Mythologies Quotes

“Justice is always ready to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without a second thought”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“The ‘healthy’ sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness—which does not try to palm itself off as ‘natural’ but which, in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates something of its own relative, artificial status as well. …Signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological. It is one of the functions of ideology to ‘naturalize’ social reality, to make it seem as innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into Nature, and the ‘natural’ sign is one of its weapons. Saluting a flag, or agreeing that Western democracy represents the true meaning of the word ‘freedom’, become the most obvious, spontaneous responses in the world. Ideology, in this sense, is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“Cultures produce myths because they satisfy a deep-rooted human need: the need to make sense of life. Myths are appealing because they reduce the complexity of experience, by making things seem simple and absolute; myths define popular realities which are accepted readily, even uncritically.”
― Matthew Screech

“All mythologies become outdated as the concept of goodness keeps evolving. Every ‘good’ of a particular time becomes ‘evil’ as time changes.”
― Awdhesh Singh, Myths are Real, Reality is a Myth

“Today’s religions are nothing but the long-lived mythologies!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“We don’t know if the mythologies are fact or fiction or mix of the two. But as far as people have faith in them, they shape their values. When people lose faith in scriptures and mythologies, they easily fall prey to the fictions of the modern times, which propagate infidelity, pleasure seeking and materialism.”
― Awdhesh Singh, Myths are Real, Reality is a Myth

“In America’s earliest mythologizing of itself, America is the underdog guided to the promised land by a merciful God. Other countries do something similar. In some other national mythology, America might be the Egyptian Pharaoh holding a worthy population captive.

We can’t all be that righteous. And sometimes that’s hard to stomach. It’s hard accepting that your comfort, or privilege, or disinterest might feed into a real and palpable problem for another group of people. And it’s hard, once you’ve recognized this to be the case, to heed the call to change.”
― Tracy K. Smith

“I have fallen in love with the stories of our lives, our everyday mythologies. How will they unfold? What will become of us?”
― D.J. MacLennan, Frozen to Life: A Personal Mortality Experiment

“The ancient sages used divine characters to create mythologies and scriptures to make them more believable. All scriptures are said to be the words of God so that people are convinced about their veracity and believe them.”
― Awdhesh Singh, Myths are Real, Reality is a Myth

“The characters of mythologies are like superman or spider-man who have infinite power and infinite goodness. When people try to imitate God, they fail miserably. You have to be stupid to jump from a hundred storey building like Superman in the hope that you will be able to fly like him.”
― Awdhesh Singh, Myths are Real, Reality is a Myth

“La notoriété est la première forme de la naturalisation.”
― Roland Barthes

“But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic?”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“I'll stand by my usual tactics here and say that it doesn't matter whether this sort of pantheism, or any sort of pantheism, is "true." What matters is the way any given mythology prompts us to interact with the world we're part of—the world each of our actions helps to make and unmake. And frankly, some mythologies prompt us to act better than others.”
― Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race