47 quotes
Freedom of speech does not exist anywhere, for every community on earth forbids the use of certain sounds, words, and sentences in various speech situations.
Word Play (1974)
Culture is all the things and ideas ever devised by humans working and living together.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
What most impresses the people around the prophet is the personality change he has undergone.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
An unusual manifestation of it is when the whole dominant culture takes up the ways of the conquered.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
For a tribe to endure, it must find some way to achieve internal unity—and that way usually is external strife.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
We are in the habit of thinking in terms of great leaders largely because the leaders themselves want it that way.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Balanced reciprocity is as much a social compact as it is an economic advantage.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
The food-production revolution turns out to be a slow evolution, a long period of experimentation rather than a sudden explosion.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
In the far north, where humans must face the constant threat of starvation, where life is reduced to the bare essentials—it turns out that one of these essentials is art.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
The environment does not determine the character of human culture; it merely sets the outer limits.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
The more simple the society, the more leisured its way of life.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Sharing is a kinsman's or a friend's obligation, and it is not in the category of a gift.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Each language encourages its speakers to tell certain things and to ignore other things.
Word Play (1974)
The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms.
Word Play (1974)
To say that the invention "was in the air" or "the times were ripe for it" are just other ways of stating that the inventors did not do the inventing, but that the cultures did.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Hospitality and sharing were characteristic of all Indian societies.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
One of the things that amazed the earliest explorers, almost without exception, was the hospitality with which Indians received them.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
The problem they had to solve was the same as any messianic movement: how to exist with an alien culture yet remain spiritually autonomous.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
They expressed the hope that they would be permitted to enjoy in peace "the blessings of civilization and Christianity on the soil of their rightful inheritance."
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
An isolated human in a simple society is usually a dead human...
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)