The Myth Quotes

#1. We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

Naomi Klein

#2. We are making a better way to live. This was the myth, they had all grown up with it.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#3. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not 'a religion', nor 'a philosophy.' It is the summing up and actuality of them all.

C.S. Lewis

#4. The myth-making about Appomattox started from the moment Lee left the courthouse on his horse to travel to Richmond.

Douglas Brinkley

#5. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.

Frank Herbert

#6. If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth.

Joseph Campbell

#7. I worked with Stanley Kubrick for almost a year back in 1990, trying to develop the screen story for his project 'Artificial Intelligence,' which is about a robot boy who wishes to become a real boy, a future scientific fairy tale inspired in the myth of Pinocchio.

Ian Watson

#8. The friend of wisdom is also a friend of the myth. - ARISTOTLE

Christopher McDougall

#9. He referred to 'the myth of discipline' and how in the end it all boils down to how badly you want something. Do you really want to have a defined six-pack or do you want those doughnuts? Which one gets you the most excited? It really is as simple and as straightforward as that.

Nick Mitchell

#10. The myth of "free choice" begins with "free market" and "free trade". When five transnational corporations control the seed market, it is not a free market, it is a cartel.

Vandana Shiva

#11. The myth that men are the economic providers and women, mainly, are mothers and care givers in the family has now been thoroughly refuted. This family pattern has never been the norm, except in a narrow middle-class segment.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

#12. The myth is that if housing prices go up, Americans will be richer. What banks - and behind them, the Federal Reserve - really want is for new buyers to be able to borrow enough money to buy the houses from mortgage defaulters, and thus save the banks from suffering from more mortgage defaults.

Michael Hudson

#13. I believe that the writers of Genesis had detected the inherent selfishness in human nature that I propose is in our genes, and invented the myth of original sin to account for it. It's an image. I am not acting as an exegete - I don't interpret scripture.

Christian De Duve

#14. I'm just trying to spread the word and upturn the myth that actually you should be resting after cancer treatment. You shouldn't; you should be getting out and doing any kind of exercise you can. You don't have to run a marathon, but you just have to up your activity levels.

Jo Brand

#15. People who succeed do not expect every company to reward fairly; they screen for companies that will recognize their contribution," wrote Warren Farrell, Ph.D. in The Myth of Male Power.2

Suzanne Venker

#16. At one time kings were anointed by Deity, so the problem was to see to it that Deity chose the right candidate. In this age the myth is 'the will of the people' ... but the problem changes only superficially.

Robert A. Heinlein

#17. I like the fact that we're stripping the icons away. They're the WikiLeaks for the age that we're revealing, with the transparency of the characters. We're unearthing the truth beyond or underneath the myth. I love that aspect.

Joseph Fiennes

#18. What really terrifies Americans is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian.

Richard Rodriguez

#19. The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

Alexander Chee

#20. The key to The Doors is the culture behind the myth.

Iggy Pop

#21. Every time our government chooses to use military force to bring about change in the world, it once again teaches our children the myth of redemptive violence, the myth that violence can be an instrument for good.

Shane Claiborne

#22. We have seen that there are two misconceptions involved in the myth that memory is a thing. One is that memory is a thing (a tangible structure rather than an abstract process) and the other is that memory is a thing (one memory rather than many memories).

Kenneth L. Higbee

#23. We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Roland Barthes

#24. The myth that the founding of American Republic was based on the philosophy of John Locke could only have been maintained, because the history of Leibniz's influence was suppressed.

Robert Trout

#25. I liked the myth elements of Christmas. The way in which its origins reach back far beyond Jesus, to the rituals of people unknown to us. The celebration of the winter solstice. The coming of light in the darkest time.

Robert B. Parker

#26. Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.

Jeffrey Tucker

#27. The myth that we must have "time" - more time - in order to create is a myth that keeps us from using the time we do have.

Julia Cameron

#28. Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth.

Tim Jackson

#29. There is actually a great book called Prima Donna by Rupert -Christiansen that deconstructs the myth. In fact, many of the women who were prima donnas were feminists and incredible forces for their time.

