Browse Quotes

The opposition between nature and culture, far from being a universal given, is a specific feature of Western modernity.

The mimetic faculty is the nature that culture uses to create second nature.

Culture is a deeply compromised idea I cannot do without.

The concept of 'religion' is a modern construct, a product of specific historical forces and intellectual traditions, particularly in the West.

The problem with 'culture' is that it is a concept that has been used to essentialize and exoticize others, to create boundaries and hierarchies.

Culture is not a pristine text but a contested zone, a site of struggle where different groups vie for the power to define and represent reality.

The original affluent society is not one in which all the people's material wants are easily satisfied, but rather one in which they are few.

The function of culture is to make life secure and continuous for the human species.

The cultural core includes those features of culture that are most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements.

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

Culture is superorganic.

Of all men's misfortunes, the bitterest is to know much and to be impotent.

Globalization is not just about the global; it is also about the national and the local, and the specific ways in which these scales are reconfigured.

Gender is not a thing, but a way of organizing social practice.

Risk society is not an option, it is a destiny.

The 'individual' and 'society' are not two separate entities, but two different aspects of the same human reality.

The reaper shall harvest the fields of tomorrow as surely as the sun rises.

It is by no means an accident that the concept of ideology emerged in a period of acute social conflict.

Love is the most powerful creative force in the universe. It is the foundation of all true community, all genuine progress, and all lasting happiness.

The problem of sociology is to understand how society works, how it maintains itself, and how it changes.