Samoa culture demonstrates how much the tragic or the easy solution of the Oedipus situation depends upon the inter-relationship between parents and children, and is not created out of whole cloth by the young child's biological impulses.

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

War is only an invention, not a biological necessity.

The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for maturing of sexual feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer.

Envy of the male role can come as much from an undervaluation of the role of wife and mother as from an overvaluation of the public aspects of achievement that have been reserved for men.

I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples - faraway peoples - so that Americans might better understand themselves.

Loving you is just like breathing, as effortless, and as lovely.