Cultural Illusion Quotes

For nearly a century, the South made itself believe that Negroes and white people were really communicating. So convinced of this were the white Southerners that they almost made the nation believe that they, and only they, knew the mind of the Southern Negro.

The dream of an Egypt without beards and veils is illusory.

The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people they serve. The people they serve are like children within the game of culture. Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That's how he can do his magic.

Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending - pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.

Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.

Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.

Part of my life's thesis is that we live in a culture that has bought into the patently silly idea that there is a divide between the secular world and the faith world.

Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects — as the wonderful new heaven and earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced. Love is the answer, we sing. Our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic - albeit desperate - conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros.