“‎ When a person is born we rejoice, and when they’re married we jubilate, but when they die we try to pretend nothing has happened.”

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.

You just have to learn not to care about the dusty mites under the beds.

No country that permits firearms to be widely and randomly distributed among its population – especially firearms that are capable of wounding and killing human beings – can expect to escape violence, and a great deal of violence.