Power Of Myth Quotes & Sayings

We often imagine that the court serves as a sort of neutral umpire controlling the warring political branches. But this is mostly myth. The justices of the Supreme Court are themselves actors in the struggle for power, and when they intervene, they think carefully about how their decisions will affect the court's own legitimacy and authority. — Noah Feldman

Only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power. — Peter S. Beagle

It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort. — Charlie Pierce

But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster. — Gregory Bateson

The Legend of the Dragon Fairytales cleanse and sanitise what were once true stories. In fairytales, knights are chivalrous, clean-shaven and wear shining armour - when in truth they were swarthy, filthy rapists and thugs. Castles are bright and gay when in truth they were grim fortresses. If dragons were real, then in all likelihood they were not graceful, high-chested, noble creatures; rather they would have been dirty, ugly, reptilian and mean. From: The Power of Myth by Craig Ferguson (Momentum, Sydney, 2013) — Matthew Reilly

The myth of progress fails because it doesn't in fact work; because it would never solve evil retrospectively; and because it underestimates the nature and power of evil itself and thus fails to see the vital importance of the cross, God's no to evil, which then opens the door to his yes to creation. — N. T. Wright

To me there is nothing more sacred than love and laughter, and there is nothing more prayerful than playfulness. When you are in love, all fears disappear, and when you become love yourself, even death becomes irrelevant. Jesus is not very far away from the truth when he says, "God is love." Certainly God is power, the greatest power. I want to improve upon Jesus: I don't say God is love, I say love is God. To me God is only a symbol and love is a reality. God is only a myth - love is the experience of millions of people. God is only a word, but love can become a dance in your heart. — Rajneesh

You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it. — Jerry Garcia

Freewill.
Some have called it the greatest gift bestowed on humanity. It is our ability to control what happens to us and exactly how it happens. We are the masters of our fate and no one can foist their will on us unless we allow it.
Others say freewill is a crap myth. We have a preordained destiny and no matter what we do or how hard we fight it, life will happen to us exactly as it's meant to happen. We are only pawns to a higher power that our meager human brains can't even begin to understand or comprehend. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Why are so many of us enspelled by myths and folk stories in this modern age? Why do we continue to tell the same old tales, over and over again? I think it's because these stories are not just fantasy. They're about real life. We've all encountered wicked wolves, found fairy godmothers, and faced trial by fire. We've all set off into unknown woods at one point in life or another. We've all had to learn to tell friend from foe and to be kind to crones by the side of the road ... — Terri Windling

The homeland, the myth of the homeland, becomes a fundamental value for those who have nothing else( ... )In a world where power, like wealth, falls to the few, where no merit guarantees a reward and justice becomes a commodity like anything else, the human heart needs fortification. It needs something permanent, something available to everyone, irrespective of their merits, of the political climate, of prestige, authority, or affluence. It may be that for the disinherited, this final place is their place of birth. A law that says we are all born equal is as beautiful as it is impossible to enact. But the fact that we are all born in a particular place is hard to question. For many of us, if not the majority, this is the only incontrovertible foundation of our fate. — Andrzej Stasiuk

The lie was that we believed that we believed all people were created equal! What made us think we were this great free society? Those at the top believed it then, and we at the top believe it two hundred years later. That's the power of myth. — Richard Rohr

The notion that Culloden destroyed the Highland clans is a myth; the traditional ways had been dying for years. Long before, without realizing it, the chieftains and the Crown had conspired to obliterate the old system of loyalties and mutual dependence in order to consolidate their own power. The battle was the clans' last stand, just as the myth states. The glory was gone. — Arthur Herman

His copy was full of lofty echoes: Greek Tragedy; Damocle's sword; manna from heaven; the myth of Sisyphus; the last of the Mohicans; hydra-headed and Circe-voiced; experiments with truth; discovery of India; biblical resonance; the lessons of Vedanta; the centre does not hold; the road not taken; the mimic men; for whom the bell tolls; a hundred visions and revisions; the power and the glory; the heart of the matter; the heart of darkness; the agony and the ecstasy; sands of time; riddle of the Sphinx; test of tantalus; murmurs of mortality; Falstaffian figure; Dickensian darkness; ... — Tarun J. Tejpal

