Quotes About Meme

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.

Yeet!" said Jack, shambling out of his room. "Walking is for Normies. It's a dank meme.

Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment .... The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator — an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus.

First and foremost, the most profound weapon a nation or special interest can possess is "control" over information. This contributes to control over the narrative and the meme is the embryo of the narrative.

Manufacturing consent begins by weaponizing the meme and utilizing the censorship algorithms of Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Meme Warfare 101: the meme hovers above the syntactical model that has limited man's evolution and expansiveness due to the restrictions of language. The meme introduces that which defies the restrictions of language and cuts to the psycho-emotional core of the individual.

The weaponized meme, when properly introduced and reinforced, will parasitically weave its way throughout the labyrinth of the mind and attach itself to the subconscious, thus effecting the root of the thought of the recipient.

Generally, the view that I've had on Twitter is if you're on Twitter, you're in, like, the meme - you're in meme war land. If you're on Twitter, you're in the arena. And so, essentially, if you attack me, it is therefore OK for me to attack back.

Meme theory is an example of the kind of prestidigitation needed to present an image of us as biologically programmed in the face of the overwhelming evidence that everyday human life is utterly different from the reflex-, tropism-, instinct-driven life of animals (although of course we rely on reflexes to perform our voluntary actions, may be in part guided by tropisms and have a general direction influenced remotely by instincts).

How about this one: you are simply a distinction—a meme—invented because it was convenient to talk about the parts of the universe that feel pain when hit with a hammer. To the universe, there's no you . . . or human beings or giraffes or solar systems or galaxies. All those are human-invented distinctions. They are all memes.

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.

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.

Blind faith can justify anything.* If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die—on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.

We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.*

Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence.

The word replicator is purposely defined in a general way, so that it does not even have to refer to DNA.

I have previously supported the case for a completely non-genetic kind of replicator, which flourishes only in the environment provided by complex, communicating brains. I called it the 'meme' (Dawkins 1976a).

The phenotypic effects of a meme may be in the form of words, music, visual images, styles of clothes, facial or hand gestures, skills such as opening milk bottles in tits, or panning wheat in Japanese macaques.

They may be perceived by the sense organs of other individuals, and they may so imprint themselves on the brains of the receiving individuals that a copy (not necessarily exact) of the original meme is graven in the receiving brain.

The new copy of the meme is then in a position to broadcast its phenotypic effects, with the result that further copies of itself may be made in yet other brains.

Any effect that a meme has on the behaviour of a body bearing it may influence that meme's chance of surviving.

The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of 'rival' memes.

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.