Anthropologist

Immanuel Kant

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1724–1804

"Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?"

🇺🇸Noam Chomsky

Philosophy

atheism

b. 1928

"Spectator sports make people more passive, because you're not doing them—you're watching somebody doing them."

🇫🇷Jean Baudrillard

Philosophy

Post-structuralism

1929–2007

"Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization."

Max Weber

Science

1836–1897

"Rationalism" is a historical concept that contains within itself a world of contradictions."

🇺🇸Steven Pinker

Psychology

atheism

b. 1954

"Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files"

🇩🇪Ivan Illich

Religion

degrowth

1926–2002

"Ivan Illich at Penn State: Continuing the Conversation"

🇺🇸Mary Doria Russell

Literature

b. 1950

"One minute, she was in the State of Puerto Rico and the next minute, she was in the State of Persistent Vegetables."

"Religion as a whole is but a form of loyalty to the interests of English property."

🇩🇪Leopold von Schroeder

Education

1851–1920

"The Indians are the nation of romanticists of antiquity. The Germans are the romantics of modem times. SentImentality and feelings for Nature are common to both German and Indian poetry."

Mircea Eliade

Literature

1907–1986

"The Experience of Sacred Space makes possible the "founding of the world": where the sacred Manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence."

Ernest Gellner

Philosophy

critical rationalism

1925–1995

"A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject."

Andrew Lang

Literature

1844–1912

"Custom and Myth - full text HTML of original work."

🇺🇸Eric S. Raymond

Literature

open source movement

b. 1957

"Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer"

Ibn Khaldun

Economics

1332–1406

"Businesses owned by responsible and organized merchants shall eventually surpass those owned by wealthy rulers."

🇬🇧Thomas Young (scientist)

Mathematics

1773–1829

"When I was a boy, I thought myself a man. Now that I am a man, I find myself a boy."

"The genius of culture is to create an ontological system so compelling that what is inside and outside of a person are viewed as of a piece, no seams and patches noticeable."

🇺🇸Franz Boas

Education

1858–1942

"The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment."

🇺🇸Thomas Lansing Masson

Journalism

1866–1934

"The love game is never called off on account of darkness."

🇺🇸Joseph Schumpeter

Politics

1883–1950

"Economists have never allowed their analysis to be influenced by psychologists of their time, but have always framed for themselves such assumptions about psychical processes as they have thought it desirable to make."

🇮🇳D. P. Agrawal

Science

b. 1935

"The Indus civilization is still alive today."

Thomas Henry Huxley

Science

1825–1895

"Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains."

🇺🇸Erving Goffman

Psychology

1922–1982

"There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged."

🇬🇧Gregory Bateson

Science

1904–1980

"We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong"

🇺🇸Dorothy Allison

Literature

1949–2024

"I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people. Neither is anyone I have ever cared deeply about."

François Bernier

Medicine

1620–1688

"There was no middle state. A man must be of the highest rank or live miserably."

🇺🇸Joseph Campbell

Literature

1904–1987

"We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about."

🇰🇪Richard Leakey

Politics

humanism

1944–2022

"I'm known for speaking my mind, a trait I probably inherited from my parents, Louis and Mary Leakey—neither of whom was renowned for tact."

"The first rule of luck in business is that you should persevere in doing the right thing. Opportunities will come your way if you do."

🇺🇸Paul Farmer

Medicine

1959–2022

"In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity."

🇺🇸Benjamin Lee Whorf

Technology

1897–1941

"The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding."

🇫🇷Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Religion

1881–1955

"In the spiritual life, as in all organic processes, everyone has their optimum and it is just as harmful to go beyond it as not to attain it."

🇫🇷Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Philosophy

1857–1939

"The primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind, and not a stage in its historical development."