The Myth of Male Power dealt much more with the political issues, the legal issues, sexual harassment, date rape, women who kill, and those issues were very much more interfaced with the agendas of feminism. — Warren Farrell

We have never sought power. We have sought to disperse power, to set men and women free. That really means: to help them to discover that they are free. Everybody's free. The slave is free. The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences. 'Fear is failure.' 'The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.' Thou hast no right but to do thy will.' The goose can break the bottle at any second. Socrates took the hemlock to prove it. Jesus went to the cross to prove it. It's in all history, all myth, all poetry. It's right out in the open all the time. — Robert Anton Wilson

Christmas is a story that has both religious and pagan origins, and to ignore its power is to ignore the power of myth - those symbols and legends that help us to ground our lives. — Jay Parini

He won the Civil War for the North, and re-established the Union which today has grown into the vastest consolidated power since the fall of Rome. He fought some of the greatest campaigns in history; was never defeated, and after the war was twice chosen by his countrymen as their President. If there is not food for myth here, where shall we seek it? His story is as amazing as Napoleon's, and as startling as Lenin's; yet enigma he lived and enigma he died, and though occasion was propitious and circumstances were favorable, enigma he remains. — J. F. C. Fuller

The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, "The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet."
Joseph Campbell, 1991, The Power of Myth, pp.68-69 — Joseph Campbell

There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today's power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women. — Naomi Wolf

The past is the occupational realm of historians - their daily work - and scholars have debated what their stance toward these social issues should be. As citizens and professionals, historians may naturally form a desire, as Carl Becker puts it, "to do work in the world." That is, they might aspire to write history that is not only of scholarly value but also has a salutary impact in society. Becker defines the appropriate impact and the historian's proper role as "correcting and rationalizing for common use Mr. Everyman's mythological adaption of what actually happened."

That process is never simple, however, when the subject involves divisions so deep that they led to civil wars. One issue that inevitably leads to controversy is the extent to which history involves moral judgment. Another is the power of myths, exerting their influence on society and acting in opposition to the findings of historical research [190 - 91]. — Paul D. Escott

I'm familiar with the myth, I'm merely surprised that a female
would be familiar with the classics."
"You must have a very limited experience with my sex," Alexandra
said, surprised. "My grandfather said most women are every bit as
intelligent as men."
She saw his eyes take on the sudden gleam of suppressed laughter
and assumed, mistakenly, that he was amused by her assessment of
female intelligence rather than her remark about his inexperience
with women. — Judith McNaught

The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections - not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in ... and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences ... — Alan Lee

A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth. In approaching literature, it has aimed at restoring to the word its magical qualities. And at giving back to language the elemental power it once had within society. This determinism lies at the heart of the surrealist attitude and distinguishes it radically from the modernism which took shape contemporaneously with it. — Michael Richardson

It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict ... There is nothing inevitable about it. It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do with sex - everything to do with power. It is done to torture and humiliate innocent people and often very young children. — Angelina Jolie

I have yet to encounter that common myth of weak men, an insurmountable barrier. — James Lane Allen

Every trauma provides an opportunity for authentic transformation. Trauma amplifies and evokes the expansion and contraction of psyche, body, and soul. It is how we respond to a traumatic event that determines whether trauma will be a cruel and punishing Medusa turning us into stone, or whether it will be a spiritual teacher taking us along vast and uncharted pathways. In the Greek myth, blood from Medusa's slain body was taken in two vials; one vial had the power to kill, while the other had the power to resurrect. If we let it, trauma has the power to rob our lives of vitality and destroy it. However, we can also use it for powerful self-renewal and transformation. Trauma, resolved, is a blessing from a greater power. — Ann Frederick

And below, the notebook filled with fine cursive script, laying out in strict order conclusion and delusion, mingling myth and science, drawing from learned men and legends, all of it based on the power of dreams. To any casual observer, it could be either a muddle of half-thought-out nonsense or, at best, the outline for a clever-silly novel. Only to me did it have the look of a careful, deliberate plan. In — Diana Gabaldon

John Calvin's theology emphasizes the sanctity of conscience, the sanctity of companionate marriage, and the obligation of those in power to attend to the well-being of the people in general, especially the poor. Interestingly, for the interpretation of Hamlet, for example, he forbids even the thought of revenge. This is not the Calvin of myth, but when the Elizabethans read him there was no such myth, nor would there be now, if he were read. — Marilynne Robinson

