“Perhaps the most legitimately dispiriting thing about reciprocal altruism is that it is a misnomer. Whereas with kin selection the "goal" of our genes is to actually help another organism, with rec...”

“-Paint-My girlfriend is so besotted that she can't take her eyes off me. After we've turned out the light she puts on her night-vision goggles, and watched me as I sleep. Quite often I am woken by ...”

“The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.”

“A man had better study what a human being is, because he's marrying one - assuming that merely being one has not been sufficient stimulus to that study.”

“To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.”

“The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.”

“The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.”

“The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.”

“All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many.”

“If it's far away, it's news, but if it's close at home, it's sociology.”