Totems Quotes

In the States, tennis is sixth or seventh on the totem pole as far as sports go.

With studio work, I'm always the bottom man on the totem pole.

He [Astaire] was not a sexual animal, but he made his partners look so extraordinarily related to him.

Atrial fibrillation has been the low man on the totem pole and so were just trying to get more visibility about this particular disease and how dangerous this could be.

The end of the animal trade would leave more time to trap or beat to death pop star wannabes.

In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is 'exogamy', an institution related to totemism.

Video artists being at the low end of the totem pole economically, one of the ways we survive is to go around showing work and giving these talks.

The gun becomes this psychological totem, this thing of who I am. And it's almost as if using the gun is going to be the thing that's going to be my expression of how I make a difference in the world.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.

When men and women across the country reported how happy they felt, researchers found that jugglers were happier than others. By and large, the more roles, the greater the happiness. Parents were happier than nonparents, and workers were happier than nonworkers. Married people were much happier than unmarried people. Married people were generally at the top of the emotional totem pole.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

More than ever, we express ourselves with what we buy and how we use what we buy. Extensions of our personality, totems of our selves, reminders of who we are or would like to be. Great marketers don't make stuff. They make meaning.

But something magical happened to me when I went to Reardan. Overnight I became a good player. I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I'd always been the lowest Indian on the reservation totem pole - I wasn't expected to be good so I wasn't. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They expected me to be good. And so I became good. I wanted to live up to the expectations. I guess that's what it comes down to. The power of expectations. And as they expected more of me, I expected more of myself, and it just grew and grew.

I was never ready to give up, but I did get words of confidence to move forward from a few musicians that had climbed up the totem pole of rock. They were encouraging words that struck a nerve with me and made me stronger.

You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another.

Now defined as art, the totem has lost cult, taboo, and custom.

When the East Timor conflict broke out, when they gained independence, the militia killed a lot of East Timorese people. And their sacred totem is the crocodile. They believe that their island is actually a solidified crocodile, so it has sacred status.

Sometimes. I get recognized, but I'm not really a famous famous. I'm pretty low on the showbiz totem pole - I mean, I'm no Jon or Kate plus eight. I'm just a comic, not a baby factory.

Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole.

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

I had my young eyes opened by the impersonal blood and guts of news photography. I was running the gamut every low man on the totem pole runs - country clubs to mass murder.

The most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex.

Oil is like a wild animal. Whoever captures it has it.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

You can't really get into regular football after you watch Australian rules football because it's just two different ends of the totem pole.

I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

Today when the Fundamentalists are once more insisting that the fundamentals of fundamentalism are fundamental to our being No. 1 on the Lord's totem pole, it's very brave of you to invite the "resident atheist" of mid-Missouri to share her thoughts with you.

Dance is low on the totem pole of the arts, because you're not left with a painting... a book that will stay there, a score you can read.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

I blame it on Walt Disney, where animals are given human qualities. People don't understand that a wild animal is not something that is nice to pat. It can seriously harm you.

Animal totems, like the tiger, come from the Other Side to protect us while we are away from Home.

Man as a pure animal does not exist

I think that in the end, a talk show is a very different animal.

To save an animal's life in order that it may suffer indefinitely is something I would never condone.

A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.

A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights.

Every seed is awakened, and all animal life.

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.

The offshore ocean area under U.S. jurisdiction is larger than our land mass, and teems with plant and animal life, mineral resources, commerce, trade, and energy sources.

In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children.

I'm a hard guy to live with. I'm like a caged animal. I'm up all night walking around the living room. It's hard for me to come down from what I do.

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we love our own fabrication. Still . . . does the artifice of our affection make our love any less real?

I think bullying comes from a person's feeling of self-worth, and so what you do is you find out where you are in a totem pole, and you may slide in somewhere in the middle. So you say, "OK, well there's all these other people who I respect and admire, and there's all these people below me, so I'm going to put on them this sense that they're inferior and I'm going to belittle them, and that's going to raise my stature."

Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.