Claude Lévi-Strauss - Human Quotes

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Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize — because they set so little store by them — the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

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

Claude Lévi-Strauss
These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Claude Lévi-Strauss