Primitive Quotes - Page 27

• And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive beast, the louse begins to multiply again and treats man as he deserves, as a brute beast. This conclusion would have endeared itself to the warm heart of Alfred Nobel. My contribution to it makes me feel less unworthy of the honour which you have conferred upon me in his name.

  Charles Nicolle

  Teaching, Heart, Knowledge

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• In its most primitive form, life is, therefore, no longer bound to the cell, the cell which possesses structure and which can be compared to a complex wheel-work, such as a watch which ceases to exist if it is stamped down in a mortar. No, in its primitive form life is like fire, like a flame borne by the living substance;-like a flame which appears in endless diversity and yet has specificity within it;-which can adopt the form of the organic world, of the lank grass-leaf and of the stem of the tree.

  Martinus Beijerinck

  Life, Science, Fire

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• Small children smoking, and the mother is not aware that it is because the breast has been taken away. In all primitive communities a seven-year-old child, or even an eight or nine-year-old child, will continue breast-feeding. Then there is a satisfaction and smoking will not be so necessary. That's why in primitive communities men are not so much interested in women's breasts; there is no problem that somebody will attack them. Nobody looks at the breasts.

  Rajneesh

  Mother, Children, Taken

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• The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

  John Shelby Spong

  Sacrifice, Views, Ideas

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• To my father, art had no restrictions. He was a true 'American Primitive.' He greatly enjoyed sketching and photography, carrying a camera with him whenever he could.

  John Carter Cash

  Photography, Art, Father

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• Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic

  Christina Stead

  Passion, Optimistic, Creation

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• Naturalism aimed at giving the primitive wishes full play but failed because these wishes are too primitive, too infantile, too inconsistent with themselves to be satisfied even by the greatest license.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Play, Giving, Wish

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• Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the present time it looks as if humanity were within sight of their satisfaction. Permanent plenty, no longer a Utopian dream, awaits the arrival of permanent peace.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Dream, Sex, Sight

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• There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at one, any savage races lacking in either the scientific attitude, or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them.

  Bronislaw Malinowski

  Attitude, Science, Race

  "Magic, Science and Religion" (1925)

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• I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.

  John Mortimer

  Fear, Law, Magic

  John Mortimer (2010). “CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE”, p.251, Penguin UK

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• ...the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.

  Joseph Goebbels

  Gun, Simple, Notable

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• Primitive, simplistic anti-Communism is all too often used as a common denominator for diverse efforts to perpetuate one's own power in a democratic system, convert opinions into dogma, and kill off all opposition, even silent.

  Eugen Kogon

  Effort, Opinion, Common

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• If we can combine our knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness, if we can nurture civilization through roots in the primitive, man's potentialities appear to be unbounded, Through this evolving awareness, and his awareness of that awareness, he can emerge with the miraculous-to which we can attach what better name than 'God'? And in this merging, as long sensed by intuition but still only vaguely perceived by rationality, experience may travel without need for accompanying life.

  Charles Lindbergh

  God, Wisdom, Science

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• It seems probable to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportions to space, as most conduced to the end for which He formed them; and that these primitive particles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God had made one in the first creation.

  Isaac Newton

  God, Science, Space

  Isaac Newton (1962). “Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World”, p.638, Univ of California Press

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• This is still a very primitive age, and I'm afraid they may not get much further here.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Humanity, Age

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• France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything.

  Adam Michnik

  Cowboy, Thinking, World

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• In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation

  Charles Petzold

  Memories, Microsoft, Corporations

  Charles Petzold (2000). “Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software”, p.147, Microsoft Press

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• The attempt to regulate, control, and prescribe all manner of conduct and social relations is very old. It was always the practice of primitive peoples.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Practice, Social, Relation

  Calvin Coolidge (2001). “The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses”, p.196, The Minerva Group, Inc.

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• An absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy.

  Terry Southern

  Hero, Hypocrisy, Abuse

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• A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather. What is she to believe in if not in this vision woven from within?

  George Eliot

  Girl, Believe, Weather

  George Eliot (1863). “Romola: In Two Volumes”, p.76

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• Fashion is primitive in its insistence on exhibitionism, which withers in isolation. The catwalk fashion show with its incandescent hype is its apotheosis. A ritualized gathering of connoiseurs and the spoilt at a spotlit parade of snazzy pulchritude, it is an industrialized version of the pagan festivals of renewal. At the end of each seasonal display, a priesthood is enjoined to carry news of the omens to the masses.

  Stephen Bayley

  Fashion, Hype, Gathering

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• All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

  George Orwell

  Memorial Day, Ideas, Evil

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• And, to prevent mistakes, I must advertize you, that I now mean by elements, as those chymists that speak plainest do by their principles, certain primitive or simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies; which not being made of any other bodies, or of one another, are the ingredients of which all those called perfectly mixt bodies are immediately compounded, and into which they are ultimately resolved: now whether there be any such body to be constantly met with in all, and each, of those that are said to be elemented bodies, is the thing I now question.

  Robert Boyle

  Mistake, Mean, Science

  Robert Boyle (2013). “The Sceptical Chymist”, p.187, Courier Corporation

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• I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.

  John Updike

  Heart, Fire, Burning

  "Roger's Version". Book by John Updike, 1986.

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• I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.

  Robert Wyatt

  Singers, Folks, Infantile

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