Top 40 Clifford Geertz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”

— Clifford Geertz

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

— Clifford Geertz

3. “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”

— Clifford Geertz

4. “Culture is public, because meaning is.”

— Clifford Geertz

5. “We don’t know what we think until we see what we say.”

— Clifford Geertz

6. “People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.”

— Clifford Geertz

7. “Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn’t have a real method, there’s a great deal of anxiety over what it is.”

— Clifford Geertz

8. “One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.”

— Clifford Geertz

9. “Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.”

— Clifford Geertz

10. “I’ve often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.”

— Clifford Geertz

11. “If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.”

— Clifford Geertz

12. “Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.”

— Clifford Geertz

13. “If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.”

— Clifford Geertz

14. “What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.”

— Clifford Geertz

15. “I think what’s known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.”

— Clifford Geertz

16. “I don’t feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.”

— Clifford Geertz

17. “I don’t write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it’s finished, it’s done.”

— Clifford Geertz

18. “Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.”

— Clifford Geertz

19. “I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.”

— Clifford Geertz

20. “I don’t think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they’re moving toward more diversity.”

— Clifford Geertz

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

— Clifford Geertz

22. “Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There’s been an extraordinary advance.”

— Clifford Geertz

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

— Clifford Geertz

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

— Clifford Geertz

25. “It may be in the cultural particularities of people – in their oddities – that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.”

— Clifford Geertz

26. “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.”

— Clifford Geertz

27. “I’ve written a lot of books which are written from the moon – the view from nowhere.”

— Clifford Geertz

28. “I’m an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.”

— Clifford Geertz

29. “Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue.”

— Clifford Geertz

30. “I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.”

— Clifford Geertz

31. “A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.”

— Clifford Geertz

32. “Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.”

— Clifford Geertz

33. “I do think the attempt to raise consciousness has succeeded. People are very aware of gender concerns now.”

— Clifford Geertz

34. “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.”

— Clifford Geertz

35. “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.”

— Clifford Geertz

36. “I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I’m satisfied with it.”

— Clifford Geertz

37. “I don’t have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.”

— Clifford Geertz

38. “I was trained in the ’50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley’s soul and such things.”

— Clifford Geertz

39. “Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.”

— Clifford Geertz

40. “My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.”

— Clifford Geertz

41. “The notion that someone who does not hold your views holds the reciprocal of them, or simply hasn’t got any, has, whatever its comforts for those afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it, not conduced to much in the way of clarity in the anti-relativist discussion, but merely to far too many people spending far too much time describing at length what it is they do not maintain than seems in any way profitable.”

— Clifford Geertz

42. “I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.”

— Clifford Geertz

43. “The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.”

— Clifford Geertz

44. “It’s always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it’s written now. There’s been an enormous shift in how it’s done, but yet you can’t put your finger on someone who actually did it.”

— Clifford Geertz

45. “All ethnography is part philosophy and a good deal of the rest is confession.”

— Clifford Geertz

46. “Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology.”

— Clifford Geertz