Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.