Quotes About Mythmaking

I will say that adapting a character like Da Vinci really wasn't that dissimilar from doing Batman or Superman. Because all three of these guys are really iconic figures, and yes, Da Vinci was historical, but there's clearly been a lot of mythmaking about him, and a lot of things have been attributed to him that may or may not have happened.

Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.

People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.

This is not just storytelling. It is the sharing of personal mythology. It's how we all make sense out of our lives and give its events significance. It parallels the mythmaking of the human race. It is the ritual of remembrance.

We're so terrified of death in Western culture that we have to make up a myth of an afterlife. I think there's something to be said for living your life very mindful of the fact that you're going to die because I think you carry yourself differently. It doesn't have to be this big, negative bummer.

Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape.

As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking.

There is a mythmaking industry hard at work to sell us that story, but I have come to believe that the story is false, the product of selection bias and after-the-fact rationalization.

Like all great mythmakers, he had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end, like Humbert, he had managed to destroy both reality and his dream.

The Republicans galvanize their base by inciting a lot of fear; they operate on a lot of mythmaking. So we have to have something compelling. We shouldn't be afraid to be bold.

Alessandra Comini. The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking. Sunstone: Santa Fe, NM, 2008

Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.

The fact is that gossip, rumors, mythmaking, and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth, those subtle tonalities that are often the truly crucial elements in a causal chain.

The vision of the US-Mexico border as a line that divides rather than unites is a dark one. It is fueled by a small measure of truth—because, of course, like most other regions, crime and criminals have found a haven in the borderlands—but a much larger degree of paranoia, racism, misunderstanding, and nationalist mythmaking.

Let's be clear: there was no golden age of journalism. The media has always been bad. And instead of improving, it spent a lot of time and energy making up its own myth.

There's never been a 'girl wonder' mythology.

The three decades following the Second World War were prolific breeders of myth. The two great military victories on opposite sides of the globe, followed by unparalleled prosperity at home and world leadership abroad, bred a national euphoria, even hubris in some, capable of the boast that America could do anything: The impossible takes a little longer.

As storytellers, you're always somehow creating history.

I am a firm believer in open justice, and an opponent of closed justice in any normal circumstances. But I am also an opponent of legal purism, and have no time for institutionalised mythmaking - whether from the authoritarian right or the liberal left.

Smith's procedure is similar to that of ancient pseudepigraphists who, in the words of one scholar, "created something new, an imaginary Sacred Past, the way it should have been.

Christianity turned its back on these ancient stories of fated decline. But it has never been able to escape historical mythmaking, despite the best efforts of theologians from Augustine to Karl Barth. The reason, as Hegel formulated it so well, is that Christian revelation is based on a unique divine incursion into the flow of historical time that altered but did not delegitimize an earlier divine–human relationship.

Our technology forces us to live mythically

The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.