Edward Sapir

All culture is a matter of style.

The true business of life is to do what we ought, but to refuse to count the cost.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, but it is more than that; it is the key to understanding the human mind.

We have more or less the problem of truth. Nobody has the courage to face it.

The child learns to speak not because he is told to, but because he must.

Culture is the sum total of the learned behavior of a group of people.

In the end, it is the individual who creates culture, not the other way around.

Language shapes our perception of the world more than we realize.

The essence of culture is the sense of proportion.

To study language is to study the soul of a people.

Progress in civilization has been too often identified with the growth of machinery.

I am convinced that the real interest of the anthropologist is in the problem of the relation between personality and culture.

The history of a science is largely the history of its successive attempts to free itself from theology.

Every language is the crystallization of a culture.

The function of speech is to free the mind from the burden of memory.

In a sense, culture is a lie we tell ourselves about who we are.

The linguist is interested in the structure of language, not in its beauty or ugliness.

Life is too short for bad coffee and bad language.

Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.

The great virtue of anthropology is that it teaches us to see ourselves as others see us.