Meme Memes Quotes & Sayings

ART: None. The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn't a mirror big enough - see point one. — Douglas Adams

Our task is to create memes ... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate. — Terence McKenna

Memes can be visual. Our image of George Washington is a meme. We don't actually have any idea what George Washington looked like. There are so many different portraits of him, and they're all different. But we have an image in our head, and that image is propagated from one place to another, from one person to another. — James Gleick

Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection. — Richard Dawkins

It doesn't have to be perfect to be better than a hotbed of rape threats and Nazi memes. — Adam Kotsko

Any woman who still thinks marriage is a fifty-fifty proposition is only proving that she doesn't understand either men or percentages. — Florynce Kennedy

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. — Kalle Lasn

The Spirit always communicates that He's for you when He convicts you of your sin. — R.C. Sproul

We reveal something of our nature when we sing, something that can be disguised in our speaking voice. — Lavinia Greenlaw

learned only later what I'd seen: the manufacture of a term that would be used to increase traffic on the Word Exchange. For some users of the Meme - those whose devices had been infected with a new virus that had recently started circulating - terms like this one would replace "obscure" words - "cynical," "morbid," "integrity" - that those of us who'd grown dependent on our Memes no longer fully trusted to our memories. But I knew nothing then about these neologisms, or the virus, or why this "word" had just been fabricated. — Alena Graedon

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. — Richard Dawkins

It's human nature to work on ourselves, to get better in mind, body, and spirit, so there's nothing wrong with trying to live life to your fullest potential. — Josh McDermitt

[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 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. — Richard Dawkins

As for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene. — James Gleick

If you go, then I'll miss you.. terribly — Julia Hoban

Pardon of sin must ever be an act of pure mercy, and therefore to that attribute the awakened sinner flies. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

This may seem labouring the obvious, but in Japan one meets intelligent people who claim that 'logic' is something invented in the West to allow Westerners to win discussions. Indeed, the belief is widespread that the Japanese can as happily do without logic now as they supposedly have for centuries past. — Karel Van Wolferen

She acts all scary, but she's been unusually nice to us, so... I know! She's the Tsundere-type zombie, amiright?! — Sakazaki Freddie

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you. — Terence McKenna

Professor Dawkins himself stated that "Religion is about turning untested belief, into unshakable truth through the power of institutions, and the passage of time." This is exactly what is happening with his meme conjecture. He is taking an untestable idea, by scientific standards, and through media and literature and a popular cult following, creating it into a social norm of truth where others believe his idea and propagate it as an unshakeable truth. This also is occurring faster because of computer technology in time. But nonetheless, it is an occurrence within a passage of time. — Idav Kelly

Cultural change occurs whenever a new meme is introduced and catches on. It might be romanticism or double-entry book-keeping, chaos theory or Pokemon. So where in the world do new memes come from? sometimes they spring full-blown from the brains of artists or scientists, advertising copywriters or teenagers. often a process of mutation is involved in the creation of a new meme, in much the same way that mutations in natural environment can lead to useful new genetic traits. — Michael Pollan

Meme A term introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, which are spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Examples of memes in his pioneering essay include cultural artifacts such as melodies, catchphrases, and clothing fashions, as well as abstract beliefs. Like genes, memes are defined as replicators that undergo variation, competition, selection, and retention. At any given moment, many memes are competing for the attention of hosts; however, only memes suited to their sociocultural environment spread successfully, while others become extinct. — Limor Shifman

If we take memetics seriously then the 'me' that could do the choosing is itself a memetic construct: a fluid and ever-changing group of memes installed in a complicated meme machine. — Susan Blackmore

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version. — Richard Dawkins

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. — Peter Watts

I never saw a meme; I never saw the sea. — Emily Dickinson

Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic. — Susan Blackmore

I would give as much as she desired and take as much as she allowed — Robin Alexander