If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one

A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

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

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology