Peter Farb Quotes

#1. There's nothing sadder than a sobbing waffle.

Jerry Spinelli

#2. The environment does not determine man's culture; it merely sets the outer limits and at the same time offers opportunities.

Peter Farb

#3. Marriage is simply an economic necessity, and so there are no elaborate courtship displays or marriage celebrations among the Eskimo.

Peter Farb

#4. An inability to communicate has little to do with international friction-as is seen in the special ferocity of wars fought between people who speak the same language.

Peter Farb

#5. A complex society is not necessarily more advanced than a simple one; it has just adapted to conditions in a more complicated way.

Peter Farb

#6. Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

Peter Farb

#7. At every moment of his life the Shoshone must be careful to observe the complicated folkways of his group, to do reverence to superhuman powers, to remember the courtesies and obligations of family, to pay homage to certain sacred plants, or to avoid particular places.

Peter Farb

#8. An invention or new combination can be successful only if all if the elements necessary for the recombination are present in the culture.

Peter Farb

#9. No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

Peter Farb

#10. People who speak the same language can hate one another as easily as can people who speak unrelated languages.

Peter Farb

#11. But of no nombre mencioun made he, Of bigamye, or of octogamye33. Why sholde men thanne speke of it vileinye34?

Geoffrey Chaucer

#12. Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the rules of grammar and the rules about appropriate speech in various situations.

Peter Farb

#13. Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle.

Dodie Smith

#14. Gestures and facial expressions do indeed communicate, as anyone can prove by turning off the sound on a television set and asking watchers to characterize the speakers from the picture alone.

Peter Farb

#15. I tell the truth: your enemy is also your friend-his presence makes your life fuller and richer.

Muhammad Iqbal

#16. I had retained little of what is generally called religion, except for a visceral conviction that our lives are controlled by some universal mechanism that is greater than ourselves. Perhaps that was what others called God. Perhaps not.

Michael Cox

#17. For a tribe to endure, it must find some way to achieve internal unity - and that way usually is external strife.

Peter Farb

#18. In place of science, the Eskimo has only magic to bridge the gap between what he can understand and what is not known. Without magic, his life would be one long panic.

Peter Farb

#19. Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

Peter Farb

#20. The dictionary is a closed system in which someone interested in the meaning of a word can go around and around and end up exactly where he started, simply because words are defined in terms of other words, and these, in turn, are defined in terms of still other words.

Peter Farb

#21. Food to a large extent is what holds a society together, and eating is closely linked to deep spiritual experiences.

Peter Farb

#22. Despite the theories traditionally taught in high-school social studies, the truth is: the more primitive the society, the more leisured its way of life.

Peter Farb

#23. The Book of Proverbs deals very hard blows against sluggards, and Christian ministers do well frequently to denounce the great sin of idleness, which is the mother of a huge family of sins.

Charles Spurgeon

#24. Surround yourself with great people; delegate authority; get out of the way

Ronald Reagan