James G. Frazer

But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be…

— James G. Frazer

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his…

— James G. Frazer

Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on…

— James G. Frazer

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

— James G. Frazer

For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such…

— James G. Frazer

I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.

— James G. Frazer

The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time…

— James G. Frazer

The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at…

— James G. Frazer

The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.

— James G. Frazer

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

For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.

— James G. Frazer

If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.

— James G. Frazer

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of…

— James G. Frazer

The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

— James G. Frazer

The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden…

— James G. Frazer

The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a…

— James G. Frazer

In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has…

— James G. Frazer

From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena…

— James G. Frazer

Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.

— James G. Frazer

The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.

— James G. Frazer

The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not…

— James G. Frazer

Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life.

— James G. Frazer

The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague,…

— James G. Frazer

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

— James G. Frazer

The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not…

— James G. Frazer