The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or … - James George Frazer

From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.

We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.

The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.