Memes quotes:

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Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors. -- Keith Henson
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator. -- Susan Blackmore
Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic. -- Susan Blackmore
Words are memes that can be pronounced. -- Daniel Dennett
You're either with us... or you're with the memes! -- George W. Bush
I never saw a meme; I never saw the sea. -- Emily Dickinson
Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes. -- Kevin Kelly
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. -- Richard Dawkins
The sale of sex in modern societies is not about spreading genes. Sex has been taken over by the memes. -- Susan Blackmore
In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts. -- Ernst Mayr
I like the app where you can make your own memes. I make memes all the time and send them to my friends. -- Taylor Swift
I'm really interested in independent publishers and memes and mini comics. But even before that, I was interested in Japanese manga and anime. -- Toyin Odutola
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture. -- Richard Dawkins
It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you. -- Terence McKenna
Specific units - such as memes are intended to represent have meaning when there is essential discontinuity between categories. Such convenient discontinuities are found in atoms, elementary particles, genes, and DNA. -- Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
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
Aimer, ce n'est point nous regarder l'un l'autre, mais regarder ensemble dans la meme direction. English Translation: To love is not to look at each other, But to look together in the same direction. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Temes' [technology-enhanced memes] don't care about us - they simply want to create more of themselves. Don't think we created the internet for our own benefit - think about temes spreading for themselves because they must. -- Susan Blackmore
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. -- Richard Dawkins
The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be. -- Richard Dawkins
You know, the very strength of science is that it keeps us from the errors of mythos, from getting committed to a set of memes that we adopt because of congruence with what we think we know. Science demands skepticism. -- Tim Ward
All religious vows, codes, and commitments are null & void herein. Please refrain from contaminating the ideosphere with harmful memes through prayer, reverence, holy books, proselytizing, prophesying, faith, speaking in tongues or spirituality. Fight the menace of second-hand faith! Humanity sincerely thanks you! -- Greg Erwin
The science-fictional motif of lethal, infectious information - bad memes - is a fascinating one, with an extended history. One of the earliest instances is Robert W. Chambers's 'The King in Yellow' from 1895. Chambers's conceit is a malevolent play: read beyond Act II, and you go mad. -- Paul Di Filippo
Irving Wallace wrote a bestselling novel, The Man, in the 1960s about a black man becoming president of the United States. We thought that such a possibility was thousands of years in the future. Some people may still have some difficulty with the idea, but that's a major cultural meme shift. -- Wayne Dyer
An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version. -- Richard Dawkins
You know, a meme is now circulating that's called the Ostrich Brigade. And it's used to describe all those people who are burying their heads in the sand. I call it the three D strategy. It's denial, deflection, and a demonization of those of us who want to speak honestly about these issues of extremism. -- Dalia Mogahed
Memes can be visual. Our image of George Washington is a meme. We don't actually have any idea what George Washington looked like. There are so many different portraits of him, and they're all different. But we have an image in our head, and that image is propagated from one place to another, from one person to another. -- James Gleick
As for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene. -- James Gleick
I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack. -- Richard Dawkins
Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection. -- Richard Dawkins
Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes. -- Susan Blackmore
Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes. -- Susan Blackmore
Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate. -- Terence McKenna
Creativity needs time to harness before it goes out, and because that's difficult, memes have become the creative language. -- M.I.A.
If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes. -- Susan Blackmore
Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies. -- Terence McKenna
If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe. -- Susan Blackmore
Imagine a world full of brains, and far more memes than can possibly find homes. Which memes are more likely to find a safe home and get passed on again? -- Susan Blackmore
Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible. -- Daniel Dennett
You can make an idea spread for good but you can also make an idea spread for bad and the power to make an idea spread, memetics, you know which now people talk about memes. -- Jay Roach

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