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Memes Quotes

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Memes Quotes

“What are words worth if you write like Wordsworth? Not as much as a man named Wordsandpicturesworth. That's so long, so I'd just call him Memesworth, and I'd use him to help me sell ducks.”

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Book:Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.
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“Or, to choose another example, we feel that freedom of speech is the last step in the march of victory of freedom. We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally—that is, for himself—which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts. Again, we are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. We neglect the role of the anonymous authorities like public opinion and "common sense," which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different. In other words, we are fascinated by the growth of freedom from powers outside of ourselves and are blinded to the fact of inner restraints, compulsions, and fears, which tend to undermine the meaning of the victories freedom has won against its traditional enemies. We therefore are prone to think that the problem of freedom is exclusively that of gaining still more freedom of the kind we have gained in the course of modern history, and to believe that the defense of freedom against such powers that deny such freedom is all that is necessary. We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigor, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life.”

LibertyCommon SenseConformityFreedom Of SpeechRestrictionAuthoritarianismMemes1969
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“Language is the basis of culture and consciousness, so, once humans had language, they became capable of using culture to override biology (using memes to drive humanity rather than genes; using idea mutations rather than gene mutations) and thus freed humanity from animalism and instinct. The new dawn of consciousness, culture and knowledge had arrived.”

ChildrenPhilosophyConsciousnessUnconsciousAnimalsGenesMemesBicameralism
Book:Children See Dead People: Children's Spooky Powers
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“People used to read books and watch movies. Now people read memes and tweets and watch GIFs. I'm currently writing something about ducks that I hope you'll say is an instant classic six seconds into the experience.”

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Book:Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.
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“Only the extremely strong – those who don’t care what others think – can take an interest in unpopular memes: the truth memes, the Logos memes. Our world has a very simple set up. Emotionally powerful memes are enormously more successful and popular than intellectually powerful memes. The whole of human fate – everything about humanity, the entirety of human history – is bound to that single fact.”

ReasonEmotionsSimplicityLogosMemesMythos
Book:The Intelligence Wars: Logos Versus Mythos
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“[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves — the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers — brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not 158 The Blind Watchmaker clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains — books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer.”

EvolutionMemesCultural EvolutionMemetics
Book:The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
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“Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted. There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths.”

ReligionMemesSnarkUrban LegendsPithRumor Cycles
Book:Maelstrom
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“The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.”

StupidSocial MediaExpertsMassesConspiracy TheoriesMemesThe InternetAnti IntellectualismDunning KrugerConfederacy Of Dunces
Book:Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President
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“A civilization makes progress by leveraging the achievements and observations of past generations. We compress history into words, stories, and symbols that allow living people to learn and benefit from the experiences of the dead. In the space of one childhood, we can learn what it took humanity many centuries to figure out. While animals may have some capacity to instruct their young, humans are unlimited in their capacity to learn from one another. Thanks to stories, books, and our symbol systems, we can learn from people we have never met. We create symbols, or what Korzybski calls abstractions, in order to represent things to one another and our descendants more efficiently. They can be icons, brands, religious symbols, familiar tropes, or anything that compresses information bigger than itself.”

WritingHumanityReadingLanguageHistoryBooksCivilizationSymbolsMemesPresent Shock
Book:Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
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“Even further, one can use a viral model for many things – it doesn't make those things a virus. For example, say that one day a prominent scientist decided to coin “moonemes” and started the “mooneme hypothesis” of cow migration. The hypothesis is all about how cows' migration patterns can be described and modelled as a “virus of the plains”, because cows move from place to place, spread, mutate, and eat all of the grass. No matter how well the model fits to cows, they are not - and will never be - obligate parasites. A view that it's a matter of personal perspective is subjectivism and hardly conducive to scientific inquiry of an objective world. It's simply not in the nature of cows any more than it is in the nature of knowledge.”

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Book:The Leprechaun Delusion
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“If ideas were viruses, then, like any virus, they would mutate rapidly and often arbitrarily, with only the fitter ideas spreading and continuing their lineage. We simply do not see this with any sort of knowledge. The only time knowledge might appear to mutate is when ideas are altered by the individuals holding them, but that does not prove the meme “hypothesis.” In fact, if the meme “hypothesis” were true, then the evolution of ideas would be quite strange indeed. For every time a good idea was received through memetic transmission, there would be mutations of that idea, rapid one's, most of which would be complete nonsense. Sure, the nonsense ideas would “die”, but they would appear at first and remain until they did. One might argue that this is made manifest in discursive thought, but one would be patently, at the base level, incorrect. This is, unfortunately, is one of the logical consequences of the meme “hypothesis” that, as a parasite, all information becomes discursive thought. Schizophrenics are typically the only people to experience discursive thoughts, and most people are not, in fact, schizophrenic.”

SchizophreniaMemesMutationsDiscursive Thought
Book:The Leprechaun Delusion
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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.”

WayMindPhilosophyDreamAgeCultureBrainFashionInformationBattleBehaviorConceptsSpeciesNotionPopulationTunesCollectivesLeapGenesWarfareUnitsRhymeInformation AgeWhy MeMemesGeopoliticalReplication
Author:Kalle Lasn
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“You start by copying other people's paintings or music or whatever. You get all of those skills before you branch out. Really creative people have a fantastic ability to copy things and then combine them in new ways. And whether we're talking about genes or memes, recombination is the real heart of creativity.”

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Author:Susan Blackmore
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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.”

HumansMayLittlesCultureGivenNumbersAtheismTheoryReaderLimitsOriginalsIntentionPositive AtheismCriticizeModestJustifiedPositivelyMemes
Book:A Devil's Chaplain
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“Most people tell themselves these excuses - I've always been this way, this is my nature, I can't help it - that are just memes. They're belief systems that keep you from being able to become all that you are intended to become. They're impediments to reaching God-realization, or Tao-centeredness. People lose track of their purpose, because they are so back there - living in their past. Byron Katie speaks about this: Who would you be without your story? Carlos Castaneda used to say if you don't have a story, you don't have to live up to it. So get rid of your story.”

PeopleIfsWayI CanHelpingStoriesAblePastUsedPurposeBeliefSpeakLosesTrackExcuseRealizationReachingTaoBelief SystemsImpedimentsKatieMemesCenterednessByron
Author:Wayne Dyer
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“I think the most common meme is that it's too difficult to change. It's too risky to change. My nature doesn't allow me to change. When you're thinking that, you're not understanding what your nature is. All of us come from this place of well-being, love, and kindness. But we've taken on these other things, and we think that they're our nature. Our nature really is to be like God.”

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Author:Wayne Dyer
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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!”

BookHandsHumanitySpiritualityFightingReligiousPrayerHolyPleaseCommitmentTongueThanksCodeVoidReverenceSincerelyVowRefrainMenaceSecond HandMemesHoly BooksNullProselytizingThanks YouSpeaking In Tongues
Author:Greg Erwin
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“We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

IfsWorldWayWholeEarthTurnsBirthPureBuiltMachinesCreatorSelfishTyrannyRebelGenesAltruismWorld HistoryNurturingIndoctrinationCultivatingDisinterestedMemesSelfish Gene
Author:Richard Dawkins
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