The All is everywhere, and anywhere may become the seat of power. Any blade of grass may assume, in myth, the figure of the savior and conduct the questing wanderer into the sanctum sanctorum of his own heart. — Joseph Campbell

And he encourages Lewis to take the same chance he is taking, to count on the "perchance." And Lewis did. For the rest of his life he was a champion of the knowledge-giving power of myth, fantasy, Faery. — Alan Jacobs

The myth of this world is that the way to transformation is through power, but God choose to enter the world in a weak manner, gentle and tender through the heartbeat of a child. — Rick Dees

The typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him - the helpless, innocent victim, that is - into let's say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something. — Neal Stephenson

In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity. — Anne Carson

There is no one story that will replace the American dream, but stories
like this one - and there are thousands - can inform the myth or myths
we create for building and preserving the next culture. In order to do so,
however, we must recognize that we cannot live without myth, for it is an
essential part of our humanity. If we attempt to do so - given the fact that
something in us needs myth - we
will only create more myths that echo
the American dream - with themes of heroism, greed, entitlement, narcissism,
exploitation, exceptionalism, and myriad abuses of power. How we prepare for and navigate collapse will provide the raw materials for the myths we make and will live by in a postindustrial world. — Carolyn Baker

This is the time of myths, Orphan. They are the cables that run under the floors and power the world, the conduits of unseen currents, the steam that powers the great engines of the earth. — Lavie Tidhar

Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that informs the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life. — Sam Keen

At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it. — C.S. Lewis

We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Although every organized religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity-an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women. — Robin Morgan

On the Ridgeway path, aged nine or ten, was where for the first time I realized the power a person might feel by aligning themselves to deep history. Only much later did I understand these intimations of history had their own, darker, history. The chalk country-cult rested on a presumption of organic connections to a landscape, a sense of belonging sanctified through an appeal to your own imagined lineage. That chalk downloads held their national, as well as natural, histories. And it was much later, too, that I realized that these myths hurt. That they work to wipe away other cultures, other histories, other ways of loving, working and being in a landscape. How they tiptoe towards darkness. — Helen Macdonald

I don't believe in the god of the Christians who gave his son in order to save mankind. That's a myth. But why should it have arisen if it didn't express some deep-seated intuition in men? I don't know what I believe, because it's instinctive, and how can you describe instinct with words? I have an instinct that the power that rules us, human beings, animals and things, is a dark and cruel power and that everything has to be paid for, a power that demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and that though we may writhe and squirm we have to submit, for the power is ourselves. — W. Somerset Maugham

The poet who speaks out of the deepest instincts of man will be heard. The poet who creates a myth beyond the power of man to realize is gagged at the peril of the group that binds him. He is the true revolutionary: he builds a new world. — Babette Deutsch

Find your myth. As Joseph Campbell observed, "Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.' A myth we requicken in our minds and our lives brings creative juice, for every living myth "bears within it, undamaged, the seed power of its source. — Robert Moss

Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections. — Frank Herbert

[The myth of the absolutizing of ignorance] implies the existence of someone who decrees the ignorance of someone else. The one who is doing the decreeing defines himself and the class to which he belongs as those who know or were born to know; he thereby defines others as alien entities. The words of his own class come to be the "true" words, which he imposes or attempts to impose on the others: the oppressed, whose words have been stolen from them. Those who steal the words of others develop a deep doubt in the abilities of the others and consider them incompetent. Each time they say their word without hearing the word of those whom they have forbidden to speak, they grow more accustomed to power and acquire a taste for guiding, ordering, and commanding. They can no longer live without having someone to give orders to. Under these circumstances, dialogue is impossible. — Paulo Freire

Thousands of years before Christianity, secret cults arose which worshipped the sacred mushroom - the Amanita Muscaria - which, for various reasons (including its shape and power as a drug) came to be regarded as a symbol of God on earth.
When the secrets of the cult had to be written down, it was done in the form of codes hidden in folk tales.
This is the basic origin of the stories in the New Testament. They are a literary device to spread the rites and rules of mushroom worship to the faithful. — John Marco Allegro

