Memes Quotes

“The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child’s head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered.”
― A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok

“The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“The danger we face does not come from religion. It comes from a growing intellectual bankruptcy that is one of the symptoms of a dying culture. In ancient Rome, as the republic disintegrated and the Caesars were deified, as the Roman Senate became little more than an echo chamber of the emperor, the population’s attention was diverted by a series of frontier wars and violent and elaborate spectacles in the arena. The excitement of entertainment consumed ancient Rome’s emotional and intellectual life. It poisoned civic and political discourse. Social critics no longer had a form in which to speak. They were answered with ridicule and rage. It was not prerogative of the citizen to think.”
― Chris Hedges, I Don't Believe in Atheists

“Words exist. What are they made of? Air under pressure? Ink? Some instances of the word "cat" are made of ink, and some are made of bursts of acoustic energy in the atmosphere, and some are made of patterns of glowing dots on computer screens, and some occur silently in thoughts, and what they have in common is just that they count as "the same" (tokens of the same type, as philosophers say) say in a system of symbols known as a language. Words are such familiar items in our language-drenched world that we tend to think of them as if they were unproblematically tangible things - as real as teacups and raindrops - but they are in fact quite abstract, even more abstract than voices or songs or haircuts or opportunities (and what are they made off?). What are words? Words are basically information packets of some sort, recipes for using one's vocal apparatus and ears (or hands or eyes) - and brains - in quite specific ways. A world is more than a sound or a spelling. For instance, fast sounds the same and is spelled the same in English and German, but has completely different meanings and roles in the two languages. Two different worlds, sharing only some of their surface properties. Words exist. Do memes exist? Yes, because words exist, and words are memes that can be pronounced.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

“I think my show was more beautiful. Like, it would have made for prettier pictures on Insta. But now, we're gonna have way better memes.”
― Carlos Hernandez, Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

“Mostly, though, Jonaton talked about geometry, Imaging, herbs and cures, and his cats. Anyone's cats, really. Often, he brought Imager pictures of various cats, and added funny captions to them. They always raised laughs as they were passed table to table.”
― Mercedes Lackey, Beyond

“Robert started heading for the door to the control room.  Claire watched his back, a frown plastered on her face.  “Where do you think you're going, Robert?”
“I'm going to go make some popcorn,” Robert replied with a smile.  “I expect that whatever is happening in Lux is going to be extremely entertaining.”
― Travis Bagwell, Catharsis

“Einstein created an unstoppable "intellectual chain reaction," an avalanche of pulsing, chattering neurons and memes that will ring for an eternity”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics

“They say, and I have reason to believe, that in times of intellectual laziness we are at our most genus when we find someone who is better in some way; it allows us to dismiss the reality that all our pride and profundity comes from our aptitude to copy and paste their intelligence. Except for memes, we get to share those by definition - and further watch the ADHD evolve them to golden cancer.”
― LampoonTop's 1925 autobiographica

“Leave the grim, follow me.

And take my hand;
Let's make an eternal meme like a Murad Osman pic on Instagram.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Letter 19

“Trolls do not build.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism--something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Professor Dawkins himself stated that “Religion is about turning untested belief, into unshakable truth through the power of institutions, and the passage of time.” This is exactly what is happening with his meme conjecture. He is taking an untestable idea, by scientific standards, and through media and literature and a popular cult following, creating it into a social norm of truth where others believe his idea and propagate it as an unshakeable truth. This also is occurring faster because of computer technology in time. But nonetheless, it is an occurrence within a passage of time.”
― Idav Kelly, The Leprechaun Delusion

“An idea: a theory or an equation, might sit around unnoticed for decades, centuries, even, before it's rediscovered and put to some use. That's how it works: it makes connections with other ideas, other knowledge, gathering momentum all the time, growing exponentially if it's strong enough. Just like it would connect and grow within the billions of neurons in a single mind.”
― K. Valisumbra, Mortlake and Other Stories

“Genetically we're just the third species of chimp, a physically weak but social animal. It was in our interests to communicate complex ideas so we could cooperate to hunt big, dangerous prey animals. I think as soon as humans developed language with grammar that allowed for abstract thought, we were set on a whole new evolutionary path, made by and for the spread of ideas instead of genes.”
― K. Valisumbra, Mortlake and Other Stories

