Great Throughts Treasury

"Science offers us complete mastery over our environment and our own destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid. Why should this be?"

"Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents."

"How can a modern anthropologist embark upon a generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion? By thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as a mathematical pattern."

"The violence in the world comes about because we human beings are forever creating barriers between men who are like us and men who are not like us."

"Men do not have to cook their food; they do so for symbolic reasons to show they are men and not beasts."

"Truth is a totality, the sum of many overlapping partial images. History, on the other hand, sacrifices totality in the interest of continuity."