Anthropology Quotes

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.

I studied anthropology and art history, as I have always been captivated by living traditions.

Ever since I was a kid, I've had an enormous interest in the sciences - everything from quantum physics to anthropology.

I had a doctorate in biological anthropology. I got a post-doc at CWRU dental school in 1983 teaching gross anatomy.

In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.

A free throw seems boring but then when you sort of dig into what's going on and the history and psychology and the social anthropology around the free throw - it's interesting.

Well, we are terribly divided politically, yes, and, you know, I don't mean to intimidate you and your listeners but I have a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago.

There is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human.

To gain an understanding of the mind leads on to an appreciation of what it means to be human.

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.

All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.

The ultimate truth is mystical truth, the ultimate reality is sacred chaos. - Muzwot

It is the character of lived experience I want to explore, not the nature of man.

[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

An encounter with other cultures can lead to openness only if you can suspend the assumption of superiority, not seeing new worlds to conquer, but new worlds to respect.

Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.

It's because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That's the reason.

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...

Anyhow, many people in the soft sciences are prone to be wrong because they’re crazy** some are dumb, too, but that’s another story.

The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!

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.

The ultimate truth is mystical truth, the ultimate reality is sacred chaos.

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

I was an American girl

It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - except when they are different.

All social interactions require some loss of freedom.

Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.

There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage.