Memes Quotes

• Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.

  Terence McKenna

  Tasks, Replicate, Ifs

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• You're either with us... or you're with the memes!

  George W. Bush

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• 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

  Apps, My Friends

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• 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

  Creativity, Ideas, Hijacking

  "The Very Best of Richard Dawkins: Quotes from a Devout Atheist". Book by Gordon Fisher, 2014.

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• 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

  Thinking, Tree, Perception

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• 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

  Religion, Survival, Culture

  Richard Dawkins (1989). “The Selfish Gene”, p.193, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

  Richard Dawkins

  Simple, Blind Belief, Curiosity

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.219, Oxford University Press

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• Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors.

  Keith Henson

  Successful, Behaviour, Attention

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• 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

  Mistake, Thinking, People

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• You're a wizard, Harry.

  J. K. Rowling

  Magic, Novelists, Inspirational Harry Potter

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• Words are memes that can be pronounced.

  Daniel Dennett

  Daniel C. Dennett (2006). “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”, p.80, Penguin

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• 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

  Thank You, Religious, Prayer

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• 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

  Numbers, Atheism, Culture

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain”, p.127, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.

  Susan Blackmore

  Consciousness, Illusion

  Interview with J. Flinn Akroyd, www.mungbeing.com.

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• Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes.

  Susan Blackmore

  Self, Consciousness, Free Will

  "Humans Are Just Machines for Propagating Memes". Interview with Kim Zetter, www.wired.com. February 29, 2008.

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• The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.

  Daniel Dennett

  Order, Brain, Mind

  Daniel C. Dennett (1996). “Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanins of Life”, p.365, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Mammals, Found, Wells

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• A meme (rhymes with dream) is a unit of information (a catchphrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. Memes compete with one another for replication, and are passed down through a population much the same way genes pass through a species. Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power.

  Kalle Lasn

  Dream, Fashion, Philosophy

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• 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

  Ideas, People, Spread

  Source: collider.com

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• In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts.

  Ernst Mayr

  Example, Doe, Definitions

  Ernst Mayr (2007). “What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline”, p.154, Cambridge University Press

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• We're [also] trying to talk to a generation who grew up on the Internet. They're digital natives, and, essentially, they speak through sequential storytelling. I mean, a good comic-book panel is not that much different than a meme.

  Andrew Aydin

  Book, Mean, Trying

  "John Lewis marches on: 'Our struggle is a struggle to redeem the soul of America'". Interview with Philip Eil, www.salon.com. August 9, 2016.

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• I think the most common meme is that it's too difficult to change. It's too risky to change. My nature doesn't allow me to change. When you're thinking that, you're not understanding what your nature is. All of us come from this place of well-being, love, and kindness. But we've taken on these other things, and we think that they're our nature. Our nature really is to be like God.

  Wayne Dyer

  Kindness, Taken, Thinking

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• 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

  Men, Years, Ideas

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• 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

  Brain, Natural, Criteria

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene”, p.167, Oxford University Press

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• Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Suicide, Daughter, Song

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