Claude Lévi-Strauss Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

The police are not entrusted with a mission which differentiates them from those they serve. Being unconcerned with ultimate purposes, they are inseparable from the persons and interests of their masters, and shine with their reflected glory.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The entire village left the next day in about thirty canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Language is a form of human reason, and has its reasons which are unknown to man.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between the individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished... The first thing we see as we travel around the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

Claude Lévi-Strauss