Symbolic Exchange Quotes

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

... the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.

The custom of clasping hands is thought to date back thousands of years, as proof of not holding any weapons.

For humans, gift giving is a universal ritual laden with evolutionary implications.

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

I was born in Brazil and grew up in the '70s under a climate of political distress, and I was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way - in a sort of a semiotic black market. You couldn't really say what you wanted to say; you had to invent ways of doing it. You didn't trust information very much.

I think theater and church are so relatable because it's traditional call-and-response in the way that an audience interacts with the actors.

In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?

Jean Baudrillard is a friend of mine, I do not agree with him on that one! For me, the significance of the war in Kosovo was that it was a war that moved into space.

The use of money and the use of words are analogous. Money is not always used to buy things which can be pointed to, e.g., when it buys permission to sit in a theatre, or a title, or one's life.

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

In ancient days the Pythagoreans were used to change names with each other,--fancying that each would share the virtues they admired in the other.

Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.

A high five is a very open kind of hand, but it can still smack you.

Of all the foods we share, there is nothing more primordial than meat. It's no surprise that meat-eaters still want a partner who will give, receive and share this primordial symbol of a budding partnership.