Quotes & Sayings About Zeitgeist

Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The caterpillar's immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar's immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing butterfly.

The caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done. There is no point in being angry with it and there is no need to worry about defeating it. The task is to focus on building the butterfly, the success of which depends on powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of society and alliances built among those engaged in them. — Elisabet Sahtouris

The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism. — Frank Herbert

A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having "such a representative life". And it's true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people. — Christopher Bram

Steve Jobs did not start started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed. He believed in making people comfortable with these machines, which is why he spent so much time thinking about how to design them a certain way, how to make them so user-friendly and interactive, and why he spent so much time studying the Zeitgeist. — Alex Gibney

Star Wars is one of a handful of films that changed the zeitgeist forever. — William Friedkin

One of the criteria by which we measure the worth of public figures is whether or not their brand of bull is in step with the current Zeitgeist. — John MacLachlan Gray

It really makes little difference in the long run whether The Book of the Law was dictated to [Crowley] by preterhuman intelligence named Aiwass or whether it stemmed from the creative deeps of Aleister Crowley. The book was written. And he became the mouthpiece for the Zeitgeist, accurately expressing the intrinsic nature of our time as no one else has done to date. — Israel Regardie

Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist. — Max Brooks

If Broadway no longer seems behind the times or ahead of the times, it may be because there are no 'times' anymore, no prevailing Zeitgeist that sets the fashion, pace, and prevailing look. — James Wolcott

Everything we say signifies; everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time. — Meryl Streep

I'm absolutely obsessed with The Jesus And Mary Chain and Patti Smith, but I'm a massive pop fan. I love pop culture, It's a total reflection of the zeitgeist. — Siobhan Fahey

The average person might articulate them differently, but we all think about interpersonal relationships in one way or another. Writers just express that in different ways and capture it in different ways. To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you. — Jennifer Egan

A man's shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Science fiction and fantasy feels like it's been ascending in the zeitgeist. — John Joseph Adams

I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea. — William Gibson

Women's issues have always been a part of my life. My goal is to bring the word 'feminism' back into the zeitgeist and reframe it. — Annie Lennox

I consider it poor historical form to make fun of ancestral mistakes without respecting the eros that was linked to them. We are no less in bondage to the Zeitgeist; folly is handed down, we merely don a new cap. — Ernst Junger

I know as far as things like the Thunderbirds, there's a New Zealand connection. X-Files, my connection there ... I mean, it could be zeitgeist. I mean, I'm into the paranormal. I have a podcast about cryptozoology. So it's out there that I'm into weird stuff. — Rhys Darby

Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back. — G.K. Chesterton

I think one of my favorite pieces I've ever done on the show which was about Hezbollah Israel conflict in 2006 and it was very pointed. It was a beautifully crafted piece of satire and it's a weird thing to say but it had a joke in there about 9/11 and I remember the audience sort of laughing but also kind of not knowing how to respond to that joke and it was just so - and I remember the tension after we did this joke on the air and there was this palpable gasp in the audience, but they were also laughing. And I thought oh, wow, that is something that is not being said in the Zeitgeist. — Aasif Mandvi

I'm a very big believer that the reason you've seen this huge surge in superheroes both on television and in film is ... part of it of course is zeitgeist. There's no denying that there's a huge appetite on the part of the audience in both TV and film for these kind of adventures. — Marc Guggenheim

In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist. — Richard M. Weaver

I think we're at a really rich and fertile time in the zeitgeist about paying attention to diversity of all kinds - racial diversity, gender diversity, making room for a continuum that is more inclusive. — Sara Bareilles

It's pretty crazy. I was thinking about that today, how 'True Blood' has penetrated so much of the cultural zeitgeist. It's truly amazing; it's incredible! The cover of 'Rolling Stone' is major. What's next, the cover of 'Vanity Fair?' When I'm in a 'New Yorker' cartoon, then I will feel like I have made it. — Denis O'Hare

Potential boyfriends could not smoke Merit cigarettes, own or wear a pair of cowboy boots, or eat anything labeled either lite or heart smart. Speech was important, and disqualifying phrases included "I can't find my nipple ring" and "This one here was my first tattoo." All street names had to be said in full, meaning no "Fifty-ninth and Lex," and definitely no "Mad Ave." They couldn't drink more than I did, couldn't write poetry in notebooks and read it out loud to an audience of strangers, and couldn't use the words flick, freebie, cyberspace, progressive, or zeitgeist ... Age, race, weight were unimportant. In terms of mutual interests, I figured we could spend the rest of our lives discussing how much we hated the aforementioned characteristics. — David Sedaris

I tried documentaries.It wasn't the time for me. I was going to try to do the same thing, I did make a valiant attempt but it did not work - to do the same thing with documentaries that we had done with the book club [in 2011]. The zeitgeist wasn't ready. It just wasn't ready. — Oprah Winfrey

