Sam Keen Quotes

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

Myth is supposed to bring us together, but fantasy alienates us.

There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves.

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

Revolutions are always the deepest memories of a people

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself to feed upon, even a poisonous one.

It is important to recognize that folklore is not simply a way of obtaining available date about identity for social scientists; it is actually one of the principal means by which an individual and a group discovers or establishes his or its identity.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth...

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

If you're constantly being reminded of the ways in which your history and your narrative as a people were rooted in loss and decay, then you're in deep trouble. Once you make a certain kind of peace with the past, then you should be completely oriented towards speculation about the future.

Historical and public memory is not merely on the side of domination.

Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

the ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as part of an ancient continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories.

People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.

Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves.

Exhibitions of minority art are often intended to make the minority itself more aware of its collective experience. Reinforcing the common memory of miseries and triumphs will, it is expected, strengthen the unity of the group and its determination to achieve a better future. But emphasizing shared experience as opposed to the artist's consciousness of self (which includes his personal and unshared experience of masterpieces) brings to the fore the tension in the individual artist between being an artist and being a minority artist.

I don't have to worry about setting a good example every day for the purpose of setting an example for Scientology. We should all set a good example in life, but this was with an agenda. Now it's about accepting what is. I have no agenda other than to enjoy my life and enjoy my time with people, for however long it goes...Because I was never really able to enjoy my life. I always had to go to Scientology or give my money to Scientology or give my time to Scientology, and now I'm just able to enjoy what is in my life. I don't have anywhere to get to. This is it.

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

I've always thought there are two ways of getting what you wanted in life.Forcing people to give it to you,or making them want to give it to you.

Heaven sees as the people see. Heaven hears as the people hear.

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths.

In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.