Primitive Quotes - Page 24

• Humanity is a crazy contradiction. I accept us for who we are. We're not that great. Every time we take a step forward we go back to the same primitive behavior. We're meant to be this way. It's not our fault, it's just who we are.

  Colin Quinn

  Crazy, Humanity, Who We Are

  12 Copy quote

• People just don't laugh when their family is violated, and you don't shrug it off. You band together and you defend together. It's a funny, primitive instinct.

  Phillip Noyce

  People, Laughing, Together

  6 Copy quote

• In action be primitive; in foresight, a strategist.

  Ed Koch

  Advice, Action, Foresight

  10 Copy quote

• We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.

  Geraldine Brooks

  War, Stupid, Intelligent

  Geraldine Brooks (2008). “People of the Book: A Novel”, p.41, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Men, Two, Jekyll

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2010). “Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde”, p.95, Bibliolis Books

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• "So decisive", he murmured in that calm tone that had adrenaline flooding her body, the primitive part of her brain conscious she was in the presence of a predator. "Got your eye on someone?" She didn‘t know what made her say it. "No. But I have no plans to die a virgin."

  Nalini Singh

  Eye, Brain, Tone

  "Kiss of Snow". Book by Nalini Singh, May, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Hannibal Lecter: We live in a primitive time - don't we, Will? - neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.

  Thomas Harris

  Wise, Book, Giving

  Thomas Harris (2009). “Red Dragon”, p.437, Penguin

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

  Northrop Frye

  Jobs, Two, Mind

  Northrop Frye (1996). “Collected Works of Northrop Frye: The educated imagination and other writings on critical theory 1933-1963”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Intelligent, Unique

  "The Everlasting Man". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Part I: On the Creature Called Man, 1925.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Grief doesn't necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear.

  Gail Caldwell

  Crazy, Grief, Noble

  4 Copy quote

• I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

  Helen Vendler

  Names, Giving

  7 Copy quote

• The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable-even necessary-that may have been in enforcing good behavior on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Tragedy, Calling, Hijacking

  7 Copy quote

• The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events

  Edward Gibbon

  Christian, Believe, Mind

  Edward Gibbon (1998). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.264, Wordsworth Editions

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poor ignorant fellah [Arabic for peasant] does not worry about politics, but when he is told repeatedly by people in whom he has confidence that his livelihood is in danger of being taken away from him by us, he becomes our mortal enemy. . . The Arab is primitive and believes what he is told.

  Chaim Weizmann

  Believe, Taken, People

  36 Copy quote

• Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.

  Joseph Alexander Leighton

  Men, Primitive Man, Devil

  Joseph Alexander Leighton (1918). “The Field of Philosophy: An Outline of Lectures on Introduction to Philosophy”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression (like the myths) reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear.

  Adolph Gottlieb

  Powerful, Expression, Violence

  "bstract Expressionism Creators and Critics". Book edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York, 1990.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• No attempt of any kind must be made at rescuing members of ships sunk, and this includes picking up persons in the water and putting them in lifeboats, righting capsized lifeboats, and handing over food and water. Rescue runs counter to the most primitive demands of warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews. Be hard, remember that the enemy has no regard for women and children when he bombs German cities.

  Karl Donitz

  Running, Children, Cities

  Orders issued on September 17, 1942. "The Trial of the Germans". Book by Eugene Davidson, p. 406, 1997.

  39 Copy quote

  Show source

• Modern anthropology ... opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means.

  John Carroll

  Believe, Mean, Goal

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.121, Taylor & Francis

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Divorce is simply modern society's version of medieval torture. Except it lasts longer and leaves deeper scars. A divorce releases the most primitive emotions; the ugliest, raw feelings. Emotionally wounded people do their best to inflict pain upon the other party, but rather than using claws they use divorce lawyers.

  William Shatner

  Pain, Party, Divorce

  William Shatner (2009). “Up Till Now”, p.136, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When primitive law has once been embodied in a Code, there is an end to what may be called its spontaneous development.

  Henry James Sumner Maine

  Law, Development, May

  Henry Sumner Maine, Sir, J. H. Morgan (2000). “Ancient Law”, p.13, Beard Books

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• I believe in mystery and, frankly, I sometimes face this mystery with great fear. In other words, I think that there are many things in the universe that we cannot perceive or penetrate, and that also we experience some of the most beautiful things in life only in a very primitive form. Only in relation to these mysteries do I consider myself to be a religious man.

  Albert Einstein

  Beautiful, Religious, Believe

  Peter A. Bucky, Albert Einstein, Allen G. Weakland (1992). “The private Albert Einstein”, Andrews McMeel Pub

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Happy he who far from business, like the primitive are of mortals, cultivates with his own oxen the fields of his fathers, free from all anxieties of gain.

  Horace

  Father, Oxen, Agriculture

  31 Copy quote

• The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.

  Hermann Hesse

  Book, Way, Gone

  Hermann Hesse (1983). “Steppenwolf”, Bantam

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory genius of the Greeks; no primitive peoples have ever come to study us. This is, on the one hand, a disinterested, intellectually inspired impulse. It is one of our glories. But it is, on the other, part and parcel of exploitation. [] The Western obsession with inquiry, with analysis, with the classification of all living forms, is itself a mode of subjugation, of psychological and technical mastery.

  George Steiner

  Spring, Unique, Men

  4 Copy quote

• It's unbelievable the primitive feelings that are aroused by rapid change.

  Sheila Ballantyne

  Change, Feelings, Rapids

  Sheila Ballantyne (1975). “Norma Jean, the termite queen”, Doubleday Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source