Prehistoric Quotes - Page 2

• "Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Hunting, Men, Historical

  Jose Ortega y Gasset (2007). “Meditations on Hunting”, p.125, Wilderness Adventures Press

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• Soil erosion is as old as agriculture. It began when the first heavy rain struck the first furrow turned by a crude implement of tillage in the hands or prehistoric man. It has been going on ever since, wherever man's culture of the earth has bared the soil to rain and wind.

  Hugh Hammond Bennett

  Rain, Men, Agriculture

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• I heard the car door shut and then Fabian's voice. "You won't believe what I found around the edge of your property," the ghost announced. "A cave with prehistoric painting inside it!" I rolled my eyes. That was the best tactic Fabian could come up with? This was a vampire he was trying to stall, not a paleontologist.

  Jeaniene Frost

  Believe, Eye, Doors

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• However much you know giraffes, to see one in the wild for the first time feels prehistoric.

  Jane Goodall

  Firsts, Giraffe, First Time

  "The lady and the chimps". Wanderlust Travel Magazine Interview, www.wanderlust.co.uk. April 10, 2009.

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• Becoming a grandmother is wonderful. One moment you're just a mother. The next you are all-wise and prehistoric.

  Pam Brown

  Wise, Mother, Grandma

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• I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not led him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle.

  Thomas Huxley

  Strong, Science, Intelligent

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1997). “The Major Prose of Thomas Henry Huxley”, p.277, University of Georgia Press

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• It is a strange fact, characteristic of the incomplete state of our current knowledge, that totally opposite conclusions are drawn about prehistoric conditions on Earth, depending on whether the problem is approached from the biological or the geophysical viewpoint.

  Alfred Wegener

  Opposites, Facts, Viewpoints

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• In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is literally, the force of gravity. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Real, Struggle, Style

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• It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.

  Mark Twain

  Animal, Men, Coal

  Pudd'nhead Wilson ch. 9, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" (1894)

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• Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they’re willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff.

  Terence McKenna

  Thinking, Empathy, Joy

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• We estimate that there are perhaps 20,000 prehistoric hunter-gatherers frozen up in those glaciers. Now, if they simply thaw and wander around, it's not a problem, but if they find a leader - a Captain Caveman, if you will - we'll be facing an even more serious problem.

  John Hodgman

  Leader, Hunters, Frozen

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• To me, the circle and the square where the sky and the earth, as symbolized by the ancient Oriental religions; they formed a kind of rudimentary alphabet by means of which everything could be expressed with the most limited means. They evoked prehistoric runes and the early I-Ching, or Book of Changes.

  Michel Seuphor

  Book, Mean, Squares

  "Abstract Painting". Book by Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., p. 98, 1964.

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• The phrase the violent bear it away fascinated the 20th century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of one of her novels. O'Connor's surname connects her to an Irish royal family descended from Conchobor (pronounced Connor), the prehistoric king of Ulster who was foster father to Cuchulainn and husband of the unwilling Derdriu. In the western world, the antiquity of Irish lineages is exceeded only by that of the Jews.

  Thomas Cahill

  Kings, Husband, Father

  Thomas Cahill (2011). “How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe”, p.71, Hachette UK

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• A yak is a prehistoric cabbage; of that, we can be sure.

  John Ashbery

  Cabbage, Yaks

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• I eat like a tortoise eats, if you've ever seen a tortoise eating. Like some prehistoric swamp thing.

  R. J. Palacio

  Swamps, Tortoises, Eating

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• I believe-and human psychologists, particularly psychoanalysts should test this-that present-day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive. It is more than probable that the evil effects of the human aggressive drives, explained by Sigmund Freud as the results of a special death wish, simply derive from the fact that in prehistoric times intra-specific selection bred into man a measure of aggression drive for which in the social order today he finds no adequate outlet.

  Konrad Lorenz

  Believe, Men, Order

  KONRAD LORENZ (1963). “ON AGRESSION”

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• A war is coming, a battle that will stretch from the prehistoric forests of the ancient past to the cutting-edge research labs of today, all to reveal a true mystery buried deep within our DNA, a mystery that will leave readers changed forever .

  James Rollins

  War, Cutting, Past

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• I don't think I'm wrong when I say that the most beautiful objects of the "stone age" were made of skin, fabric, and especially wood. The "stone age" ought to be called the "wood age." How many African statues are made of stone, bone, or ivory? Maybe one in a thousand! And prehistoric man had no more ivory at his disposal than African tribes. Maybe even less. He must have had thousands of wooden fetishes, all gone now.

  Pablo Picasso

  Beautiful, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.americansuburbx.com

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• Of course
  the New Testament is very small.
  Its mouth opens four times
  as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster,
  yet somehow man-made.

  Anne Sexton

  Bible, Men, Monsters

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.85, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups.

  Richard Dawkins

  Baby, Sex, Past

  Source: inters.org

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• The closeups of pornography make human genitals look like undiscovered prehistoric animals.

  Mason Cooley

  Animal, Looks, Pornography

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• My dentist is actually a highly technical specialist, constantly experimenting with the latest dental research. The equipment he has makes my old dentist look prehistoric.

  Joelle Carter

  Looks, Research, Dental

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• The trouble with water-and there is trouble with water-is that they're not making any more of it. They're not making any less, mind, but no more either. There is the same amount of water in the planet now as there was in prehistoric times.

  Marq de Villiers

  Water, Mind, Environmental

  Marq De Villiers (2001). “Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Home, Thinking, Next Week

  Mary Roberts Rinehart (2014). “Tish: The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions”, p.58, Simon and Schuster

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• Cookery is the art of preparing food for the nourishment of the body. Prehistoric man may have lived on uncooked foods, but there are no savage races today who do not practice cookery in some way, however crude. Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

  Fannie Farmer

  Art, Food, Men

  Fannie Merritt Farmer (1896). “Original 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book”, p.17, Courier Corporation

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