but a science that is terribly real.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

Science

“He surely failed as prime minister to prevent the tragedy at Ayodhya. But his rivals in the Congress did their own party such disservice by spreading the canard that his (and their) government was responsible for that crime. This, more than anything else, lost them the Muslim vote in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar… any dispassionate reading of recent political history will tell you that this is a self-inflicted injury. The Congress has itself built a mythology whereby the Muslims have come to hold their party as responsible for Babri as the BJP … If you take Justice Liberhan’s indictment of so many in the BJP seriously, you cannot at the same time dismiss his exoneration of Rao, and the government, and the Congress Party under him. You surely cannot put the clock back on so much injustice done to him, like not even allowing his body to be taken inside the AICC building. But the least you can do now is to give him a memorial spot too along the Yamuna as one of our more significant (and secular) prime ministers who led us creditably through five difficult years, crafted our post-Cold War diplomacy, launched economic reform and, most significantly, discovered the political talent and promise of a quiet economist called Manmohan Singh.”

P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004) Indian politician

Shekhar Gupta in Tearing down Narasimha Rao http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/tearingdownnarasimharao/547260/1, The Indian Express, 7 September 2011.

Time , Justice , Reading , History

“Deep in my psyche, I am no different than any American—I have a greater command of their language than they do. I am a composite of all of the heroines in the books I’ve read—legendary, mythological, fictional ones. I wonder if I am real? I want to be!”

Estela Portillo-Trambley (1936–1998) American writer

On how she would describe herself (as quoted in the book Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers https://books.google.com/books?id=yq0PkmCGWoEC&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205&dq)

Books , Reading

“The mythology built around the Civil War—that victory by the North eradicated slavery and all of its vestiges throughout our nation—has obscured our discussions of the impact of chattel slavery and made it difficult to have a national dialogue on how to fully account for its place in American history and public policy. While it is nearly impossible to determine how the lives touched by slavery could have flourished in the absence of bondage, we have certain datum that permits us to examine how a subset of Americans – African Americans – have been affected by the callousness of involuntary servitude. We know that in almost every segment of society – education, healthcare, jobs and wealth – the inequities that persist in America are more acutely and disproportionately felt in Black America.”

Sheila Jackson Lee (1950) American politician

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee Statement on the Historic Hearing on H.R. 40 - a Bill to Establish a Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans (19 June 2019)

History , War , Wealth , Victory

“The Veda may be called primitive, because there is no other literary document more primitive than it; but the language, the mythology, the religion and philosophy that meet us in the Veda open vistas of the past which no one would venture to measure in years. Nay, they contain, by the side of simple, natural, childish thoughts, many ideas which to us sound modern, or secondary and tertiary, as I called them, but which nevertheless are older than any other literary document, and give us trustworthy information of a period in the history of human thought of which we knew absolutely nothing before the discovery of the Vedas.”

Max Müller (1823–1900) German-born philologist and orientalist

Lecture IV : Objections
India, What Can It Teach Us (1882)

Religion , History , Past , Nature

“There is a vast mythology surrounding meat, but all the myths are in one way or another related to what I refer to as the Three Ns of Justification: eating meat is normal, natural, and necessary.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

The Three Ns have been invoked to justify all exploitative systems … When an ideology is in its prime, these myths rarely come under scrutiny. However, when the system finally collapses, the Three Ns are recognized as ludicrous.
Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), pp. 96-97

Way , Relation ships , Nature

“The magic that you hear in tales and things was all based around the Celtic mythology of England, which is Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.”

Donovan (1946) Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist

I just drain from that source. I just drain everything. So the magic is there.
Interview in Rolling Stone (9 November 1967)

“It is the vaccine or vaccines that will win the war against COVID-19, not the government or mythological beliefs.”

P. Chidambaram (1945) Indian politician

Source: Jan 2021 https://twitter.com/PChidambaram_IN/status/1350733987640086530

War

“Hindu mythology is virtually a large scale projection into the psychological realm of microscopic scientific discoveries." "The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than discovering the endless diversity of nature.'”

Gary Zukav book The Dancing Wu Li Masters

They are dancing with Kali, the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology."
The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979)
Source: Zukav, Gary The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics Bantam (September 1, 1984)ASIN 0553249142 as quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Tribute_to_Hinduism.html?id=G3AMAQAAMAAJ

Nature

Quotes about mythology page 2

Quotes about mythology
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