I have always used the world of make-believe with a certain desperation.

In a day of footloose movements of people and of mixed marriages in the ancestry of the most desirable elements of the community we preach unabashed the gospel of the pure race.

War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex

An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.

A man's indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.