Science sometimes improves hypotheses and sometimes disproves them. But proof would be another matter and perhaps never occurs except in the realms of totally abstract tautology. We can sometimes say that if such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such must follow absolutely. But the truth about what can be perceived or arrived at by induction from perception is something else again.

Without context words and actions have no meaning at all

It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.

There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.

There are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching the holy.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.