Men in all societies possess the biological equipment to remove their hats or shoes, but it is the birth within a particular culture that decides that a Jew will keep his hat and shoes on in his place of worship, a Mohammedan will take off his shoes, and a Christian will keep his shoes on but remove his hat.

Marriage is simply an economic necessity, and so there are no elaborate courtship displays or marriage celebrations among the Eskimo.

Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly they make the same mistakes in their own speech, but they know-unconsciously, not as a set of rules they learned in school-when a sentence is incorrect.

People who speak the same language can hate one another as easily as can people who speak unrelated languages.

Despite the theories traditionally taught in high-school social studies, the truth is: the more primitive the society, the more leisured its way of life.

In place of science, the Eskimo has only magic to bridge the gap between what he can understand and what is not known. Without magic, his life would be one long panic.

Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.