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In the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Radin first described it as "shamans being half mad," shamans being "healed madmen." This fits exactly.

— Robert Sapolsky Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)

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More quotes by Robert Sapolsky

Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)

The notion of the psychopathology of the shaman works just as readily in understanding the roots of major Western religions as well.

The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)

From the very moment of your life, culture is leaving an imprint on who you are.

The Neuroscience Behind Behavior (2017)

We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything.

Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)

Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Sapolsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.