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Mythologies Quotes

Browse 12 quotes about Mythologies.

Mythologies Quotes

“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.”

AmericaNationsInequalityFoundingEquityMythologies
Author:Tracy K. Smith
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“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.”

NatureHistoryIdeologySemioticsBarthesMythologiesStructuralism
Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction
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“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.”

MythologiesHuman Impact
Book:Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race
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