Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

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

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity

[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.

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

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world