71 Quotes by Claude Lévi-Strauss

With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.

Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between the individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal.

Animals are good to think with.

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.

Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also for better or for worse takes us out of our class context, so that the colour and flavour of certain places cannot be dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them.

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.

Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.

I am the place in which something has occurred.

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