“PK Fire!!!”
― Ness

“What starts with 2 number 9's and ends with a large soda - a meme”
― Visvaldis Vilks

“She acts all scary, but she's been unusually nice to us, so... I know! She's the Tsundere-type zombie, amiright?!”
― Sakazaki Freddie, Land of the Rising Dead: A Tokyo School Girl's Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

“They say, and I have reason to believe, that in times of intellectual laziness we are at our most genius when we find someone who is better in some way; it allows us to dismiss the reality that all our pride and profundity comes from our aptitude to copy and paste their intelligence. Except for memes, we get to share those by definition - and further watch the ADHD evolve them to golden cancer.”
― LampoonTop's 1925 autobiographica

“Or, to choose another example, we feel that freedom of speech is the last step in the march of victory of freedom. We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally—that is, for himself—which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts. Again, we are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. We neglect the role of the anonymous authorities like public opinion and "common sense," which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different. In other words, we are fascinated by the growth of freedom from powers outside of ourselves and are blinded to the fact of inner restraints, compulsions, and fears, which tend to undermine the meaning of the victories freedom has won against its traditional enemies. We therefore are prone to think that the problem of freedom is exclusively that of gaining still more freedom of the kind we have gained in the course of modern history, and to believe that the defense of freedom against such powers that deny such freedom is all that is necessary. We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigor, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“There is a phrase that has been bandied about as a prescriptive for success from the late Stephen Covey these last few years, “Begin with the end in mind”. It is a reasonable aphorism if limited to areas that are manageable such as paying off debts in 5 years or finishing a paper at midnight; but is unreasonable for one who intends to reach loftier goals as quickly as one locates a search result on Google. Adages relating to goals and success are meant to target specific people in certain periods of his or her life, not as a carpet bomb that leaves collateral damage of those unprepared to assess his or her own strengths and weaknesses or unwilling to court such an effort. But society is indifferent to these setbacks because each time an individual fails, another person or institution takes advantage of these failures for self-gain. That is the so-called nature of the so-called beast.”
― Lloyd Wedes

“A civilization makes progress by leveraging the achievements and observations of past generations. We compress history into words, stories, and symbols that allow living people to learn and benefit from the experiences of the dead. In the space of one childhood, we can learn what it took humanity many centuries to figure out. While animals may have some capacity to instruct their young, humans are unlimited in their capacity to learn from one another. Thanks to stories, books, and our symbol systems, we can learn from people we have never met. We create symbols, or what Korzybski calls abstractions, in order to represent things to one another and our descendants more efficiently. They can be icons, brands, religious symbols, familiar tropes, or anything that compresses information bigger than itself.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“if ideas were viruses, then, like any virus, they would mutate rapidly and often arbitrarily, with only the fitter ideas spreading and continuing their lineage. We simply do not see this with any sort of knowledge.”
― Andrew T Kelly, The Bifrost and The Ark: Examining the Cult and Religion of New Atheism

“Only the extremely strong – those who don’t care what others think – can take an interest in unpopular memes: the truth memes, the Logos memes. Our world has a very simple set up. Emotionally powerful memes are enormously more successful and popular than intellectually powerful memes. The whole of human fate – everything about humanity, the entirety of human history – is bound to that single fact.”
― Joe Dixon, The Intelligence Wars: Logos Versus Mythos

“Trolls do not build.' - Aragorn (as Strider)”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Trolls do not build. - Aragorn (as Strider)”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“When it comes to philosophy, don't indulge in it too much that it becomes a cul de sac labyrinth around your mind, and don't read it too little that you can't even make memes.”
― Abdur-Rehman Qadeer

“Never doubt the friendship of someone who sends you memes without asking.”
― Sarvesh Jain

“Having no one to send memes is also a tragedy of a modern breakup.”
― Sarvesh Jain

“They called themselves the Meme Squad, which was so cringeworthy that I wished I hadn’t heard it; their motto was ‘ignorance is strength’.”
― Alexander Wales, Worth the Candle