Rufus Wainwright

#30. The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

Joseph Campbell

#31. There is no truth to the myth that Negroes depreciate property. The fact is that most Negroes are kept out of residential neighborhoods so long that when one of us is finally sold a home, it's already depreciated.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#32. Sometimes you pick up on the myth and it's just an accident. I think it comes naturally out of people, and some people are aware of it.

Brie Larson

#33. Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#34. As critical acclaim and response has built up, every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I've created about my work and refine it.

James Ellroy

#35. The need to recreate the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place. Never

Stephen King

#36. It is time that we dispensed with the myth that the market is a force of nature that should not be meddled with. Markets are social creations that can be, and have been, modified for social purposes.

Ha-Joon Chang

#37. the central rule of the myth: For every feminist action there is an equal and opposite beauty myth reaction.

Naomi Wolf

#38. The myth of socialism is far stronger than the reality of capitalism. That is because capitalism is not really an ism at all. It is what people do if you leave them alone.

Arnold Beichman

#39. The myth of the impossible dream is more powerful than all the facts of history.

Robert Fulghum

#40. The resistance to the mimetic contagion prevents the myth from taking shape. The conclusion in the light of the Gospels is inescapable: myths are the voice of communities that unanimously surrender to the mimetic contagion of victimization.

Rene Girard

#41. Part of the myth is that these model citizens have been given nothing by the government and have made it on their own. The American Dream is that any honest, self-disciplined, hard-working person can do the same.

George Lakoff

#42. I don't like the idea of drama schools. They only perpetuate the myth that everyone can do what I do

Zach Braff

#43. The myth that young people should leave the nest at 18, never to return, started with iconic American Benjamin Franklin.

Annalee Newitz

#44. I'd like to dispel the myth that when you put a wedding ring on a woman, her brain stops.

Marilyn Quayle

#45. 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

#46. In the middle of our lives, we mistakenly fall prey to the myth that successful people are those who help rather than need, and broken people need rather than help.

Brene Brown

#47. The myth of the detached manipulator and compliant crowd has, since the Twenties, also been abundantly re-echoed by academic students of mass suasion.

Edward L. Bernays

#48. ... to walk is to enact the illusion of autonomy and above all the myth of authenticity.

Sergio Chejfec

#49. We are all prone to the myth of the perfect stranger

Gordon Livingston

#50. I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

Joseph Campbell

#51. The myth of unending consumption has taken the place of the belief in life everlasting.

Ivan Illich

#52. I bought into the myth that you are not complete without romantic love, without a mate. And it can really distract you from your goals. But sometimes you have to take a leap.

Diane Lane

#53. The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#54. Nothing in modern attitudes is believed more to signify exceptional intelligence than association with large pools of money. Only immediate experience with those so situated denies the myth.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#55. As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.

James Hillman

#56. The myth of Bardot is finished, but Brigitte is me.

Brigitte Bardot

#57. The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

Joseph Campbell

#58. The myth is that women and their families don't have to make trade-offs to have an 'extreme career'; they absolutely do. How you prioritize your life and career is your choice. Once you make a decision, stick to it; don't always second-guess yourself.

Angela Braly

#59. The myth of black women profiting at the expense of black men is the oldest rap around.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#60. As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.

Simone De Beauvoir

#61. I don't know who started the myth that sheep are fluffy and white. They were more the color of an old mop and just as matted with dirt.

Connie Willis

#62. Despite the myth that men are less committed, they are predisposed to desire marriage.

Helen Fisher

#63. I subscribe to the myth that an artist's creativity comes from torment. Once that's fixed, what do you draw on?

David Byrne

#64. In the beginning was the myth.

Hermann Hesse

#65. Contrary to the myth that Mr. Bush cut taxes only for the wealthy, the 2001 tax cut reduced taxes for every income-tax payer in the country.

Ari Fleischer

#66. The myth of self-sufficiency demands optimism without end, downplays life's challenges, and shames us when, inevitably, we fall short.

