Sigmund Freud Quotes

Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.

I consider myself something of a self-taught anthropologist.

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - except when they are different.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.

In 1981, while doing postdoctoral field work in cultural anthropology, Bonnie A. Nardi lived with villagers in Western Samoa, trying to understand the cultural reasons that people there have an average of eight children.

I have no doubt that if you were to ask a cannibal, he would plead his religion for the heinous acts he does.

This proposal will destroy our Islamic, social and family values by stripping men of their humanity when they surprise their wives or female relatives committing adultery.

We do not discriminate concerning marriage in the South; we simply do not let the whites and Negroes intermarry. We treat the white the same as the Negro.

Proceed not to the solemnization of the marriage without the consent of the parents or governors

Our law requires no solemnity or form in regard to the marriage of slaves, and whether they ‘take up’ with each other, by the express permission of their owners, or from a mere impulse of nature…cannot, in contemplation of law, make any sort of difference.

[Marriage is] something more than a mere contract. It is rather to be deemed an institution of society, founded upon consent and contract of the parties.

[Marriage is] an institution, in the maintenance of which in its purity the public is deeply interested.

Marriage, as creating the most important relation in life, as having more to do with the morals and civilization of a people than any other institution, has always been subject to the control of the legislature.

It is an act of hubris to believe that marriage can be infinitely malleable, that it can be pushed and pulled around like silly-putty without destroying its essential stability and what it means to our society, and if marriage goes, then the family goes, and if the family goes, we have none of the decency or ordered liberty which Americans have been brought up to enjoy and to appreciate.

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.

Just as states should not make laws based on race of who should be able to marry, they should not make laws based on sex about who can marry.

Ethnology: The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.

Women went to market with their virginity.

It is universal to give gifts as an expression of love. My academic background is anthropology, the study of cultures. We have never discovered a culture where gift-giving is not an expression of love.

In Hungary, if homosexuals would like to live together, they can do so under the civil code. But what we call marriage is exclusively for one man and one woman. We are a Christian country. That's a historical fact.

In marriage, a woman becomes the weaker sex, even if her husband doesn't want her to be. This happens because of the way society has built the institution.

Why would I need to have sex on TV for my living? No Indian should do this; I can't do such things.