Were it part of our everyday education and comment that the corporation is an instrument for the exercise of power, that it belongs to the process by which we are governed, there would then be debate on how that power is used and how it might be made subordinate to the public will and need. This debate is avoided by propagating the myth that the power does not exist. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Cursed, he once cried in a fit of rage. His temper has always been as restless and unpredictable as the sea itself. But his words had power behind them and I felt the effects instantly. Too late to take it back. — Jennifer Silverwood

The act of abortion positions women at their most powerful, and that is why it is so strongly opposed by many in society. Historically viewed as and conditioned to be passive, dependent creatures, victims of biological circumstance, women often find it difficult to embrace this power over life and death. They fall prey to the assumption, the myth, that they cannot be trusted with it. — Merle Hoffman

Most promising of all is new work by a team of researchers at Stanford, led by Mark Jacobson (who coauthored the 2009 global plan). In March 2013, they published a study in Energy Policy showing that New York state could meet all of its power needs with renewables by 2030. Jacobson and his colleagues are developing similar plans for every U.S. state, and have already published numbers for the country as a whole. "It's absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil - we think it's a myth," he told The New York Times.22 — Naomi Klein

The Rape of Europa. Both the myth and the picture only prove the power of beauty to turn anyone into a beast. — Lara Biyuts

I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love. — Larry McMurtry

Yes, authority, coercion, and dependence rest on the mass, but never freedom or the free unfoldment of the individual, never the birth of a free society. The Socialist demagogues know that as well as I, but they maintain the myth of the virtues of the majority, because their very scheme of life means the perpetuation of power. — Emma Goldman

Belief in the liberating power of knowledge has become the ruling illusion of modern humankind. Most want to believe that some kind of explanation or understanding will deliver them from their conflicts. Yet being divided from yourself goes with being self-aware. This is the truth in the Genesis myth: the Fall is not an event at the beginning of history but the intrinsic condition of self-conscious beings. — John Gray

The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Now, eternity is beyond all categories of thought. This is an important point in all of the great Oriental religions. We want to think about God. God is a thought. God is a name. God is an idea. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. As Kant said, the think in itself is no things. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent ... That's why it's absurd to speak of God as of either this sex or that sex. The divine power is antecedent to sexual separation. — Joseph Campbell

The final greatness of the presidency lies in the truth that it is not just an office of incredible power but a breeding ground of indestructible myth. — Clinton Rossiter

Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe as long as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil. — Theodor W. Adorno

I don't know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth. Politics don't appeal to me. I don't like people who don't care about the truth. — Boris Pasternak

Recognizing that family self-sufficiency is a false myth, we also need to acknowledge that all today's families need help in raising children. The problem is not so much to reeducate parents but to make available the help they need and to give them enough power so that they can be effective advocates with and coordinators of the other forces that are bringing up their children. — Kenneth Keniston

Another myth of necessity is that killing is an economic imperative. While an economic motive has driven many violent ideologies
the economy of the New World was largely buttressed by slavery, and the plundering of gold and other assests as well as the unpaid labor of Nazi victims financed the German war machine
that doesn't mean the economy would collapse were the killing to cease. It is far more likely that the economic status quo would break down; the carnistic-corporate power structure, rather than the citizenry, would suffer were carnism abolished. — Melanie Joy

People who succeed do not expect every company to reward fairly; they screen for companies that will recognize their contribution," wrote Warren Farrell, Ph.D. in The Myth of Male Power.2 — Suzanne Venker

Here is one reason I think we always need new tarot decks being created. I think of tarot decks as similar to myths and so I think this quote applies: "Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them." Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth — Barbara Moore

Naomi Wolf dares to explode the myth of 'victim feminism' and pleads for allowing women to be as full of good and bad desires as men, as avid for sexual fulfilment and power as men, but held back by the twin myths of good-girlism and sentimental sisterhood. Though she is perhaps too sanguine about women quickly overcoming their fear of power, Wolf fills me with hope because I see her analysis as having shattered the false categories that imprisoned my generation. Women do not have to agree about everything to join in alliance with each other to promote female power. Women do not have to cast out their inner bad girl to assert their right to power. Women do not have to cast out their sexuality to be 'good sisters'. — Erica Jong

When you have a World Champion in your smartphone, the myth of the superior brainpower of human chess champions has lost its power. — Hans Ree

