Frazer's Quotes

#1. Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not

Richard Dawkins

#2. The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

James G. Frazer

#3. His gaze glossed over a stack of wooden crates and landed on a steamer trunk that was covered with stickers from all over the world.

Megan Frazer Blakemore

#4. Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.

James G. Frazer

#5. But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard.

James G. Frazer

#6. This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages

James G. Frazer

#7. everything's just tickety-boo.

Andrea Frazer

#8. The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.

James G. Frazer

#9. The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.

James G. Frazer

#10. The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.

James G. Frazer

#11. The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.

James G. Frazer

#12. Dance to the light that is your soul.

Jendayi Frazer

#13. Where there's compassion, no heirarchy can exist. Where men are allowed to create themselves as equals, evil cannot thrive or survive.

Dean Frazer

#14. The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

James G. Frazer

#15. No sirens. Let Parker drive," Frazer ordered.

Toni Anderson

#16. The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.

James G. Frazer

#17. We're forever focusing upon our differences, and never noticing how much we're all alike.

Dean Frazer

#18. The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough.

James G. Frazer

#19. The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.

James G. Frazer

#20. No mountain of doom,
Just foothills of Ferninand.
Towers of fire and glory as far as one can see.

Megan Frazer Blakemore

#21. Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

James G. Frazer

#22. And I make no apology for linking my thinking with computer technology.

Maxwell Frazer

#23. Don't you love those crazy Brits?
Jumpers for sweaters and spots for zits.
And when they want to change their suits,
It's in a box, not a booth.
Be a hero, make a call.
Steepest streets might make you fall.

Megan Frazer Blakemore

#24. The Ark of the Covenant is a Golden Rectangle because its rectangular shape is in the proportions of the Golden Ratio.

Donald Frazer

#25. Chosing to stay in the moment, is choosing to be free from fear.

Dean Frazer

#26. With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.

James G. Frazer

#27. We never cherish what we've got until the day it's gone.

Dean Frazer

#28. The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

James G. Frazer

#29. The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

James G. Frazer

#30. For the answer you seek,
Look up.

Megan Frazer Blakemore

#31. I would've loved to have children and I'm really good with kids, but I just didn't want to commit to anything when I had cancer. I didn't want to plan for the future.

Frazer Hines

#32. Never having children is a huge regret of mine.

Frazer Hines

#33. If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.

James G. Frazer

#34. Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.

James G. Frazer

#35. For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.

James G. Frazer

#36. Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#37. It is only those who feel disconnected and seperated from the Oneness of All That Is that can ever commit evil deeds.

Dean Frazer

#38. Ephraim found a stack of postcards tied together with a faded green ribbon. He shuffled through them and found they were from every World's Fair from 1915 in San Francisco to 1939 in New York. None of the postcards hed been written on or mailed.

Megan Frazer Blakemore

#39. The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.

James G. Frazer

#40. Ignorance is jealousy's twin sister.

Dean Frazer

#41. For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion .

James G. Frazer

#42. The only way to go beyond your fears is to grow beyond them and that always means challenging, overcoming and learning from them.

Dean Frazer

#43. legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana is familiar to classical readers;

James George Frazer

#44. It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back.

James G. Frazer

#45. The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.

James G. Frazer

#46. Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life.

James G. Frazer

#47. Orlando said it was important for scientists to have minds kept open by literature, and souls touched by the creativity of art.

Megan Frazer Blakemore

#48. Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.

James George Frazer

#49. So in Scotland witches used to raise the wind by dipping a rag in water and beating it thrice on a stone, saying: "I knok this rag upone this stane To raise the wind in the divellis name, It sall not lye till I please againe.

James George Frazer

#50. In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

James G. Frazer

#51. Intolerance is evidence of fear, and fear is the consequence of feeling powerless.

Dean Frazer

#52. Rachel could sell cheese to vegans.

Megan Frazer Blakemore

#53. Normally zombies gave her comfort. They were slow. There were straightforward ways to kill them. If they ever showed up, she would know what to do. Too bad the rest of life wasn't like that.

Megan Frazer Blakemore

#54. THE PRIMARY aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia.

James George Frazer

#55. the fear of the human dead, which, on the whole, I believe to have been probably the most powerful force in the making of primitive religion.

James George Frazer

#56. In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.

James G. Frazer

#57. The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.

James G. Frazer

#58. Like a crowd in my head, so loud.
I wonder what it's like to be dead, I hope it's quiet.
Noise in my head like a riot.
Any remedy you have for me, I'll try it.

Maxwell Frazer

#59. Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.

James G. Frazer

#60. The only time you truly make a mistake is when you commit a "mis-take," that is, you "miss-taking" the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson from your seemingly malfunctional experience.

Dean Frazer

#61. I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.

James G. Frazer

#62. Parker joined him and geared up, fast and efficient. That, and the fact Frazer was sending him out with Matt into a dangerous situation, told him the rumors were true. The guy wasn't your typical desk-jockey, computer nerd.

Toni Anderson

#63. The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.

James G. Frazer

#64. You don't need eyes to see, you need vision.

Maxwell Frazer