A Quote by Meridel Le Sueur
The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.
Related Quotes
If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler's eye, determine the direction of the journey.
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
Here is a myth for you if myths are your pleasure: "There is no more opportunity in this world." Most people held this false belief fifty years ago, the majority agreed with it five years ago, and practically everyone clings to it today. Clearly, this myth will also be the screaming rage in the future. Hang on to this myth, and you are destined to miss great opportunities for the rest of your life.
Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the futures is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth.
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.
Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds.
My philosophy is such that I am not going to vote against the oppressed. I have been oppressed, and so I am always going to have avote for the oppressed, regardless of whether that oppressed is black or white or yellow or the people of the Middle East, or what. I have that feeling.
Remember that our Spanish conquerors, for their own benefit, deliberately created an oppressed underclass whose collective psyche became rooted in passivity and underachievement.
There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
In India, we never distinguished between history and myth. Our Puranas as well as Itihasas contain fantastical tales. They are lies that convey deeper truths.
But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny. Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence. Hence to demythologize is to interpret myth, that is, to relate the objective representations of the myth to the self-understanding which is both shown and concealed in it.
A too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and completely miss the underlying reality of what's going. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the hands of a genius give us a clear picture of the inner import of life itself.
It is a leftist myth that European conquerors and settlers encountered only peaceful, virtuous tribes and subdued them murderously in the name of Christianity and Capitalism.
History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
Related Authors
Ayn Rand Quotes
Russian
Writer
C. S. Lewis Quotes
British
Writer
Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes
French
Writer
Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
English
Writer
H. L. Mencken Quotes
American
Writer
Haruki Murakami Quotes
Japanese
Writer
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
American
Writer
Leo Tolstoy Quotes
Russian
Writer
Mark Twain Quotes
American
Writer
Mason Cooley Quotes
American
Writer
Ray Bradbury Quotes
American
Writer
Samuel Johnson Quotes
English
Writer
Seth Godin Quotes
American
Writer
Sherrilyn Kenyon Quotes
American
Writer
Suzanne Collins Quotes
American
Writer