The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.

The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.