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‘I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.’

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969), in The Raw and the Cooked

‘The story was the bushman’s most sacred possession. These people knew what we do not; that without a story you have not got a nation, or culture, or civilisation. Without a story of your own, you haven’t got a life of your own.’

Laurens Van der Post (1958), in Lost World of the Kalahari

‘The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in. That is a hard saying for hardheaded men to accept, but it is true. Stories are told, grow old, and are remembered. Battles are fought, fade out, and are forgotten –unless they beget great stories.’

Harold Goddard (1960), in The Meaning of Shakespeare

‘Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.’

Mary Catherine Bateson (1994), cultural anthropologist

‘That is whay ecology often revalues in its practices the traditions of the oldest peoples.’

Moacir Gadotti (2000), in Pedagogía de la Tierra, p. 167

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1968), poet and feminist activist

‘We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.’

Carl G. Jung (1912), psychiatrist