19th-century Anthropologist Quotes

Alfred Russel Wallace

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach

Rudolf Virchow

Howard Carter

Franz Boas

James Frazer

Edward Burnett Tylor

The clarification of concepts... directly gauges scientific progress.

A lizard maiden Was thirsty and crying. A gila monster ran up And comforted her. The maiden stopped crying. The monster carried her off And took her to wife.

So, in short, the real equipment of an archaeologist is a scientific mind.

History is principally the inaccurate narration of events which ought not to have happened.

At the end of a long day's march, one of the soldiers, hot, thirsty and utterly weary, was heard to exclaim: "What did God Almighty make such a country for?" To which one of his companions made the reply that "God Almighty made the country good enough, but it's this infernal geology that the professor talks about that has spoiled it all."

George Bird Grinnell

A scientist who is no longer capable of framing a hypothesis — or never was — is not a scientist but a methodological fossil.

Alexander Goldenweiser (anthropologist)

The growth of property and the desire for its transmission to children was, in reality, the moving power which brought in monogamy to insure legitimate heirs, and to limit their number to the actual progeny of the married pair.

Lewis H. Morgan

Whoever wins to a great scientific truth will find a poet before him in the quest.

Frederic Wood Jones

It must be made possible for the one to live vicariously the life of the many from the beginning.

The phenomena of the universe, brought within the range of human understanding and preserved in memory or writing, constitute knowledge; and systematic search for knowledge, on the basis of the highest standards of learning, is science.

Aleš Hrdlička

Religion is a disease. It is born of fear; it compensates through hate in the guise of authority, revelation. Religion, enthroned in a powerful social organization, can become incredibly sadistic. No religion has been more cruel than the Christian.

George Amos Dorsey

The residue of possible findings is a sort of condensed social history.

Alfred L. Kroeber

To gather and describe antiquities, although thoroughly and intelligently done, is by no means all of archaeology. True, these are to archaeology what the unfashioned and unadjusted materials of which the house is to be built are to the house, but they are not the house.

I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam.

Fear of change is a part of the state of fear man has ever lived in but out of which he has begun to escape. Civilization might be defined indeed as the steps in his escape.

Elsie Clews Parsons

What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.

Both magic and religion are based strictly on mythological tradition, and they also both exist in the atmosphere of the miraculous, in a constant revelation of their wonder-working power. They both are surrounded by taboos and observances which mark off their acts from those of the profane world.

Bronisław Malinowski

The land of a god corresponds with the land of his worshipers.

William Robertson Smith

The hell of human suffering, evil and oppression is paved with good intentions. The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all in their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions.

Robert Briffault

Anthropology is the child of Darwin. Darwinism makes it possible. Reject the Darwinian point of view, and you must reject anthropology also.

Robert Ranulph Marett

I think at the moment we did not even want to break the seal [on the inner chamber of the tomb of Tutankhamen], for a feeling of intrusion had descended heavily upon us... We felt that we were in the presence of the dead King and must do him reverence, and in imagination could see the doors of the successive shrines open one.

National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry.

Species are merely those strongly marked races or local forms which, when in contact, do not intermix, and when inhabiting distinct areas are generally regarded to have had a separate origin, and to be incapable of producing a fertile hybrid offspring.

Alfred Russel Wallace

The habit of building houses upon piles, which was first forced upon the people by the position they had chosen, was afterwards followed as a matter of taste, just as it is in Holland.

Edward Burnett Tylor

There can be no scientific dispute with respect to faith, for science and faith exclude one another.