“The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.”

—  Claude Lévi-Strauss , book Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 4 : The Quest for Power, p. 38
Context: The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

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Claude Lévi-Strauss photo
Claude Lévi-Strauss 35
French anthropologist and ethnologist 1908–2009

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