"I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?'"
— Margaret Mead

"Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is."
— Clifford Geertz

"[The web] is not just about information, [it] is actually about linking people, and about linking people in ways that we've never been linked before."
— Mike Wesch

"Interviewer: Have you ever considered writing nonfiction?
Mary Doria Russell: Oh, honey, I did! Let's see...There was "A Reconsideration of the Evidence for Cannibalism at the Krapina Neandertal Site." That was a big hit. And who could ever forget "Cutmarks on the Engis II Calvarium"? Then there was "Browridge Development as a Function of Bending Stress in the Supraorbital Region." I got tons of reprint requests for that one.

Trust me fiction is better."
— Mary Doria Russell

"If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it."
— Robert Wright

"All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer"
— Robert Owen

"[T]he more individual we become, the more we long for [...] community."
— Mike Wesch

"Alle äußeren Feinde und Widerstände ermangelnd, eingesperrt in unterdrückende Enge und Ordnung, hat der Mensch schließlich keine andere Wahl, als sich selbst zu einem Abenteuer zu machen."
— J.M. Coetzee (In the Heart of the Country)

"I figured it out. In my head. While eating a cup-a-soup."
— BONES

"The pure products of America
go crazy...

...[] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car"
— William Carlos Williams

"We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature," but the study of emic realities shows, quite the contraty, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such."
— Robert Anton Wilson

"It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found."
— Clifford Geertz

"If there is a single thing, a common land that all of us are seeking, it is an anthropology without exiles."
— Ruth Behar