Quotes by Anthropologists - Page 2

There is no death! the stars go down to rise upon some fairer shore.
John L. McCreery
The forgotten man. He is the clean quiet virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of outside his little circle. ... He works he votes generally he prays but his chief business in life is to pay.
William Graham Sumner
There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.
Zora Neale Hurston
Once you wake up thought in a man you can never put it to sleep again.
Zora Neale Hurston
The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good.
Ruth Benedict
The full-grown modern human being ... is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment... when he is consumed in the service of an idea in the conquest of the goal pursued.
R. Briffault
I want a busy life a just mind and a timely death.
Zora Neale Hurston
Love I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
Zora Neale Hurston
I love myself when I am laughing.
Zora Neale Hurston
He is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment... when he is consumed in the service of an idea in the conquest of the goal pursued.
R. Briffault
The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done by hesitation.
Thomas Henry Huxley
In a world that holds books and babies and canyon trails why should one condemn oneself to live day in day out with people one does not like and sell oneself to chaperone and correct them?
Ruth Benedict
It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble and then not worth much after you get it.
Zora Neale Hurston
Who is the Forgotten Man? He is the clean quiet virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle.
William Graham Sumner
No matter how many communes anybody invents the family always creeps back.
Margaret Mead
Today while the titular head of the family may still be the father everyone knows that he is little more than chairman at most of the entertainment committee.
Ashley Montagu
Faith is the sturdiest the most manly of the virtues. It lies behind our pluckiest... strivings. It is the virtue of the storm just as happiness is the virtue of the sunshine.
Ruth Benedict
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
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done whether you like it or not it is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
Thomas Huxley
Faith hasn't got no eyes but she's long-legged.
Zora Neale Hurston
A wiser rule would be to make up your mind soberly what you want peace or war and then to get ready for what you want for what we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner
There is no death! the stars go down To rise upon some other shore And bright in Heaven's jeweled crown They shine for ever more.
John L. McCreery
Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
Ernest Becker
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
I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it.
Ashley Montagu
If folks can learn to be racist then they can learn to be antiracist. If being sexist ain't genetic then dad gum people can learn about gender equality.
Johnnetta Betsch Cole
The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change of perpetual flux.
Sir James Frazer
When I stand on a street in a Canadian city and look across the street it couldn't be anywhere but Canada but how can I prove it?
Margaret Mead
Most people are afraid of failing. I think there's nothing wrong in failing.
Mark N. Cohen
I have been in sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows with a harp and sword in my hands.
Zora Neale Hurston
Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them and know it but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.
William Graham Sumner
The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe don't read what they write don't ask them what they believe just observe what they do.
Ashley Montagu
The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves.
Elaine Morgan
Finally, there are assuredly diversities of gifts pertaining to diverse breeds of men; and unless we are all reduced to the dull dead level of socialism, and perhaps even in that case, for the sake of relief, we shall continue to stand in need of all these gifts. Let us hope, then, that blue eyes, as well as brown eyes, will continue to beam on our descendants, and that heads will never come to be framed all upon one and the same pattern.
John Beddoe
When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works.And the hundredth boy?We can go either way. Kill the old man, or try to become a better one.
Mary Doria Russell
As a result, amongst working-class Americans, government is now generally seen as being made up of two sorts of people: "politicians," who are blustering crooks and liars but can at least occasionally be voted out of office, and "bureaucrats," who are condescending elitists almost impossible to uproot.
David Graeber
Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.
Ernest Gellner
he had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.
Mary Doria Russell
A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
Zora Neale Hurston
...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.
Ernest Becker
Insularity is the foundation of ethnocentrism and intolerance; when you only know of those like yourself, it is easy to imagine that you are alone in the world or alone in being good and right in the world. Exposure to diversity, on the contrary, is the basis for relativism and tolerance; when you are forced to face and accept the Other as real, unavoidable, and ultimately valuable, you cannot help but see yourself and your 'truths' in a new - and trouble - way.
