History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.

The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.

No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.