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The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Claude Levi-Strauss

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Claude Levi-Strauss
Age: 100 †
Born: 1908
Born: November 28
Died: 2009
Died: October 30
Anthropologist
Ethnologist
Mythographer
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Photographer
Politician
Professor
Psychologist
Scientist
Sociologist
Writer
Brussels
Belgium
Klod Levi-Stros
Claude Levi-Strauss
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Writing
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Always
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Political
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Cities
Empires

More quotes by Claude Levi-Strauss

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For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society.
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The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space.
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I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.
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How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time.
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In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.
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I hate travelling and explorers
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The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. . . .
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I can't help thinking that science would be more appealing if it had no practical use.
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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.
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The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.
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Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous.
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[Serialism] is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination.…
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All the essentials of humanity's artistic treasures can be found in New York.
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Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.
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Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.
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No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.
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Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.
Claude Levi-Strauss
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With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.
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The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living.
Claude Levi-Strauss
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The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.
Claude Levi-Strauss