103 quotes found
“-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.”
“All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.”
“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our...”
“In America, Amazon competes with yahoo and Google by competing with a gas station. Imagine if every price in QT was the same, but had a for sale sign beside higher prices, and you'll have either Am...”
“In our desire to impose form on the world and our lives we have lost the capacity to see the form that is already there; and in that lies not liberation but alienation, the cutting off of things as...”
“I had made an early policy decision to drink the native beer despite the undoubted horrors of the process of fabrication. On my very first visit to a Dowayo beer party, this was put severely to the...”
“There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage.”
“[W]e might do better here to think of culture as fashion. And in fashion, of course, the key is not wearing a particular outfit but being able to wear it ... Clothing is a mere collection of garmen...”
“What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipator...”
“If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude...”
“All social interactions require some loss of freedom.”
“I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to...”
“There was a time when Men functioned through the mind and Women from their heart, now its Men who feel more and women think more...”
“Gmez had suggested I steal a fish to achieve more courage and purpose. I regarded this task as an anthropological experiment, though it crossed a border into something approaching magic, or perhaps...”
“Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.”
“Marriage," "mating," and "love" are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we've noted of rampant ritualized group sex, m...”
“I remember taking an anthropology class in college and the professor was explaining that there is little 'sexual dimorphism' in humans. He meant that there are few outward, observable differences b...”
“It appears now to be universally admitted that, before the exile, the Israelites had no belief in rewards and punishments after death, nor in anything similar to the Christian heaven and hell; but ...”