Best Clifford Geertz Quotes
- I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world American
- I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and… Critic
- I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done Beginning
- Culture is public, because meaning is Culture
- I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity Diversity
- Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars Anthropology
- A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear. Better
- As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain,… Agony
- To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it… Achievement
- We don't know what we think until we see what we say. Funny
- The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive. Anthropology
- People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous. Anthropology
- I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive… Alive
- I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves. Africa
- I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it. Accused
- The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician… Beauty
- The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more… African
- Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed. Constructed
- It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is… Cultural
- Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. Analysis
- There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the… Ah
- One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds… All
- Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. Animal
- Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular… Been
- We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in… Anthropology