Clifford Geertz

“I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.”

“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”

“I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.”

“Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology.”

“If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.”

“We're getting closer to our nature.”

“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”

“I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.”

“I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.”

“I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.”

“I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.”

“I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.”

“I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.”

“I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.”

“I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.”

“It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it.”

“We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.”

“Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.”

“I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.”

“It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.”