I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one

We don't know what we think until we see what we say.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Culture is public, because meaning is

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.

There are things which couldn't be expressed by the words, when you've mastered certain lesson for more than 30 years.

People need meaning as much as they need air. Lucky for us, we can give meaning to each other for free. Just by being alive.

I already accepted that I relate to nothing. The more I gain, the more lonely it is I know I'm like a ghost.

Worrying about tomorrow is the best way to screw up today.

Whatever you want to teach, be brief.

... Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote - the Daguerreotype. (1845)

I always tell people I'm running against two Democrats, one that admits it and one that does not.

The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn-the less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything.