Peter Farb Short Quotes

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The Shoshone did not wage war, because it served no purpose.

Peter Farb
The more simple the society, the more leisured its way of life.

Peter Farb
An isolated human in a simple society is usually a dead human...

Peter Farb
Culture is all the things and ideas ever devised by humans working and living together.

Peter Farb
Each language encourages its speakers to tell certain things and to ignore other things.

Peter Farb
Sharing is a kinsman's or a friend's obligation, and it is not in the category of a gift.

Peter Farb
The environment does not determine the character of human culture; it merely sets the outer limits.

Peter Farb
Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

Peter Farb
Experiments... have shown that at least one aspect of human thought—memory—is strongly influenced by language.

Peter Farb
Thinking is language spoken to oneself. Until language has made sense of an experience, that experience is meaningless.

Peter Farb
A complex society is not necessarily more advanced than a simple one; it has just adapted to conditions in a more complicated way.

Peter Farb
Marriage is simply an economic necessity, and so there are no elaborate courtship displays or marriage celebrations among the Eskimo.

Peter Farb
Complex civilization is hectic... such hunters and collectors of wild food as the Shoshone are among the most leisured people on earth.

Peter Farb
An invention or new combination can be successful only if all if the elements necessary for the recombination are present in the culture.

Peter Farb
At the time of the Europeans discovery of North America, the American Indians already cultivated a wider variety of plants than did the Europeans.

Peter Farb
The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms.

Peter Farb
No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

Peter Farb
The most imposing characteristic of the Mississipian is the pyramidal mound, built not to cover a burial but as a foundation for a temple or a chief's house.

Peter Farb
... they were set off on a thousand mile march—called to this day "the trail of tears" by the Cherokee—that was one of the notable death marches in history.

Peter Farb
An inability to communicate has little to do with international friction-as is seen in the special ferocity of wars fought between people who speak the same language.

Peter Farb
In place of science, the Eskimo has only magic to bridge the gap between what he can understand and what is not known. Without magic, his life would be one long panic.

Peter Farb
To say that the invention "was in the air" or "the times were ripe for it" are just other ways of stating that the inventors did not do the inventing, but that the cultures did.

Peter Farb
When today's remnants of Indian societies are examined closely, it is seen how well some have worked out a compromise with their White conquerors—acculturation without assimilation.

Peter Farb
The astonishing cluster of them [geniuses] that appeared in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B. C.... what changed was the culture, which allowed exceptional minds to flourish.

Peter Farb
A central assumption of this book has been that to examine the experience of humans throughout their 25,000 years on this continent is to hold up a mirror to the culture of Modern America.

Peter Farb