17 quotes
One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when we have separated them from this dross.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
I hate travelling and explorers.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Men can coexist on condition that they recognize each other as being all equally, though differently, human, but they can also coexist by denying each other a comparable degree of humanity, and thus establishing a system of subordination.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Once men begin to feel cramped in their geographical, social and mental habitat, they are in danger of being tempted by the simple solution of denying one section of the species the right to be considered as human. This allows the rest a little elbow-room for a few more decades.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize — because they set so little store by them — the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
The police are not entrusted with a mission which differentiates them from those they serve. Being unconcerned with ultimate purposes, they are inseparable from the persons and interests of their masters, and shine with their reflected glory.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between the individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point — more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance — and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)