Top 36 Quotes by Clifford Geertz

The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

I agree with Chomsky in almost nothing. When it comes to innate structures and so on, I'm very skeptical.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means.

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.

I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist.

Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.