103 quotes found
“Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third, and ...”
“The technology is the independent variable, the social system the dependent variable. Social, systems are therefore determined by systems of technology; as the latter change, so do the former.”
“I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this ...”
“Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each ot...”
“The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristi...”
“But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoi...”
“There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.”
“Elohim was, in logical terminology, the genus of which ghosts, Chemosh, Dagon, Baal, and Jahveh were species. The Israelite believed Jahveh to be immeasurably superior to all other kinds of Elohim....”
“Can any one deny that the old Israelites conceived Jahveh not only in the image of a man, but in that of a changeable, irritable, and, occasionally, violent man?”
“Try seeing, feeling, and tasting the water you swim in the way a land animal might perceive it. You may find the experience fascinating -- and mind-expanding.”
“There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologistmusical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were wo...”
“I remember the very day, sometime during the first two weeks of my five-year amorous sojourn in Brutland, when I was made privy to one of the most arcane of their utterings. The time was ripe for t...”
“Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked h...”
“The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a re...”
“Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.”
“In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differenc...”
“I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I...”
“Anyhow, many people in the soft sciences are prone to be wrong because theyre crazy** some are dumb, too, but thats another story.”
“These people know the reality and laugh at it. Such laughter has little concern with what is funny. It is often bitter and sometimes a little mad, for it is the laugh under the mask of tragedy, and...”
“The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!”
