British Anthropologist Quotes

Alfred Russel Wallace

Jane Goodall

Howard Carter

David Harvey

Mary Leakey

Mary Douglas

Ashley Montagu

Thus, if a composer wants to produce music that is relevant to his contemporaries, his chief problem is not really musical, though it may seem to him to be so; it is a problem of attitude to contemporary society and culture in relation to the basic human problem of learning to be human.

Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, "edgemen," who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact or imagination. In their productions we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalized and fixed in structure.

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

Frederic Wood Jones

The smell of roasting meat together with that of burning fruit wood and dried herbs, as voluptuous as incense in a church, is enough to turn anyone into a budding gastronome

Fortunately, there is so much underground still. It is a vast place, and there is plenty more under the surface for future generations that are better educated.

The African presence in America before Columbus is of importance not only to African and American history but to the history of world civilizations. It provides further evidence that all great civilizations and races are heavily indebted to one another and that no race has a monopoly on enterprise and inventive genius.

Ivan Van Sertima

Since science has no value agenda of its own it is always subject to hijacking by fanaticism and idealism.

There are no closed frontiers between intellectual approaches. Only closed minds which refuse to cross them.

Institutions have the pathetic megalomania of the computer whose whole vision of the world is its own program.

Certainly the Thracians and the Illyrians were non-Greek speakers, but in the northwest, the peoples of Molossis (Epirot province), Orestis and Lynkestis spoke West Greek. It is also accepted that the Macedonians spoke a dialect of Greek and although they absorbed other groups into their territory, they were essentially Greeks.

The main principle by which human beings must guide the future course of their development is love.

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

In the relentless search for advancement and material progress we have perhaps alienated ourselves from our Earth. I feeltingly witnessed this innate appreciation of belonging when the Colombian Indians greeted strangers on a street in Bogatá. Tribal people are the beacons that illuminate the importance of these connections. If we destroy them, we smother these lights, and so make our future far less human. I believe their survival, far from being a fringe concern, is one of the greatest humanitarian concerns of our time.

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.

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

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

And I thought how sad it was that, for all our sophisticated intellect, for all our noble aspirations, our aggressive behavior was not just similar in many ways to that of the chimpanzees - it was even worse. Worse because human beings have the potential to rise above their baser instincts, whereas chimpanzees probably do not.

Nowhere is Universalism welcomed and encouraged by a people; everywhere governments have forced and are forcing Universalism upon unwilling and resistant subjects.