The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats. — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being. — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use… — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only… — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles… — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings. — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as… — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic. — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to… — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance… — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man. — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity. — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion. — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime. — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed… — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough. — James G. Frazer Copy Share Image
