Quotes / Memetic Mutation

"A man has an idea. The idea attracts others, like-minded. The idea expands. The idea becomes an institution. (pause) What was the idea?"

— Top Dollar, The Crow

"You internet types ruined Trogdor! Just like you did zombies, pirates, ninjas and Strong Bad!"

— Strong Bad, Homestar Runner, Trogday '08

Do you realize that here in the future, this bulletin has come to be regarded as something of a joke
A lengthy piece of comedy, often quoted amongst ourselves in private moments of levity

— Equius sums it up in Hivebent

"Memes are what happens when someone decides to try to be funny, and then someone decides it's catchy and repeats it to try to seem cool, in short."

— Namedown, M.U.G.E.N user

"That's Cookie Monster! He's why people on the internet say 'nom nom nom.' But we forgive him. This time."

— Jason, Something*Positive

"Attention duelists! My hair is now an internet phenomenon!"

— Kimo, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series episode 35, "The Tale of Two Tourneys"

"Oooh, long Johnson! Oooooh, looong John—*hit by train*

—South Park, "Faith Hilling"

"...And you can superimpose text on the picture of the cat, like so...This cat is saying "YOLO", which stands for "You Only Live Once"...

...Just a little acronym we thought up..."

— Douglas Engelbart, xkcd

"Two years later, I feel like this video has created its own sub-culture on YouTube."

— SillyJenny9000 on her I Staple Tapeworms on my Penis video

"It's just one of those daft things that's so brilliant about the Internet."

— Rick Astley, on his own memetic phenomenon

"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

— Remarks of Sen. Ted Stevens before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, June 28, 2006

"Here on the internet, everything burns so fast – too fast. For one thing, the internet has killed satire, barring that brief 24 hour window where every possible take, joke, cut-up or animated gif gets gunked across messageboards and social networking sites, EVERYTHING notable that happens gets parodied to the point of utter tedium almost immediately. Witness this week’s billion memes of Kanye West interrupting everything from Presidential speeches to my mid-morning wank. “IMMA LET YOU FINISH, BUT LAST WEEK I SAT ON MY HAND…”"

—Stuart Millard

"Oh! Oh- look, it's a barrel! I-it's like, do a barrel roll! I, uh... can't let you do that, Star Fox! I am the Juggernaut bitch Leeroy Jenkins."

— Iruka, "A Brand New Abridged Series!"

"Meme: a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene that was originally used to describe packets of cultural information, but subsequently adopted by internet users to refer to inside jokes for people who have no friends with whom to have real inside jokes."

— Wolfram Alpha, taken from Encyclopedia Dramatica

Chick: And I dare you to go into a circle of any respectable nerds and say the words "you remind me of the babe" without-

Nella: What babe?

Chick: ...the babe with the power.

Nella: What power?

*the Chick waves her hands in a "see?" gesture*

— The Nostalgia Chick, Labyrinth review

John Hodgman: [Packets like these] could be anything on the internet. Spam, videos of lonely teens practicing with their lightsabers, comical reimaginings of movie premises — Brokeback Mountain, for example, cats dressed as nuns eating from dishes of gravy...
Jon Stewart: Or maybe even useful information, or news analysis.
John Hodgman: Well, I guess. In fact...(he passes another envelope to Jon Stewart)...these are all Chuck Norris jokes.

—The Daily Show, Net Neutrality Act.

Super64: Oh wow, references. They're so funny. Especially when you've heard them over eighteen billion times!

1337f0x: Or OVER 9000!

— Smashtasm

Monsoon: Memes. The DNA of the soul. They shape our will. They are the culture - they are everything we pass on. Expose someone to anger long enough, they will learn to hate. They become a carrier. Envy, greed, despair... all memes. All passed along.
Raiden: How about "full of shit"? Is that a meme?

—- Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

"The memes..."

— Raiden, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

"Ideas, philosophy, art, culture. They live and die by the meme... An infection."

—Izuru Kamukura, Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School, Episode 11

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet."

— Abraham Lincoln

"It's so cool a phrase, even the president is using it... or is he? 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us'. Don't ask what it means, don't ask where it came form, just accept it as one of those things that's got a lot of people talking. Still confused? Look on the web, it's everywhere. 'All Your Base Are Belong to Us' on Uncle Sam, on Bill Gates, on t-shirts, billboards, c'mon! Say it! Everybody else is."

— Rick Folbaum, KABB Fox News 29 San Antonio report

Amy: "Viral sensation?" You mean like that cute sneezing panda?
Sonic: Or all those weird pictures of me?

— Sonic Boom

"Aw, man! I'm a meme!"

— Pac-Man, Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures

Mufasa: Everything the light touches is our kingdom.
Simba: Everything the light touches... what about that shadowy place?
Critic: That's reserved for memes, son.

— The Nostalgia Critic's review of The Lion King (1994)

Senator Vreenak: It's a faaaake!
Chuck: Okay, everybody got that out of their system now? No need to fall back on any hackneyed Internet memes, right? Especially once we realize that every time you masturbate God does indeed kill a kitten. And I for one welcome our domokun overlords, and remind my fellow Earthlings that all your base are belong to us because it’s a trap!

— SF Debris, reviewing Star Trek Deep Space Nine S 06 E 19 In The Pale Moonlight - found here

Jon: Have you ever made a simple observation while reading the paper, only to have a sinking feeling that a bunch of nerds will revisit it endlessly?
Garfield: No, but do you know what I could really go for right now? A Dippin' Dots.

— Square Root of Minus Garfield, Five-Minute Garfield

Just follow the recipe and gather the ingredients
Pick a topic people talk about on social media
Don't violate the terms of service, or your vid will be deleted
Also make a catchy chorus; something that could be repeated.

CATS! CATS! Laughing babies! People falling! Hot, hot ladies!
Sleepy puppies! Dancing babies! Kittens, monkeys, more hot ladies!
Put a lot of words in one verse, careful to annunciate it
Sing multiple layers; it helps if you animate it.

— Tobuscus, "VIRAL SONG"

"I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged [...]. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my Classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme."

— Richard Dawkins, providing the trope's name in The Selfish Gene

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