Edmund Leach

"The study of culture requires both sympathy and skepticism in equal measure."

"We are creatures who cannot live without creating stories about why we exist."

"The sacred cannot be separated from power; every ritual is an assertion of authority."

"To understand another person is to understand that they are not really another person."

"Anthropology is the art of seeing the obvious as if it were strange."

"Every culture invents its own concept of the human; none are universal."

"The function of religion is not to explain the world but to organize society."

"We are the only animals who need to believe in order to survive."

"The anthropologist must learn to think in many ways without believing in any."

"What makes us human is not reason, but the creation of meaning."

"Exchange creates relationships; economics attempts to explain exchange without reference to relationship."

"Every human society must determine what is food and what is poison; this is the beginning of culture."

"The past is not dead; it is barely conscious in the present."

"Ritual is the language in which humans speak to themselves about their own society."

"We are the animals that cannot not create meaning; meaning-making is our nature."

"To study one's own culture is to practice a peculiar kind of egoism."

"The anthropologist is a professional stranger who learns to be strange at home."

"Culture is the system of meanings that allows humans to be human."

"What appears as tradition is often merely the forgetting of how contingent everything is."

"The sacred is what we dare not touch; the profane is what we can destroy without guilt."

"Human societies are solutions to the problem of how to make life meaningful."

"Language is the technology that allowed humans to become human."

"The study of kinship is the study of how humans transform biology into culture."

"We are all natives in our own culture; some of us simply know it and others don't."

"Ritual creates the illusion of order in an ordered world, but the illusion is necessary."

"The anthropologist must practice what I call 'controlled distance' from all cultures."

"What we call progress is merely the shedding of one set of illusions for another."

"The function of myth is to transform the contingent into the necessary."

"Every human group creates boundaries; the content of those boundaries is immaterial."

"We are creatures who create meaning and then suffer under its weight."