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The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.

— Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

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Wikiquote does not flag this quote as disputed or misattributed.

Source: Book I, Chapter 3, p. 75
Work: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976
Source quality: Source identified Names the work or year, but without an exact location.

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The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.

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The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.

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These esoteric poses of philosophy and even the paper theories of behaviorists are mere subterfuges to avoid the material we are talking about.

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There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.

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We know too much to command ourselves very far.

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Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.

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Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world.

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Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

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Behavior now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

There is a complete lack of reference to business profits or loss in any of the cuneiform tablets that have been so far translated.

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

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Julian Jaynes (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.