Joseph Campbell Quotes

Epistemology has always been affected by technologies like the telescope and the microscope, things that have created a radical shift in how we sense physical reality.

People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.

It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.

If we do not have more scientific graduates from the university we will lose contact with modernity.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilization. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.

Scientists are not these guys in lab coats deep in the inner bowels of universities and hospitals with their Bunsen burners. They're the people molding the culture that we live in, the future of our culture, and the technology we rely on every day. These are the rock stars of our time right now.

We are now able to put our minds in other places in the universe with the use of telescopes. That is very exciting.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilliser.

It can be frustrating to see how society has taken the sacred out of everything.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.

The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man, unable to understand the phenomena of nature, and harassed by them, saw in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none left over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment.

In the years since man unlocked the power stored up within the atom, the world has made progress, halting, but effective, toward bringing that power under human control. The challenge may be our salvation. As we begin to master the destructive potentialities of modern science, we move toward a new era in which science can fulfill its creative promise and help bring into existence the happiest society the world has ever known.

The idea that we are the gods now, and we are doing things that our ancestors think are god-like is not a rhetorical question. You know what I mean? We really are as gods.

The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.

The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.

God's a busy guy. He don't have time to micromanage. What are the chances he heard that? It's early in the morning. He's probably having breakfast with Mrs. God.

I hope we'll be able to see that in our lifetime: the end of the camera! When I'm in Paris, I'll buy a big bottle of champagne and I'll save it for that day, for the day when they'll be no more camera.

The world is not bound to get better as a result of new discoveries in science and technology, nor is it bound to get worse, there will simply be new opportunities for making it better or worse.

A nation has a fixed quantity of invention, and it will make itself felt.