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."

"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."

No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.

"Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize. . . the immense riches accumulated by the human race. . . . By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished."

"The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space."