There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Categorized in : Animal Poison Finishing

The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

Claude Levi-Strauss

wisdom wise inspirational

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Claude Levi-Strauss

logic language men

The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.

Claude Levi-Strauss

atheism fear men

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

Claude Levi-Strauss

criticism numbers thinking

Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.

Claude Levi-Strauss

musical language men

I am the place in which something has occurred.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.

Claude Levi-Strauss

economy what-matters century

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.

Claude Levi-Strauss

technology giving science

Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.

Claude Levi-Strauss

finals forget science

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

Claude Levi-Strauss

groups men science

Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.

Claude Levi-Strauss

reducing understanding reality

Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.

Claude Levi-Strauss

flower men two

Animals are good to think with.

Claude Levi-Strauss

dog-lover animal thinking

For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society.

Claude Levi-Strauss

development historical yesterday

Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.

Claude Levi-Strauss

heart adventure country

Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.

Claude Levi-Strauss

knowing-nothing fashion past

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.

Claude Levi-Strauss

conviction poverty intellectual

The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.

Claude Levi-Strauss

country people firsts

Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

Claude Levi-Strauss

doubt science knowledge

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.

Claude Levi-Strauss

music character mean