Myth Quotes - Page 26

• To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Destiny, America, Imagine

  10 Copy quote

• There's so much myth and baloney. Like a 80-year-old man able to manhandle a 300-pounder with his little finger. Ridiculous. Or this matter of breaking bricks and boards wth the edge of your hand. Now I ask you, did you ever see a brick or a board pick a fight with anybody?

  Bruce Lee

  Fighting, Men, Hands

  14 Copy quote

• The idea of a liberal media bias is simply a myth. If only it were true, we might have a more humane, open-minded, and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the country.

  Barbra Streisand

  Country, Media, Ideas

  56 Copy quote

• It is difficult to separate, at times, the myth from the truth.

  Bob Kane

  Separation, Difficult

  9 Copy quote

• The Rising was mainly a piece of streat theatre designed by poets for dramatic effect. For better or worse, it became part of the founding myth which states need - but which they should move on from after a time. Major John MacBride, in a cameo performance in which he left Jacobs Mill, as he had entered it, immaculately dressed down to the white spats, told his colleagues Next time lads, don't shut yourself up behind four walls. It was good advice.

  Maurice Hayes

  Wall, Moving, White

  4 Copy quote

• That image of the common drunk is a myth. There is a thing called a maintenance drinker which may very well be a mother of four, a welder or a distinguished business person. These people build up a tolerance and manage to still maintain their daily lifestyles while constantly struggling with this disease, because it is a recognized disease by the American Medical Association.

  Lisa Anderson

  Mother, Struggle, People

  4 Copy quote

• There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Eye, Sadness, Kids

  23 Copy quote

• Kill off the sacred bear. Kill off the ancestral crocodile. Kill off the myth-wrapped tiger. Kill off the lion. You haven't conquered a people, or their place, until you've exterminated their resident monsters.

  David Quammen

  People, Monsters, Lions

  David Quammen (2004). “Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind”, p.254, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.

  Meridel Le Sueur

  Lying, People, Oppression

  Meridel Le Sueur, Elaine Hedges (1990). “Ripening: Selected Work”, p.66, Feminist Press at CUNY

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is my belief that we need a new transnational sustaining 'myth' that can impart value and respect. It is my further belief that we are coming to see our universe and life as creative, without a directing agency. Meaning emerges with life. If this view becomes widespread, it has the promise to become the sustaining myth we need to sustain in turn an emerging global civilization.

  Stuart Kauffman

  Agency, Views, Civilization

  6 Copy quote

• We must...forge partnerships with those around us, and begin to dismantle the myth of solitary perfection.

  Debora Spar

  Perfection, Partnership, Solitary

  6 Copy quote

• You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

  Humphrey Carpenter

  Stars, Moving, Ideas

  Humphrey Carpenter (1977). “Tolkien: A Biography”, Boston : Houghton Mifflin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Real life is about accepting ups and downs, the good and the bad, the possibility of failure as well as the ambition to succeed. Atheism speaks to the truth about our human nature because it recognizes all this and does not seek to shield us from the truth by myth and superstition

  Julian Baggini

  Real, Ambition, Atheism

  Julian Baggini (2003). “Atheism: A Very Short Introduction”, p.111, Oxford University Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.

  John Michael Greer

  Hands, People, Water

  4 Copy quote

• In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

  Salman Rushdie

  Dream, Song, Art

  Salman Rushdie (2000). “The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A Novel”, p.73, Macmillan

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• The constancies and equivalences adumbrated work havoc with such settled topical blocks as myth and philosophy, natural reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, or the Orient with its cyclical time and Christianity with its linear history. And what is modem about the modem mind, one may ask, if Hegel, Comte, or Marx, in order to create an image of history that will support their ideological imperialism, still use the same techniques for distorting the reality of history as their Sumerian predecessors?

  Eric Voegelin

  Block, Philosophy, Reality

  9 Copy quote

• The director, Antoine Fuqua, relies on small details, which anchor the vigilante-as-saint myth in at least a minimal degree of reality.

  David Denby

  Reality, Anchors, Small Details

  "The Equalizer" by David Denby, www.newyorker.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Being here really is just the invitation to rest as Being. There is nothing you have to do. It is not an invitation to become. You will not be scrutinized, your actions compared with those of others. Thats just unicorn food. Let your river flow as it pleases. Simply observe and recognise that all is unfolding spontaneously when that inner journalist- the ego, is exposed as a myth.

  Mooji

  Rivers, Ego, Flow

  17 Copy quote

• From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.

  Janet Frame

  Memories, Darkness Within, Light

  Janet Frame (1998). “The Complete Autobiography”, Womens PressLtd

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Today a new faith is awakening — the Myth of the blood; the belief that to defend the blood is also to defend the divine nature of man in general. It is a belief, effulgent with the brightest knowledge, that Nordic blood represents that Mysterium which has overcome and replaced the older sacraments.

  Alfred Rosenberg

  Men, Blood, Overcoming

  "The Myth of the Twentieth Century". Book by Alfred Rosenberg, p. 65, 1930.

  59 Copy quote

  Show source

• If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the problem of mass incarceration is just too big, too daunting for us to do anything about and that we should instead direct our energies to battles that might be more easily won, history will judge us harshly. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch.

  Michelle Alexander

  Rights, Judging, Progress

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.15, The New Press

  87 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is the power of myth: that we can experience invisible spiritual realities and truths greater than visible, material things in story form.

  John Granger

  Spiritual, Reality, Stories

  John Granger (2010). “How Harry Cast His Spell: The Meaning Behind the Mania for J. K. Rowling's Bestselling Books”, p.94, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• The myth of the first world is that
  development is wealth and technology progress.
  It is all rubbish.
  It means that you are no longer human beings
  but only labor.
  It means that the land you live on is not earth
  but only property.

  Karen Tei Yamashita

  Mean, Technology, Land

  Karen Tei Yamashita (1997). “Tropic of Orange: A Novel”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Congress remains in total denial as our liberties are rapidly fading before our eyes. The process is propelled by unwarranted fear and ignorance as to the true meaning of liberty. It is driven by economic myths, fallacies and irrational good intentions.

  Ron Paul

  Ignorance, Eye, Liberty

  16 Copy quote

• Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historica l, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former-the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers-prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole.

  Joseph Campbell

  Children, Hero, Adventure

  8 Copy quote