The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical

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

I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.

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

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it