Top 15 Peter Farb Quotes

If you read Peter Farb's book, Man's Rise of Civilization, he goes through all these different cultures at first contact, and they very often figure out in very different ways, but typically the things that were in common among them, were that the idea of the accumulation of private property beyond your needs was considered a mental illness.

The weakness of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis... the impossibility of generalizing about entire cultures and then attributing these generalizations to the language spoken ...is to leave numerous facts about culture unexplained. The great religions of the world... have flourished among diverse peoples who speak languages with sharply different grammars. ...Cultures as diverse as the Aztec Empire of Mexico and the Ute hunting bands of the Great Basin spoke very closely related tongues.

Whorf asked... Do the Hopi and European cultures... conceptualize reality in different ways? And his answer was that they do. Whereas European cultures are organized in terms of space and time, the Hopi culture, Whorf believed, emphasizes events. To speakers of European languages, time is a commodity that occurs between fixed points and can be measured. Time is said to be wasted or saved... their economic systems emphasize wages paid for the amount of time worked, rent for the time a dwelling is occupied, interest for the time money is loaned. Hopi culture... instead thinks... The span of time the growing takes is not the important thing, but rather the way in which the event of growth follows the event of planting. The Hopi is concerned that the sequence of events in the construction of a building be in the correct order, not that it takes a certain amount of time to complete the job.

About 1932 one of Sapir's students at Yale, Benjamin Lee Whorf drew on Sapir's ideas and began an intensive study of the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Whorf's brilliant analysis... seemed to support the view that man is a prisoner of his language. Whorf emphasized grammar—rather than vocabulary, which had previously intrigued scholars—as an indicator of the way a language can direct a speaker into certain habits of thought.

Wilhelm von Humboldt... stated that the structure of language expresses the inner life of its speakers: "Man lives with the world about him, principally, indeed exclusively, as language presents it."

The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms.

Experiments... have shown that at least one aspect of human thought—memory—is strongly influenced by language.

Each language encourages its speakers to tell certain things and to ignore other things.

For tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years, people regarded language as a holy instrument that let them look out upon the world... Only in the last few decades have people suspected that their window on the world has a glass that gives a distorted view.

This inseparableness of everything in the world from language has intrigued modern thinkers, most notably Ludwig Wittgenstein... If its limits—that is, the precise point at which sense becomes nonsense—could somehow be defined, then speakers would not attempt to express the inexpressible. Therefore, said Wittgenstein, do not put too great a burden upon language. Learn its limitations and try to accommodate yourself to them, for language offers all the reality you can ever hope to know.

Thinking is language spoken to oneself. Until language has made sense of an experience, that experience is meaningless.

Freedom of speech does not exist anywhere, for every community on earth forbids the use of certain sounds, words, and sentences in various speech situations. ...the habitual liar faces social sanctions ...Speakers are not allowed to misrepresent... to defame other people in public, to maliciously shout "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater, or to utter obscenities on the telephone.

To do nothing now is to let our children lament that they never knew the magnificent diversity of humankind because our generation let disappear those cultures that might have taught it to them.

Perhaps we, who for so long regarded ourselves as bringers of light to the shadowy recesses of North America, will finally admit that there is much about which the Indians can illuminate us.

Millions of dollars have been expended to excavate and transport to museums the tools, weapons, and other artifacts of Indians—but scarcely a penny has been spent to save the living descendents of those who made them. Modern man is prompt to prevent cruelty to animals, and sometimes even to humans, but no counterpart of the Humane Society or the Sierra Club exists to prevent cruelty to entire cultures.