The idea of race as an indelible attribute "is a new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white." These people are a "modern invention" whose whiteness "has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white - Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish - and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Equality is a lie," Bane told her. "A myth to appease the masses. Simply look around and you will see the lie for what it is! There are those with power, those with the strength and will to lead. And there are those meant to follow - those incapable of anything but servitude and a meager, worthless existence. "Equality is a perversion of the natural order! — Drew Karpyshyn

Myth: Feeding the banking sector gobs of welfare cash will bring about a recovery. Fact: Our leaders are only dedicated to preserving power — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur'
people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not. — Michael Moorcock

So one of my core themes in The Myth of Male Power - that history's controlling force was not patriarchy, but survival - is still ignored. Instead, the leading universities' women's studies and "gender studies" courses still emanate from the Marxist and Civil Rights model of oppressor vs. oppressed. We'll see in this book exactly why the dichotomy of oppressor/oppressed is both inaccurate and, more important, undermines love and women's empowerment. In virtually every leading university this leads to a demonizing of men and masculinity that distorts the very essence of traditional masculinity - being socialized to be a hero by being willing to sacrifice oneself in war or in work. The possibility that being socialized to be disposable is not genuine power is, to this day, either considered radical, heretical, or, most frequently, not considered. — Warren Farrell

If a being from another world were to ask you, "How can I learn what it's like to be human?" a good answer would be, "Study mythology. — Joseph Campbell

Don't touch any of my weapons without my permission."
"Well, there goes my plan for selling them all on eBay," Clary muttered.
"Selling them on what?"
Clary smiled blandly at him. "A mythical place of great magical power. — Cassandra Clare

Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn back on truth as squarely as they can. Politics mean nothing to me. I don't like people who are indifferent to the truth. — Boris Pasternak

To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic an event was unmentioned and unnoticed not only in the rich historical literature of medieval Islam, but even in the literatures of the Coptic and other Christian churches, of the Byzantines, of the Jews, or anyone else who might have thought the destruction of a great library worthy of comment. That the story still survives, and is repeated, despite all these objections, is testimony to the enduring power of a myth. — Bernard Lewis

The motive for criticizing myth, that is, its objectifying representations, is present in myth itself, insofar as its real intention to talk about a transcendent power to which both we and the world are subject is hampered and obscured by the objectifying character of its assertions. — Rudolf Bultmann

There was the old myth of divine intervention. You blasphemed, and a lightning bolt struck you. That was a little steep too. If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power. — Norman Mailer

Can I blame them? they're sick with fear. We've grown too entrenched here, too entwined. Too immersed in the beating heart of this city, this country, this region, We've grown heavy and fat on our our wealth, collective power. We've become addicted to our influence, our mystique. And it's all a myth. An illusion. A crystal tower, standing on sand. — Stephen Lloyd Jones

Christians believe, as is reported in the New Testament scriptures, that Jesus of Nazareth healed 10 men with leprosy. It sounds like an astounding feat, but compare that to Jacinto Convit who saved thousands of lives when he developed the vaccine that protects us from it. In 1988, Convit was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his anti-leprosy vaccine. So, while the promise of Jesus' healing power is a centerpiece of the Christian myth, the demigod's results leave something to be desired when compared to the rigor of man's scientific inquiry. — David G. McAfee

Because let's talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I'm not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. — Lionel Shriver

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already. — Peggy McIntosh

But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.
No, said Tolkien, they are not.
... just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.
You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand. — Humphrey Carpenter

Even perfection is a myth. There is no evidence of a perfect world, a perfect man or a perfect family anywhere on earth. Perfection, be it Rama Rajya or Camelot, exists only in mythology. Yet everyone craves for it. This craving inspires art, establishes empires, sparks revolutions and motivates leaders. Such is the power of myth. — Devdutt Pattanaik

As for the men in power,
they are so anxious to establish
the myth of infallibility that they
do their utmost to ignore truth. — Boris Pasternak

This myth he'd made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs - what had it come to at last? When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else. — Frank Herbert

Above all, don't overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian "prime movers" who claim to be independent of everybody around them. In this respect Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt's Gulch. There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd's worship - or jeering - for the truth. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom. — Anonymous

This is the power of myth: that we can experience invisible spiritual realities and truths greater than visible, material things in story form. — John Granger

With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice - the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind. — Ursula K. Le Guin