Ashton Applewhite

#67. I don't believe in the myth of the "self made man". Nobody gets through alone.

Dan Mangan

#68. The golden age of equal rights in Spain was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam. The myth was invented by Jews in nineteenth-century Europe as a reproach to Christians.

Bernard Lewis

#69. The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

Albert Einstein

#70. You need more people to perpetuate a myth because if the people stop the myth is known to all.

Rick Santelli

#71. 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

#72. In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the myth it is a fact about improvements.

C.S. Lewis

#73. Too many church leaders have bought into the myth that to clarify the win means establishing attendance goals and raising a lot of money.

Andy Stanley

#74. We're going to have to debunk the myth that Africa is a heaven for black people
especially black women. We've been the mule of the world there and the mule of the world here.

Alice Walker

#75. But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.

Stanley Crouch

#76. If you're constantly pushing yourself higher, higher, the law of averages - not to mention the myth of Icarus - predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do, I want you to know this, remember this: There is no such thing as failure.

Oprah Winfrey

#77. Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt.

Sarah Zettel

#78. The myth of their total responsibility arose during postwar trials in the Federal Republic of Germany as a way to protect the majority of German killers and isolate the killing from German society as such.

Timothy Snyder

#79. The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke's philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.

Robert Trout

#80. Even when the facts are available, most people seem to prefer the legend, and refuse to believe the truth when it in any way dislodges the myth.

John Mason Brown

#81. (Propaganda) proceeds by psychological manipulations, character modifications, by creation of stereotypes useful when the time comes - The two great routes that this sub-propaganda takes are the conditioned reflex and the myth

Jacques Ellul

#82. We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#83. Moreover, the subjective interpretation which sees the myth as a transpersonal psychic event is, in view of the myth's origins in the collective unconscious, much fairer than an attempt to interpret it objectively,

Erich Neumann

#84. 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

#85. The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.

Barbara Tuchman

#86. But if it not be true, the myth itself requires to be explained, and every principle of philosophy and common sense demand that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary allegorical categories, but in the actual facts of ritual or religious custom to which the myth attaches.

William Robertson Smith

#87. A too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and completely miss the underlying reality of what's going. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the hands of a genius give us a clear picture of the inner import of life itself.

Tom Harpur

#88. The alternative to the myth of pure evil is that most of the harm that people visit on one another comes from motives that are found in every normal person.

Steven Pinker

#89. The thing I came for:
[ ... ]
the thing itself and not the myth

Adrienne Rich

#90. The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." ~ John F. Kennedy

Tim O'Shea

#91. Alongside the mythos of the eternal free soul stands the Myth, the religion of the blood.

Alfred Rosenberg

#92. The myth of objectivity made nonfiction increasingly unread. In feature articles, we could be playful in the opening and clever in the end but in the middle it was back to the boring basics.

Lee Gutkind

#93. The myth of the liberal media empowers conservatives to control debate in the United States to the point where liberals cannot even hope for a fair shake anymore.

Eric Alterman

#94. I remembered the myth about Andromeda and how she had been chained to a rock by her own parents as a sacrifice to a sea monster. Maybe she'd gotten too many F's on her report card or something.

Rick Riordan

#95. When we think of the myth of the settling of the West, this is our creation myth. But because we think of it as mythology, not as real people interacting with other real people, we ignore the cost of human lives and blood.

Philipp Meyer

#96. The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

Joseph Campbell

#97. History shows us that the songs - the myth, the experience and the emotion - live longer the less you explain.

Sondre Lerche

#98. Our susceptibility to myth is a world danger. Because the application of science to human behaviour has come so late the myth is regarded as less dangerous than the bacillus. It is doubtful whether such a belief is justified.

Geoffrey Pyke

#99. Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students.

Lloyd DeMause

#100. The Myth is the Myth of the Blood, which, under the sign of the Swastika, released the World Revolution. It is the Awakening of the Soul of the Race, which, after a period of long slumber, victoriously put an End to Racial Chaos.

Alfred Rosenberg