Edmund Leach

"The relationship between the dancer and the dance is too close for the dancer to see it."

"If we regard human beings as machines, we can have no morality."

"The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he possesses the faculty for discovering them."

"Culture is communication; communication is culture."

"We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and should not be counted."

"The truth is that we use different languages to talk about different aspects of reality."

"Ritual, which is a means to an end, must be respected as an end in itself."

"Religion in its pure form is a search for truth."

"The anthropologist must have a vision of the world that does not depend on the accident of his birth."

"We cannot understand society without understanding the role of imagination."

"Modernism is a secular religion."

"The function of ritual is to transform understanding into belief."

"Language is the means by which culture is transmitted."

"All societies are equal but some are more organized than others."

"The sacred and the profane are not opposites but categories of understanding."

"We should not impose our morality on other cultures."

"Symbols are the currency of human communication."

"The modern world is characterized by the loss of sacred space."

"Kinship is the fundamental organizing principle of all human society."

"We construct our world through language and then forget that we have done so."

"The anthropologist is a translator between cultures."

"Ritual creates order from chaos."

"The meaning of a symbol lies in its use, not in its intrinsic properties."

"Culture is a system of meanings and symbols."

"We are all products of our culture, yet we must learn to transcend it."

"The boundary between nature and culture is artificial."

"All human behavior has meaning if we look deeply enough."

"Society is held together by shared beliefs and common rituals."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

"Language shapes our perception of reality."