Peter Farb Quotes

18 quotes in 353 categories

• Food to a large extent is what holds a society together, and eating is closely linked to deep spiritual experiences.
• Men in all societies possess the biological equipment to remove their hats or shoes, but it is the birth within a particular culture that decides…
• Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the…
• An inability to communicate has little to do with international friction-as is seen in the special ferocity of wars fought between people who speak the…
• Gestures and facial expressions do indeed communicate, as anyone can prove by turning off the sound on a television set and asking watchers to characterize…
• Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.
• No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from…
• At every moment of his life the Shoshone must be careful to observe the complicated folkways of his group, to do reverence to superhuman powers,…
• Despite the theories traditionally taught in high-school social studies, the truth is: the more primitive the society, the more leisured its way of life.
• The dictionary is a closed system in which someone interested in the meaning of a word can go around and around and end up exactly…
• The environment does not determine man's culture; it merely sets the outer limits and at the same time offers opportunities.
• Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly…
• People who speak the same language can hate one another as easily as can people who speak unrelated languages.
• An invention or new combination can be successful only if all if the elements necessary for the recombination are present in the culture.
• Marriage is simply an economic necessity, and so there are no elaborate courtship displays or marriage celebrations among the Eskimo.
• In place of science, the Eskimo has only magic to bridge the gap between what he can understand and what is not known. Without magic,…
• A complex society is not necessarily more advanced than a simple one; it has just adapted to conditions in a more complicated way.
• Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these…

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