Memes Quotes

• Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.

  Terence McKenna

  Tasks, Replicate, Ifs

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• You're either with us... or you're with the memes!

  George W. Bush

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• I like the app where you can make your own memes. I make memes all the time and send them to my friends.

  Taylor Swift

  Apps, My Friends

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• An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.

  Richard Dawkins

  Creativity, Ideas, Hijacking

  "The Very Best of Richard Dawkins: Quotes from a Devout Atheist". Book by Gordon Fisher, 2014.

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• Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic.

  Susan Blackmore

  Thinking, Tree, Perception

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• God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

  Richard Dawkins

  Religion, Survival, Culture

  Richard Dawkins (1989). “The Selfish Gene”, p.193, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

  Richard Dawkins

  Simple, Blind Belief, Curiosity

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.219, Oxford University Press

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• Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors.

  Keith Henson

  Successful, Behaviour, Attention

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• One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.

  Susan Blackmore

  Mistake, Thinking, People

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• You're a wizard, Harry.

  J. K. Rowling

  Magic, Novelists, Inspirational Harry Potter

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• Words are memes that can be pronounced.

  Daniel Dennett

  Daniel C. Dennett (2006). “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”, p.80, Penguin

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• All religious vows, codes, and commitments are null & void herein. Please refrain from contaminating the ideosphere with harmful memes through prayer, reverence, holy books, proselytizing, prophesying, faith, speaking in tongues or spirituality. Fight the menace of second-hand faith! Humanity sincerely thanks you!

  Greg Erwin

  Thank You, Religious, Prayer

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• I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack.

  Richard Dawkins

  Numbers, Atheism, Culture

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain”, p.127, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.

  Susan Blackmore

  Consciousness, Illusion

  Interview with J. Flinn Akroyd, www.mungbeing.com.

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• Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes.

  Susan Blackmore

  Self, Consciousness, Free Will

  "Humans Are Just Machines for Propagating Memes". Interview with Kim Zetter, www.wired.com. February 29, 2008.

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• The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.

  Daniel Dennett

  Order, Brain, Mind

  Daniel C. Dennett (1996). “Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanins of Life”, p.365, Simon and Schuster

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• If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes.

  Susan Blackmore

  Mammals, Found, Wells

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• A meme (rhymes with dream) is a unit of information (a catchphrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. Memes compete with one another for replication, and are passed down through a population much the same way genes pass through a species. Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power.

  Kalle Lasn

  Dream, Fashion, Philosophy

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• You can make an idea spread for good but you can also make an idea spread for bad and the power to make an idea spread, memetics, you know which now people talk about memes.

  Jay Roach

  Ideas, People, Spread

  Source: collider.com

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• In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts.

  Ernst Mayr

  Example, Doe, Definitions

  Ernst Mayr (2007). “What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline”, p.154, Cambridge University Press

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• Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

  Charles Stross

  Smart, Intelligent, Average

  Charles Stross (2005). “Accelerando”, p.283, Penguin

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• I do think the Roman Catholic religion is a disease of the mind which has a particular epidemiology similar to that of a virus... Religion is a terrific meme. That's right. But that doesn't make it true and I care about what's true. Smallpox virus is a terrific virus. It does its job magnificently well. That doesn't mean that it's a good thing. It doesn't mean that I don't want to see it stamped out.

  Richard Dawkins

  Jobs, Mean, Thinking

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• We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.

  Richard Dawkins

  Memories, Science, Names

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.249, Oxford University Press

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• You know, the very strength of science is that it keeps us from the errors of mythos, from getting committed to a set of memes that we adopt because of congruence with what we think we know. Science demands skepticism.

  Tim Ward

  Thinking, Errors, Demand

  Tim Ward (2012). “Zombies on Kilimanjaro: A Father/Son Journey Above the Clouds”, p.112, John Hunt Publishing

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• Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

  Peter Watts

  Reality, Rose, Police

  Peter Watts (2006). “Blindsight”, p.48, Macmillan

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