Primitive Quotes - Page 3

• There is no beginning and there is no end. Nothing is final. There is no absolute. There is no highest point, nor is there a lowest point. These configurations are ideas. Ideas are primitive constructs, symbolic representations, reflections in a mirror.

  Frederick Lenz

  Reflection, Mirrors, Ideas

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• It is useless saying that we do not accept the gods of the primitive world. In form, no; in essence, yes. The fact before us is that all ideas of gods can be traced to the earliest stages of human history.... There is an unbroken line of descent linking the gods of the most primitive peoples to those of modern man. We reject the world of the savage; but we still, in our churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, perpetuate the theories he built upon that world.

  Chapman Cohen

  Men, Ideas, Essence

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• Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.

  Lionel Trilling

  Neurosis, Judgment, Ends

  "Partisan Review: 50th Anniversary Edition", ed. William Philips, 1985.

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• Petroleum is the product of a distillation from great depth and issues from the primitive rocks beneath which the forces of all volcanic action lie.

  Alexander von Humboldt

  Lying, Rocks, Issues

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• Music is thousands and thousands of years old and I don't think that basic, primitive connection to the language of music ever changes.

  Spike Jonze

  Thinking, Years, Connections

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• I remain convinced that for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem. Such a policy is Genocide in the classic sense of the word.

  James Mace

  Country, Simple, Ukraine

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• It is only comparatively primitive machinery that affords a stimulus, and there is already a faint period touch about Pacific 231 and Le Pas d'Acier. One feels...that Prokofieff should have written ballets about the spinning jenny and the Luddite riots; that Honegger should have been there to celebrate the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the death of Huskisson with a "Symphonie Triomphale et Funèbre".

  Constant Lambert

  Fun, Should Have, Spinning

  "Music, Ho!". Book by Constant Lambert, Hogarth Press edition, "Mechanical Romanticism", pp. 209-10, 1934.

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• In Hollywood, primitive magical thinking exists side by side with the most advanced technology.

  Hortense Powdermaker

  Technology, Thinking, Hollywood

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• I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn't very good no matter how much money you had.

  Terry Riley

  Technology, Dancer, Tape

  Interview with Gamall Awad and Ammon Haggerty, www.qaswa.com. October 9, 1992.

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• The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Technology, Listening, Doe

  "Credo". Essay by Arthur C. Clarke (1991), later published in Arthur C. Clarke "Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998" (p. 360), 1990.

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• Animism is far from primitive, nor is it about pre-modernity because animism does not serve as a precursor to modernity. Rather animism is one of the many vitally present and contemporary other-than-modern ways of being human.

  Graham Harvey

  Doe, Way, Being Human

  Graham Harvey (2005). “Animism”, p.21, Columbia University Press

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• The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula "I am we"; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an "individual," existing apart from his group.

  Erich Fromm

  Responsibility, Independence, Identity

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Sane Society Ils 252”, p.61, Routledge

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• A relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture.

  Erich Fromm

  Real, Reading, Expression

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Sane Society”, p.392, Open Road Media

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• A highly intelligent man should take a primitive woman. Imagine if on top of everything else, I had a woman who interfered with my work.

  Adolf Hitler

  Intelligent, Men, Imagine

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• Stories are the most primitive and purest form of communication.

  Blake Mycoskie

  Communication, Stories, Form

  Blake Mycoskie (2012). “Start Something That Matters”, p.25, Random House

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• A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly relations.

  Jane Addams

  Cities, Littles, Poor

  Jane Addams, Charlene Haddock Seigfried (2002). “Democracy and Social Ethics”, p.13, University of Illinois Press

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• In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.

  James G. Frazer

  Men, Practice, Class

  "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion". Book by James G. Frazer, 1890.

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• The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.

  James G. Frazer

  Men, Primitive Man, Suffering

  "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion". Book by James G. Frazer, 1890.

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• It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Shortcuts, Thinker, Complexes

  H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ The Ultimate Horror Collection: 60 Occult & Supernatural Mysteries in One Volume: The Greatest Spine-Chilling and Blood-Curdling Stories of Terror & Macabre: The Call of Cthulhu, The White Ship, The Dunwich Horror, At The Mountains Of Madness, The Whisperer in Darknessäó_”, p.106, e-artnow

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• Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is - both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology - of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Dog, Horse, Motivation

  Letter to James F. Morton (1929), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, (p. 483), 1996.

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• The unknown ... became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Spheres, Reason, Source

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “The Classic Horror Stories”, p.413, OUP Oxford

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• It is good to be a cynic - it is better to be a contented cat - and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world - we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death - the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Suicide, Cat, Dark

  "Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy" edited by S. T. Joshi, (p. 71), 2006.

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• She seemed to belong to that pagan, primitive kingdom of birds and forests where everything was infinitely abundant, wild, blooming, and royal in its perpetual decay, death, and rebirth; illicit and clashing with the human world.

  Jerzy Kosinski

  Bird, Blooming, Decay

  Jerzy Kosinski (2007). “The Painted Bird”, p.70, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• All primitive people are frightened of owls,' said Harley. 'The villagers here are scared to death of the gufo. Birds of ill omen. If they see one, they think they'll die. But they never do. See one, I mean, of course,' he added with a laugh.

  Francis Brett Young

  Mean, Thinking, People

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• Rooted in the mythology of all primitive races is the belief in a land of peace and happiness, a sort of earthly paradise, once possessed by man, but now lost, and only to be attained again by the virtuous.

  H. A. Guerber

  Men, Race, Land

  H. A. Guerber (1910). “Myths & Legends of the Middle Ages”

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