As he demonstrated with 'Juno' and 'Up in the Air,' Reitman has an uncanny knack among contemporary directors for tapping into the zeitgeist in dramatically satisfying ways. — Lou Lumenick

If you don't appeal to kids, to the zeitgeist, you get thrown on the scrapheap. — Ariel Pink

Big D. November '63. He was there that Big Weekend. He caught the Big Moment and took this Big Ride.
He was a sergeant on Vegas PD. He was married. He had a chemistry degree. His father was a big Mormon fat cat. Wayne Senior was jungled up all over the nut Right. He did Klan ops for Mr. Hoover and Dwight Holly. He pushed high-line hate tracts. He rode the far-Right zeitgeist and stayed in the know. He knew about the JFK hit. It was multi-faction: Cuban exiles, rogue CIA, mob. Senior bought Junior a ticket to ride.
Extradition job with one caveat: kill the extraditee. — James Ellroy

There are so many other people involved in the making of a play or a television series or whatever ... even if you're a novelist there's so much in just the marketing of a book, or even the time ... the zeitgeist, the moment at which it comes out. There's a lot you can't control. — Peter Morgan

Sometimes we make assumptions about influence when similarities between two writers' work are so strong, but they're still just assumptions. Some things are sort of zeitgeist-y. There's a collective consciousness and we're all drawing from it. — Ron Currie Jr.

The zeitgeist is ever-changing. If you try second guess what people want, you'll miss it. — Nick Frost

Indeed, it is nearly impossible for any person inserted in a modern cultural context to escape the haze of the zeitgeist and develop a truly unbiased, critical, and personal worldview. — Bernardo Kastrup

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written. — Dan Simmons

Use the word 'zeitgeist' as often as possible. Ideally, you want to find words that sound familiar but people don't really know their definitions: 'zeitgeist,' 'bildungsroman,' 'doppelganger' - better yet, anything Latin. But avoid 'paradigm.' It's so 1994. If you say the word 'paradigm,' everybody knows you're a poser. — Stephen Colbert

Twitter is like Ozymandias' wall of tv's in Watchmen. You don't read every tweet, but from the whole you can absorb the zeitgeist. — Mike Pohjola

The zeitgeist is for cutting spending and balancing the budget. But I do not want the Republican Party to be perceived as putting the budget ahead of people, jobs and education. — Jack Kemp

Puppets, zeitgeisty dressed, they dance on the edge of fire-breathing volcanoes -
lack of emotion in their faces. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

I really just like acting. I'm not always aware of what is hip and what is popular and what is zeitgeist. — Kevin McKidd

No church that panders to the zeitgeist deserves respect, and very shortly it will not get respect, except from those who find it politically useful, and that is less respect than disguised contempt. — Robert Bork

The real revolution is the revolution of values — Peter Joseph

Essentially what you're doing is collaborating with the photographer to create an image that reflects the fashion you're trying to capture and also hold a mirror up to the zeitgeist at the moment. — Hamish Bowles

We are at a point in the video game industry that the industry is hollowed out. It is out of touch with the zeitgeist, creating sequels and formulaic games over and over again. The energy comes from the indies. — Mitch Lasky

There are some people who have helped to advance me and other girls, but the fashion industry is always behind popular culture. They think they understand the zeitgeist. They don't know anything about the zeitgeist. — Iman

Anonymous is not an organization. It is an idea, a zeitgeist, coupled with a set of social and technical practices. — Yochai Benkler

Every man who speaks out loud and clear is tinting the "Zeitgeist." Every man who expresses what he honestly thinks is true is changing the Spirit of the Times. Thinkers help other people to think, for they formulate what others are thinking. No person writes or thinks alone
thought is in the air, but its expression is necessary to create a tangible Spirit of the Times. — Elbert Hubbard

One of the nice things about living in Silicon Valley is that I end up at all these conferences and things, and I get to listen in on the zeitgeist. — Rick Smolan

Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time. — Viktor E. Frankl

I certainly never imagined 80-year-olds singing along, like they were watching Cats. I'm fascinated by that kind of pop cultural zeitgeist that it's attached itself to. — Josh Gad

Every year I go to the Google Zeitgeist conference, which is invite-only, and I'm one of about 20 women and five fashion people out of the 400 there. — Natalie Massenet

Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation.
Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel.
Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world.
It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation. — Peter Joseph

Breaking new factual ground is not what Zeitgeist is about, however. Rather, the video is a powerful and fast-acting dose of agitprop, hawking its conclusions as givens. Unfortunately, like most propaganda, it doesn't play fair with its intended audience. At times, while watching it, I felt like I was getting Malcolm McDowell's treatment in Clockwork Orange: eyes pried wide open while getting bombarded with quick-cut atrocity photos. — Jay Kinney

