Alex Tizon Quotes

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

No work of history can ever escape its own time...we are all influenced by what we read and what we experience.

We must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional, and the spiritual. We must make clear in what respects our epoch differs from others and in what respects it is similar.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

Literature gives us a window into other people's experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.

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.

We think in myths; we live in myths

Myth and mythology often serve constructive and aspirational purposes. But they also do harm.

I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting.

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.

Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths

No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time.

It is not necessary to agree with the Arab point of view about their own history, but it is foolish to ignore it.

I always point out to my Passover guests that the Hebrews were not living in isolation. They were at the crossroads of several great, elaborate cultures with their own mythology and religion and art and architecture and cultural belief. In fact, so many of the mythologies of the world describe the same events, just from different points of view.

Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn't really help me understand a person.

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

If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be... a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.

American myths have never been colorless.

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

Without understanding your history, you can't get a perspective about the present.

The narratives in which you're born have a fierce pattern of repetition.

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.

Indian epics are full of violence, and such stories have shaped India. As filmmakers, I don't think anyone in India would tone down violence, keeping in mind the censorship.