Peter L. Berger Quotes

Cultural comparisons are good because they can tell you about what's similar, but also sometimes they make it easier to see obvious differences.

Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.

To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.

When you get to see the world, it changes you. You realise that there are all kinds of people out there.

When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world.

There will be no room, here, for the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of peoples whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced.

The world looks different and is understood differently at every spot on earth. Without accepting this simple truth it is hard for us to grasp the behavior of others, the motives and aims of those actions.

No nation has reason to regard itself superior to others by virtue of its innate endowment.

Living through the intersections of cultural diversity has given me an intimate understanding of the dynamics of living between the dimensions of East and West, traditional and modern, and political and spiritual.

Our lives don't make sense in abstraction, only when compared with the lives of others.

You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.

An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.

He that would travel for the entertainment of others, should remember that the great object of remark is human life. Every Nation has something peculiar in its Manufactures, its Works of Genius, its Medicines, its Agriculture, its Customs, and its Policy. He only is a useful Traveller, who brings home something by which his country may be benefited; who procures some supply of Want, or some mitigation of Evil, which may enable his readers to compare their condition with that of others, to improve it whenever it is worse, and whenever it is better to enjoy it.

Its [the anthropological method] power to make us understand the roots from which our civilization has sprung, that it impresses us with the relative value of all forms of culture, and thus serves as a check to an exaggerated valuation of the standpoint of our own period, which we are only too liable to consider the ultimate goal of human evolution, thus depriving ourselves of the benefits to be gained from the teachings of other cultures and hindering an objective criticism of our own work.

I think an awful lot of the diplomatic problems that exist in the world come from people assuming that their society is the one with a purchase on truth.

Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.

The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit.

In the teaching of geography and history a sympathetic understanding (should) be fostered for the characteristics of the different peoples of the world, especially for those who we are in the habit of describing as "primitive.

Each person calls barbarism whatever is not his or her own practice.... We may call Cannibals barbarians, in respect to the rulesof reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.

Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining.

I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.

To me it's very obvious there are huge cultural differences between Americans and Canadians. But a lot of what we are is American.