Fred Kaplan Quotes

I've come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology. Mythology gives you a sense of what a people believes, what they fear.

All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived.

We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.

Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.

Combine two words, Myth and History. What do you get? Mystery.

In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

I'm not certain that I draw from any one culture more than others. Many myths and legends of many different cultures are really the same story when you get to the heart of it. They are often cultural cautionary tales about how we should behave and how we should live.

I do love mythology.

Mythology works... because Indians have been bred on myths.

I write on sacred stories, symbols and rituals of all cultures - European, American and Chinese - but my audiences, typically, like me to focus on India.

Again, both literature and philosophy work by appealing to certain reigning idols.

Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'

American myths have never been colorless.

What people will - or will not - laugh at is mainly determined by their social conditioning.

We, as a culture, use television as at least one of the great arbiters of truth. Even though we know it's fiction, when we see it portrayed, we believe it. We recognize it as part of our culture.

You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas.

The bedroom is an archetype. To me it stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture where the kind of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies because we don't really have much else in the way of myths, if that makes sense.

Mythologies are violent things, and to be true to them, you have to go to primal territory.

I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.

I have always argued that we can't live by or be made to exist outside of mythology, and that every group and nation has, possibly unacknowledged to themselves, some myths by which they live. It remains important to revisit them, understand them and possibly retell them - or at least own up to them - and then it becomes possible to move something. If it's obscure or invisible to you, you can't budge those understandings.

Myth is what we call other people's religion.

Advertising is about norms and values, aspirations and prejudices. It is about culture.