Peter Farb Quotes

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

The most distinguished hallmark of the American society is and always has been change.

Nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies. Almost everything about the way culture works does.

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

It's like a 'chicken or the egg' thing. We're all part of the culture. We're reflecting it; we're changing it. So, yeah, I think culture is always changing.

Every social organisation which is rooted in life still lasts a long time, even after the conditions from which it drew its strength have changed in a manner unfavourable to it.

Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.

I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.

Culture more than politics determines the success of the society, but politics can save the culture.

A society based on … reality must reconcile in its life, the categories of permanence and change.

The general idea of history seems to be that it is the biography of a society…. History is to the common life of many what biography is to an individual.

We see culture as a self-organising thing.

My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.

Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.

With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Social evolution may be the result of intention, but it rarely, if ever, produces the result intended.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.