“You can no longer save your family, tribe or nation. You can only save the whole world.”

My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.

Sooner or later I’m going to die, but I’m not going to retire.

Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.

in all cultures, human beings – in order to be human – must understand the nonhuman.

Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.

The negative cautions of science are never popular.

We need every human gift and cannot afford to neglect any gift because of artificial barriers of sex or race or class or national origin.

It is easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.

It used to be when we said, ”til death do us part,’ death parted us pretty soon. That’s why marriages used to last forever. Everybody was dead.

Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.

The ability to learn is older as it is also more widespread than is the ability to teach.

We end up with the contradictory picture of a society that appears to throw its doors wide open to women, but translates her every step towards success as having been damaging.

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.

I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples – faraway peoples – so that Americans might better understand themselves.

We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.