Cultural Myth Quotes

The reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies. Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth it exports is of a racial melting-pot, everyone solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.

According to the Mayans, the world is supposed to end in the year 2012. Are you buying that? When's the last time you even ran into a Mayan?

A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life.

I did grow up in a military family but lacked the perspective to grasp the cognitive dissonance carried by most people who serve in the armed forces or the circumstances that push lots of folks into the military. I don't blame G.I. Joe or Rambo for that atmosphere, but they certainly reflected the final stage of a two generation cultural myth.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

Myth is what we call other people's religion.

A lot of London's image never was. There never was a Dickensian London, or a Shakespearean London, or a swinging London.

There are two ways to look at the Alamo—through the eyes of history and through the eyes of myth, and I found that myth wins out pretty much every time.

They live in perpetual fear of the time they call "The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief

I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell's notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we're close to that.

Within a culture possessed by the myth of feminine evil, the naming, describing, and theorizing about good and evil has constituted a maze/haze of deception. The journey of women becoming is breaking through this maze - springing into free space, which is an a-mazing process.

In Hollywood Westerns even in the Thirties and Forties, history was mythologized to accommodate some kind of moral code. And what really affects me deeply is when you see it taken to the extent where Native Americans become mythical people.

The wrong question to ask of a myth is whether it is true or false. The right question is whether it is living or dead, whether it still speaks to our condition.

Darwinism has become our culture's official creation myth, protected by a priesthood as dogmatic as any religious curia.

History is delusional. Not just an illusion, it's a delusion. America is this giant country, so it has these big delusions, and history is where delusions play out.

It is said, in Imardin, that the wind has a soul, and that it wails through the narrow streets because it is grieved by what it finds there.

... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

There was never a golden era of American radio as far as I can tell.

There's a natural tendency to sanitize and polish any historical icon whether it be George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Martin Luther King saying, "I have a dream."

I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern.

History is like Santa Claus: a language construction. We have some registers about the existence of Santa and history - the presents under the tree, the archives - but none have really seen them.

There's a longstanding myth about the United States that is still very prevalent in Europe [despite recent developments]. Historically the "America" of this myth is an incredible human adventure and an experiment in political democracy. But at the same time, or so we're told, it's the land of extremes where the worst can happen.

The Matrix itself is not some external evil, but rather an outcome of our own error, our karmic payoff of past actions. Not merely illusion, it is an allusion to a founding myth of our culture.

When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it.

I wrote a novel called 'Blonde,' which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.