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

- Clifford Geertz

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

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

- Clifford Geertz

We're getting closer to our nature.

- Clifford Geertz

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

- Clifford Geertz

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

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.

- Clifford Geertz

I don't think things are moving toward an omega point; I think they're moving toward more diversity.

- Clifford Geertz

I think feminism has had a major impact on anthropology.

- Clifford Geertz

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

- Clifford Geertz

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.

- Clifford Geertz

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

- Clifford Geertz

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

- Clifford Geertz

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

- Clifford Geertz

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.

- Clifford Geertz

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

- Clifford Geertz

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

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

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

- Clifford Geertz

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything.

- Clifford Geertz