Jack David Eller
The idea of “art for art’s sake” is a recent Western cultural phenomenon that in some ways both distracts and diminishes the reality of human creative expressions. If we define art broadly, then it permeates virtually every aspect of our lives. All of us search for and attempt to create that which is aesthetically pleasing; thus, we are all “artists.
James Peoples
China uses about half of the world’s cement for its new roads and buildings.According to the World Bank in 2007, China had 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities.One day in January 2013, the air pollution index in Beijing was 755—measured on a scale of 0 to 500!In late 2012, 16,000 dead pigs were found floating in the river that supplies water toShanghai, the PRC’s largest city. For 2010, a ministry of the Chinese government estimated the monetary cost of the environmental damage caused by rapid industrialization at $230 billion, which is 3.5 percent of China’s gross domestic product.Air pollution from Chinese factories wafts over to the Koreas and Japan. Sometimes, upper atmospheric winds carry the sulphur dioxide from China’s coal-burning clear over to North America’s west coast.
James Peoples
In Japan:The shortage of wives for farmers became a rural crisis. In one village in the late 1980s, of unmarried persons between ages 25 and 39, 120 were men and only 31 were women, a ratio of 4:1. Some Japanese villages organized to find wives for their bachelors. One mountain village placed newspaper ads, promising free winter skiing vacations to all young women who visited and agreed to meet its men. Over a fiveyear period, 300 women responded, but none became wives of a villageman. In another mountain village of 7,000, there were three bachelors for every unmarried woman, so the local government became a marriage agent. It brought in 22 women from the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and other Asian countries to marry its men, many in their 40s and 50s. Some marriages endured, but others ended in divorce because of the labor demands of farm life, the burden wives bore in caring for their husband’s elderly parents, and cultural differences. Small businesses developed that offered counseling services for bicultural couples and served as marriage brokers to match Japanese men with foreign women. Even today, many Japanese farm men remain bachelors. Farming in Japan is now primarily a part-time occupation—farmers find off-season jobs in construction or other tasks, unable to make an acceptable living even with government subsidies. And farming is now largely performed by older persons. For example, in one important rice-growing area, between 1980 and 2003, the number of people making most of their money from farming fell by 56 percent, and the number of people between ages 15 and 59 fell by 83 percent. There was one increase, though: there were 600 more farmers older than 70 in 2003 than in 1980.
James Peoples
Eat good food, keep moving, and let your body take care of the rest.
Stephen Le
All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up.
Carlos Castañeda
All of the people took it up and sung it over and over until it was wrung dry, and no further innovations of tone and tempo were conceivable. Then they hushed and ate barbecue.
Zora Neale Hurston
In insisting that personal habit and political action be one and the same, absolutist moralizing limits the possibilities of both.
Heather Paxson
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Revolutionary moments often seem to occur in history when large numbers of individuals have a change in consciousness, regarding themselves and their status
Robert Trivers
Through their donations and work for voluntary organizations, the charitable rich exert enormous influence in society. As philanthropists, they acquire status within and outside of their class. Although private wealth is the basis of the hegemony of this group, philanthropy is essential to the maintenance and perpetuation of the upper class in the United States. In this sense, nonprofit activities are the nexus of a modern power elite.
Teresa Odendahl
Let the sun go down on you like King Harold at the battle of Hastings — fighting gloriously. Maybe a loser but what a loser! Greater in defeat than the conqueror. Certainly not a coward that rusted out lurking in his tent.
Zora Neale Hurston
We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are. ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty. I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake.
Gregory Bateson
Later that summer, as rain fell, such a moment shimmered and paused on the brink, and then began the ancient dance of numbers: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and a new life took root and began to grow. And thus the generations past were joined to the unknowable future.
Mary Doria Russell
What we had actually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.
Clifford Geertz
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Tain't no use in you cryin' . . . But folks is meant to cry 'bout somethin' or other. Better leave things de way dey is. Youse young yet. No tellin' whut mout happen befo' you die.
Zora Neale Hurston
Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain
Zora Neale Hurston