Claude Lévi-Strauss Quotes

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The world began without the human race and it will end without it.... Man has never—save only when he reproduces himself—done other than cheerfully dismantle million upon million of structures and reduce their elements to a state in which they can no longer be reintegrated.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point — more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance — and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also — for better or for worse — takes us out of our class context, so that the colour and flavour of certain places cannot be dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Adventure has no place in the anthropologists profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or month.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
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