Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.
Claude Levi-StraussScientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.
Claude Levi-StraussWith all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.
Claude Levi-StraussThe dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.
Claude Levi-Strauss