Quotes by Anthropologists

They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without master...
Zora Neale Hurston
The power of monsters is their ability to fuse opposites, to merge contraries, to subvert rules, to overthrow cognitive barriers, moral distinction, and ontological categories. Monsters overcome the barrier of time itself. Uniting past and present, demonic and divine, guilt and conscience, predator and prey, parent and child, self and alien, our monsters are our innermost selves.
David D. Gilmore
But such monsters as sphinxes bring forth the necessary heroes to defeat them, and because such heroes make civilization by the example of monster-taming, without the former there would be no civilization at all.
David D. Gilmore
Do you know what made me fall in love with you?" George asked suddenly. Anne shook her head, puzzled that he should ask her this now. "I heard you laugh, down the hall, just before I got to Spanish class that first day. I couldn't see you. I just heard this fabulous laugh, like a whole octave, top to bottom. And I had to hear it again.
Mary Doria Russell
I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
Margaret Mead
Each suburban housewife spends her time presiding over a power plant sufficient to have staffed the palace of a Roman emperor with a hundred slaves.
Margaret Mead
Human war has been the most successful of all our cultural traditions.
Robert Ardrey
The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.
Ruth Benedict
We grow in time to trust the future for our answers.
Ruth Benedict
Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
Ruth Benedict
The city is a cultural invention enforcing on the citizen knowledge of his own nature. And this we do not like. That we are aggressive beings easily given to violence that we get along together because we must more than because we want to and that the brotherhood of man is about as far from reality today as it was two thousand years ago that reason's realm is small that we never have been and never shall be created equal that if the human being is perfectible he has so far exhibited few symptoms - all are considerations of man from which space tends to protect us.
Robert Ardrey
I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to his or her fellow human beings.
Margaret Mead
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
Thomas Henry Huxley
I have never been able to understand why pigeon-shooting at Hurlingham should be refined and polite while a rat-killing match in Whitechapel is low.
T. H. Huxley
Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins in the eyes of most people is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.
Thomas Huxley
If it's working keep doing it. If it's not working stop doing it. If you don't know what to do don't do anything.
Dr. Melvin Konner
We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
Carlos Castañeda
No man may make another free.
Zora Neale Hurston
He who would be well taken care of must take care of himself.
William Graham Sumner
There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.
Margaret Mead
Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads or you shall learn nothing.
Thomas Huxley
Science is simply common sense at its best - that is rigidly accurate in observation and merciless to fallacy in logic.
T. H. Huxley
The great tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas Huxley
The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.
Ashley Montagu
Any path is only a path and there is no affront to oneself or to others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.
Carlos Castañeda
In almost any society I think the quality of the non-conformists is like to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.
Margaret Mead
When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.
Loren Eiseley
Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
Whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience the larger whole is primarily beautiful.
Gregory Bateson
What we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner
We make our own criminals and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.
Margaret Mead
Women forget all the things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't want to forget.
Zora Neale Hurston
You just have to learn not to care about the dust mites under the beds.
Margaret Mead
From the solitude of the wood (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
Loren Eiseley
Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.
Zora Neale Hurston
Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read. It merely records the degree of the lover's insecurity.
Margaret Mead
The sun gives us light but the moon provides inspiration. If you look at the sun without shielding your eyes you'll go blind. If you look at the moon without covering your eyes you'll become a poet.
Serge Bouchard
The chess-board is the world the pieces are the phenomena of the universe the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair just and patient. But also we know to our cost that he never overlooks a mistake or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
Thomas Huxley
Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Any path is only a path and there is no affront to oneself or to others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.
Carlos Castañeda
In almost any society I think the quality of the non-conformists is like to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.
Margaret Mead
When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.
Loren Eiseley
Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
Whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience the larger whole is primarily beautiful.
Gregory Bateson
What we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner
We make our own criminals and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.
Margaret Mead
Women forget all the things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't want to forget.
Zora Neale Hurston
You just have to learn not to care about the dust mites under the beds.
Margaret Mead
From the solitude of the wood (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
Loren Eiseley
Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.
Zora Neale Hurston
Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read. It merely records the degree of the lover's insecurity.
Margaret Mead
The sun gives us light but the moon provides inspiration. If you look at the sun without shielding your eyes you'll go blind. If you look at the moon without covering your eyes you'll become a poet.
Serge Bouchard
The chess-board is the world the pieces are the phenomena of the universe the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair just and patient. But also we know to our cost that he never overlooks a mistake or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
Thomas Huxley
Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
If some great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed I should close instantly with the offer.
Thomas Huxley
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture - and very much to our credit.
Thomas Huxley
I no longer cared about survival - I merely loved.
Loren Eiseley
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Thomas Huxley
If a little knowledge is dangerous - where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Thomas Huxley
Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads or you shall learn nothing.
Thomas Huxley