John Fiske Quotes & Sayings

Is it honest for me to go and sit there on communion day and drink the wine and eat the bread while feeling it all to be mummery? — John Fiske

Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed. — John Fiske

The way we make sense of a realistic text is through the same broad ideological frame as the way we make sense of our social experience or rather, the way we are made sense of by the discourses of our culture. — John Fiske

One and all, the orthodox creeds are crumbling into ruins everywhere. — John Fiske

while we remain immersed in the study of personal incidents and details, as what such a statesman said or how many men were killed in such a battle, we may quite fail to understand what it was all about, and we shall be sure often to misjudge men's characters and estimate wrongly the importance of many events. For this reason we cannot clearly see the meaning of the history of our own times. — John Fiske

We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led to the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ. — John Fiske

We now witness the constructive work on a foundation that will endure through the ages. That foundation is the god of science - revealed to us in terms that will harmonize with our intelligence. — John Fiske

The persecuting spirit has its origin ... in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct. — John Fiske

My design was not so much to contribute new facts as to shape the narrative in such a way as to emphasize relations of cause and effect that are often buried in the mass of details. — John Fiske