John Fiske Quotations

The persecuting spirit has its origin... in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.

The persecuting spirit has its origin . . . in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.

We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led to the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.

One and all, the orthodox creeds are crumbling into ruins everywhere.

We now witness the constructive work on a foundation that will endure through the ages. That foundation is the god of science - revealed to us in terms that will harmonize with our intelligence.

Is it honest for me to go and sit there on communion day and drink the wine and eat the bread while feeling it all to be mummery?

Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.

The way we make sense of a realistic text is through the same broad ideological frame as the way we make sense of our social experience or rather, the way we are made sense of by the discourses of our culture.

A mass of metaphysical assumptions, wherein science was disowned, where reason was discredited, and where blind, unquestioning faith was regarded as the only passport to true Christian knowledge.