Claude Lévi-Strauss quotes - page 2

I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I', no ‘me.' Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance. (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
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. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
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. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
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. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are "good to eat" but because they are "good to think." View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The entire village left the next day in about thirty canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The police are not entrusted with a mission which differentiates them from those they serve. (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when we have separated them from this dross. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
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. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
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. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation; and we believe we have made great spiritual progress because, instead of eating a few of our fellow-men, we subject them to physical and moral mutilation. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The idea behind structuralism is that there are things we may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Adventure has no place in the anthropologists profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
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. It displaces us physically and also - for better or for worse - takes us out of our class context, so that the colour and flavour of certain places cannot be dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Our science arrived at maturity the day that Western man began to see that he would never understand himself as long as there was a single race or people on the surface of the earth that he treated as an object. Only then could anthropology declare itself in its true colours: as an enterprise reviewing and atoning for the Renaissance, in order to spread humanism to all humanity. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The idea behind structuralism is that there are things we may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other. This has been used by science since it existed and can be extended to a few other studies - linguistics and mythology - but certainly not to everything. The great speculative structures are made to be broken. There is not one of them that can hope to last more than a few decades, or at most a century or two. (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
Logically, the "infantilization" of the culprit implied by the notion of punishment demands that he should have a corresponding right to a reward, in the absence of which the initial procedure will prove ineffective and may even lead to results contrary to those that were hoped for. Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation; and we believe we have made great spiritual progress because, instead of eating a few of our fellow-men, we subject them to physical and moral mutilation. View quote
Claude Lévi-Strauss