Myth Quotes - Page 6

• The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

  Fred Brooks

  Character, Thinking, Perfect

  "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering". Book by Frederick Brooks, 1975.

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• Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!

  Honore de Balzac

  Ideas, Criticism, Genius

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• American public policy is run on a myth.

  Richard Lamm

  Running, Policy, Public Policy

  "Lamm on the Line". Interview with Peter Doskoch, www.psychologytoday.com. September 1, 1996.

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• The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde.

  Eldridge Cleaver

  Beautiful, Strong, Women

  ELDRIDGE CLEAVER (1968). “SOUL ON ICE”

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• The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.

  J. G. Ballard

  Thinking, Views, Enlightenment

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• Sometimes, some of us in some things we do know better. When we know better, I think it's imperative that we do better. Otherwise we're perpetuating myths that have for centuries done us no good. Men and women alike. No one is exempt from being called into consciousness.

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

  Men, Thinking, Good Man

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've just always had a personal fascination with the myth of Abraham Lincoln. And once you start to read about him and the Civil War and everything leading up to the Civil War, you start to understand that the myth is created when we think we understand a character and we reduce him to a kind of cultural national stereotype.

  Steven Spielberg

  War, Character, Thinking

  "Steven Spielberg And Daniel Day-Lewis Talk 'Lincoln'". Interview with Roth Cornet, screenrant.com. November 26, 2012.

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• Jesse [James] was known as a kind of Robin Hood character and also it was known that his exploits were somewhat dubious - however, he perpetuated this myth. Our film [The Assassination of Jesse James] really takes place at the end of all that, the last year of his life, at the end of all that celebrity.

  Brad Pitt

  Character, Years, Dubious

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• My dad was a self-taught stride piano player. The myth is - I don't whether it's true or not - that he taught himself to play by watching a player piano.

  Mose Allison

  Dad, Player, Self

  Interview with Jason Heller, www.avclub.com. February 04, 2010.

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• I don't say that I'm an atheist. I don't like that term, because I think it mirrors the certitude of religion. I say I don't know. And if you don't know - and you don't - just man up and say you don't know. Don't turn to silly stories and ancient myths.

  Bill Maher

  Atheist, Silly, Men

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• When those myths were created, when the Bible was written, man didn't know what an atom or a germ was, or where the sun went at night, or why the women got pregnant. [Laughs.] They needed stories to answer the questions.

  Bill Maher

  Night, Men, Laughing

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Believe, Hero

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• ... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

  Adrienne Rich

  Philosophy, Past, Wind

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.95, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place i1legally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 percent since legalization.

  Bernard Nathanson

  Mean, Media, Numbers

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• Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
  Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
  A cornice on the Third National Bank.

  Allen Tate

  Vocabulary, Mortality, Hermes

  Allen Tate (2014). “Collected Poems, 1919-1976”, p.11, Macmillan

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• Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.

  Camille Paglia

  Men, Self, Personality

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.100, Vintage

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• For little boys are rancorous
  When robbed of any myth,
  And spiteful and cantankerous
  To all their kin and kith.
  But little girls can draw conclusions
  And profit from their lost illusions.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Girl, Children, Boys

  Phyllis McGinley (1951). “A Short Walk from the Station”

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• We become male automatically because of the Y chromosome and the little magic peanut, but if we are to become men we need the helpof other men--we need our fathers to model for us and then to anoint us, we need our buddies to share the coming-of-age rituals with us and to let us join the team of men, and we need myths of heroes to inspire us and to show us the way.

  Frank Pittman

  Father, Team, Hero

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• As a guy develops and practices his masculinity, he is accompanied by an invisible male chorus of all the other guys, who hiss orcheer as he attempts to approximate the masculine ideal, who push him to sacrifice more of his humanity for the sake of his masculinity, and who ridicule him when he holds back. The chorus is made up of all the guy's comrades and rivals, his buddies and bosses, his male ancestors and his male cultural heroes--and above all, his father, who may have been a real person in his life, or may have existed only as the myth of the man who got away.

  Frank Pittman

  Father, Real, Hero

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• What we men share is the experience of having been raised by women in a culture that stopped our fathers from being close enough to teach us how to be men, in a world in which men were discouraged from talking about our masculinity and questioning its roots and its mystique, in a world that glorified masculinity and gave us impossibly unachievable myths of masculine heroics, but no domestic models to teach us how to do it.

  Frank Pittman

  Father, Men, Talking

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• We have to be realistic about what we can achieve in Afghanistan. The notion that the United States can build a Western-style democracy there is a myth

  Barbara Boxer

  Style, Democracy, United States

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• Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.

  Northrop Frye

  Fall, Together, Special

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.412, University of Toronto Press

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• If this country [America] is to survive, the best-fed-nation myth had better be recognized for what it is: propaganda designed to produce wealth not health.

  Adelle Davis

  Country, America, Wealth

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• There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.

  Michel Foucault

  Determination, Exercise, People

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• Plato--who may have understood better what forms the mind of man than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to "real" people and everyday events--knew what intellectual experience made for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Education, Plato, Children

  Bruno Bettelheim (1976). “The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales”, Knopf

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