Quotes About Mythologizing

National culture and national self-expression tend to be self-serving and mythologising (all the more acutely so, perhaps, if foreigners proof even better at mythologising than the locals and drive the locals on to ever-greater feats of self-deception). National culture, by definition, is mythologising, self-serving and at the same time, self-mutilating, designed as it is to focus a group identity by creating shibboleths and stereotypes.

For all our mythologizing, the margins can be painful and some people are there because they have no choice.

You can feel Simon's impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the

You can feel Simon's impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

Human beings seem reluctant to accept that morality is something invented by themselves and so tend to legitimize moral rules by mythologizing their origins:

Even worse. Making vivid, interesting characters out of those girls and women? Mythologizing and novelizing their suffering? No." The man gives an exaggerated sigh. "I know this argument, and I don't buy it. If everyone felt the way you do, the world would remain ignorant about things it has every good reason to know. Writers have to bear witness, it's their vocation. Some would say the writer has no higher calling than to bear witness to injustice and suffering.

whether you believe in a demon of the air or in a factor in the unconscious that plays diabolical tricks on you is all one to me. The fact that man's imagined unity is menaced by alien powers remains the same in either case. Theologians would do better to take account for once of these psychological facts than to go on "demythologizing" them with rationalistic explanations that are a hundred years behind the times.

romanticizing pathology

In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.

Many of us become walking self-caricatures at a certain point, and politicians can be particularly vulnerable, especially those who have maneuvered their very public lives as conspicuously as McCain. They tell and retell the same stories; things get musty. They engage in a lot of self-mythologizing,