Edmund Leach Quotes

• Men do not have to cook their food; they do so for symbolic reasons to show they are men and not beasts.

  Edmund Leach

  Men, Beast, Reason

  Edmund Leach (1989). “Claude Levi-Strauss”, p.102, University of Chicago Press

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• How can a modern anthropologist embark upon a generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion? By thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as a mathematical pattern.

  Edmund Leach

  Hope, Math, Thinking

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• Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.

  Edmund Leach

  Secret, Privacy, Source

  BBC Reith Lectures, 1967, in 'Listener' 30 November 1967

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• The violence in the world comes about because we human beings are forever creating barriers between men who are like us and men who are not like us.

  Edmund Leach

  Men, Creating, Forever

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• Truth is a totality, the sum of many overlapping partial images. History, on the other hand, sacrifices totality in the interest of continuity.

  Edmund Leach

  Sacrifice, Hands, Truth Is

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