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

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

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

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

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

I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.

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