The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises from… - James George Frazer

But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard.

In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.