Lancelot Hogben Quotes

Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather than from the genes they pass to us.

Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

It is, indeed, perhaps the greatest prospect of humanistic studies to contribute through an increasing knowledge of the history of cultural development to that gradual removal of prejudices which is the common aim of all science.

I always thought that in the countries that the modernity kicks in later, it seems that everything changes on the surface, the physical things change, but inside, things haven't changed, really. This is always the challenge of this kind of community, to make a harmony between the cultural traditions and the modernity of modern life.

The people of Iran have been battling against consecutive conflicts between tradition and modernity for over 100 years... some have tried and are trying to see the world through the eyes of their predecessors and to deal with the problems and difficulties of the existing world by virtue of the values of the ancients... many others...seek to go forth in step with world developments and not lag behind the caravan of civilization, development and progress.

Anthropology studies different cultures; mainly primitive, but it doesn't think its own culture is primitive, unfortunately. There is no field that you can study today that isn't trapped in the culture in some way. It's hard to escape your culture.

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.

Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.

Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community, and it's my responsibility to make it better.

We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health or longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.

More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.

Why didn't evolution make a giraffe good at carpentry so it could build a ladder?

Philosophy is that part of science which at present people chose to have opinions about, but which they have no knowledge about. Therefore every advance in knowledge robs philosophy of some problems which formerly it had ...and will belong to science.

The way in which a society organizes the life of its members ... is one "project" of realization among others. But once the project has become operative in the basic institutions and relations, it tends to become exclusive and to determine the development of the society as a whole.

There is nothing more mysterious about the concept human nature than about the concept bee or chicken nature, at least for those who regard humans as creatures in the biological world.

When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.

The betterment of society is not a job to be left to a few. It's a responsibility to be shared by all.

When it comes to people -- don't write about who you know; but what you know of human nature.

The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences

Mainstream culture is like your mom: It's always a little late to catch on and gets easily confused by technology, but it means well.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be. . . .