Lying and corruption begins to seep into the emotional zeitgeist of the entire country. If individual and institutional "leaders" are not exposed, confronted, and prosecuted or ousted for their misdeeds, the inevitable result of all this bureaucratic, corporate, and government corruption will be full-scale cultural suicide in the form of mass amorality - behavior without any moral guidelines - which can generate social chaos in a historically moral country, which can next generate restoration of "order" by way of martial law, which can then generate full dictatorship. More: — Alexandra York

To discern the Zeitgeist you need to read widely. You need to systematically scan all possible sources of information. You also need to gauge the moods and emotions triggered by the happenings at that point in time. But if you can get a good sense on Zeitgeist you can get immense control on shaping new ideas for others and you can even control others! — Abhishek Ratna

While much of postmodernist analysis should be credited with theoretical imagination, as well as talent for capturing something of the Zeitgeist, this type of analysis nonetheless misses some crucial facts about consumption: that consumption is vitally linked to production; consumption is anchored in concrete relations; and the driving force in consumption is individual interest, as encouraged and often shaped by profit interests. — Richard Swedberg

The apparent pointlessness of fashion may be just what makes it so strong as a zeitgeist sensor. Even I, a designer, do not know why a certain proportion feels dated or why another one feels exciting at a given moment. I leave that to the cultural historians and theorists. — Jil Sander

I think commercial success is really important. It means there are more people listening, and you're affecting the zeitgeist more. If only a hundred people know you exist, it's harder to get your message across. — Courtney Love

They say you can do honest, sincere work for decades, but you're given in general a 10-year period when what you do touches the zeitgeist - when you're relevant. And I'm aware of that, and I don't want my time to go by. — Alexander Payne

Many of my works fall into the category of 'Zeitgeist novels'. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future. — Will Self

Even the juncture in history and the zeitgeist we live in is something we choose, setting the scene for the spiritual fodder we need to grow and achieve deeper elevation of our souls. — Raquel Cepeda

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense. — Henry Ford

What I say today everybody will say tomorrow, though they will not remember who put it into their heads. Indeed they will be right for I never remember who puts things into my head : it is the Zeitgeist. — George Bernard Shaw

The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone. — Johann Georg Hamann

When I left 'American Morning' in 2007, I'd focused on doing documentaries. But I thought 'Starting Point' was a great opportunity to be involved in the zeitgeist. — Soledad O'Brien

For a movie - any movie - to work, all the bread has to fall jelly side up; everything has to go right. You have to hit the zeitgeist. — Jon Favreau

A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought - -the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul - -and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism. — Oscar Wilde

[On The Hunger Games success]: It hit on the zeitgeist of the disparity b/w the haves and have nots. — Nina Jacobson

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow. — Frank Herbert

Vessels expose the invisible Zeitgeist, the visible formed by the invisible. — James Hillman

I'm not exactly the zeitgeist queen. — Jincy Willett

I come more to Scotland than I ever used to, so I feel more connected to it, more part of the zeitgeist. You know when you realize you have a choice and I'm choosing my homeland. It's funny: when you get older these things creep up to you. — Alan Cumming

I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written. — G. Willow Wilson

Why do people write books that say it's better to be older than to be younger? It's not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you're constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday ... If you work, you're surrounded by young people who are plugged into the marketplace, the demographic, the zeitgeist; they want your job and someday they're going to get it. — Nora Ephron

According to Thomas, the city [of Bath] had once been a veritable hotbed of manifestations, with every sorcerer, bunyip, golem, goblin, pict, pixie, demon, thylacine, gorgon, moron, cult, scum, mummy, rummy, groke, sphinx, minx, muse, flagellant, diva, reaver, weaver, reaper, scabbarder, scabmettler, dwarf, midget, little person, leprechaun, marshwiggle, totem, soothsayer, truthsayer, hatter, hattifattener, imp, panwere, mothman, shaman, flukeman, warlock, morlock, poltergeist, zeitgeist, elemental, banshee, manshee, lycanthrope, lichenthrope, sprite, wight, aufwader, harpy, silkie, kelpie, klepto, specter, mutant, cyborg, balrog, troll, ogre, cat in shoes, dog in a hat, psychic and psychotic seemingly having decided that this was the hot spot to visit. — Daniel O'Malley

Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.' — Steven Johnson

The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work. — Carl Sagan

I've never been in love with fashion, actually; trends and catwalks don't interest me. I love clothes; I love them historically and currently. They represent a spirit of the times and the zeitgeist. — Tim Walker

Very few entrepreneurs start their business on the back of market research. Instead, they have tremendous zeitgeist, honed by paying attention to where they are. — Margaret Heffernan

Since I became part of the zeitgeist, I've been called a sellout many times. — Joe Wurzelbacher

There's something in the Zeitgeist now. A lot of [film] scripts I get have these very dark themes, a cornucopia of dysfunction. You know, Jane is a 13-year-old anorexic who lives with her parents and has been raped by her father. And this is a comedy. — Christine Vachon