Carl Jung Quotes

...for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'

You can't escape culture. You can learn about it. You can criticize it. You can try to move it slowly. But at the end of the day, you can't actually opt out of the culture that you're in.

We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

We found out that you can't pass on acquired things like bigotry, prejudice, greed. That's all learned in your culture or your sub-culture

Although we think that we think, most of the time we are being thought by the collective mind, the hypnosis of conditioning.

It is interesting how fashion filters down and we discover in the "Devil Wears Prada" that we're all prey to trends, even if we think we are not.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

We are all victims of culture.

There is no way you can think outside of your culture.

The collective dream is the hypnosis of social conditioning. Only sages, psychotics & geniuses manage to break free.

Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born. It does not matter whether, with the Northwest Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference, or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.

Temperament lies behind mood; behind will, lies the fate of character. Then behind both, the influence of family the tyranny of culture; and finally the power of climate and environment; and we are free, only to the extent we rise above these.

Our identity is fictional, written by parents, relatives, education, society.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century. It may then fairly be inferred, that, till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education.

Once you accept the fact that people have 'individual choices' and they're 'free' to make those choices. Free to make choices means without being influenced and I can't understand that at all. All of us are influenced in all our choices by the culture we live in, by our parents, and by the values that dominate. So, we're influenced. So there can't be free choices.

The impact of television on our culture is. . . indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.

What people call the spirit of the times is mostly their own spirit in which the times mirror themselves.

We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.

No one … can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time

Anthropology studies different cultures; mainly primitive, but it doesn't think its own culture is primitive, unfortunately. There is no field that you can study today that isn't trapped in the culture in some way. It's hard to escape your culture.

Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and Preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments would be urged.

The white man is not inherently evil, but America's racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.

What we believe as human nature in actuality is human habit.