The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

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.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.

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.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.