Savages Quotes - Page 12

• How much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners.

  Nikolai Gogol

  Manners, Refined, Concealed

  Nikolai Gogol (2011). “The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol”, p.397, Vintage

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• A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

  Jack London

  Dog, Laughter, Sadness

  Jack London (1992). “The Call of the Wild and White Fang”, p.71, Wordsworth Editions

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• The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"
  "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons – that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to."

  Aldous Huxley

  Philosophy, Believe, Zippers

  "Brave New World". Book by Aldous Huxley. Chapter 17, 1932.

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• It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. (Ch.1)

  Jack London

  Futility Of Life, Laughing, Effort

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• Savages!' he echoed, ironically. 'You set foot on one of the shores of this globe, professor, and you’re surprised to find savages? Where aren’t there savages? Besides, are they any worse than others, these whom you call savages?

  Jules Verne

  Feet, Professors, Shore

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• A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.

  William Wordsworth

  Stupid, Mind, Acting

  William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth (1815). “Poems”, p.370

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• Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we've led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending.

  Mark Steyn

  Children, Blessing, Years

  Mark Steyn (2006). “America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It”, p.207, Regnery Publishing

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• We reject this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel. And you have to do the same.

  George Galloway

  Israel, States, Illegal

  "George Galloway investigated by police for saying Bradford an 'Israel-free zone'" by Kevin Rawlinson, www.theguardian.com. August 7, 2014.

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• The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

  George Santayana

  Men, Laughing, Fool

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• We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

  Mark Twain

  Knowledge, Science, Rainbow

  A Tramp Abroad ch. 42 (1880)

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• I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society. I reject the notion that the death penalty has any essential deterrent effect on potential offenders. I am convinced that the contrary is true - that savagery begets only savagery.

  Andrei Sakharov

  Foundation, Essentials, Death Penalty

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• It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?

  Robin Hobb

  Memories, Night, Men

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• "All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
  "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
  There was a long silence.
  "I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

  Aldous Huxley

  Pain, Cancer, Long

  "Brave New World". Book by Aldous Huxley. Chapter 17, 1932.

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• No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States  of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders

  Ida B. Wells

  Women, Lynching, America

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• Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

  George Santayana

  Change, Children, Persistence

  George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT Press

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• A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

  Virginia Woolf

  Art, Knowing, Play

  Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928”, Chatto & Windus

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• There is need for a crusade of manliness and purity to counteract and nullify the savage work of those who think man is a beast. And that crusade is your work.

  Josemaria Escriva

  Faith, Inspiration, Thinking

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• He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Men, Age, Bottles

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• This is a fierce bad rabbit; look at his savage whiskers, and his claws and his turned-up tail.

  Beatrix Potter

  Rabbits, Tails, Looks

  Beatrix Potter (2016). “The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit: Beatrix's Tales”, p.1, VM eBooks

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• The show's writers had peppered the piece with words like "savage," "wild," and "animalistic." What bullshit. Show me the animal that kills for the thrill of watching something die. Why does the stereotype of the animalistic killer persist? Because humans like it. It neatly explains things for them, moving humans to the top of the evolutionary ladder and putting killers down among mythological man-beast monsters like werewolves. The truth is, if a werewolf behaved like this psychopath it wouldn't be because he was part animal, but because he was still too human. Only humans kill for sport.

  Kelley Armstrong

  Sports, Moving, Animal

  Kelley Armstrong (2009). “Bitten”, p.25, Vintage Canada

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• For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony. But justice is the bond of men in states, and the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.

  Aristotle

  Determination, Animal, Men

  Aristotle, Hugh Griffith (2009). “Aristotle”, p.201, Collector's Library

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• And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Ideas, Would Be

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2017). “The Brothers Karamazov (English Russian Edition illustrated): Братья Карамазовы (англо-русская редакция иллюстрированная)”, p.556, Clap Publishing, LLC.

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• If she know how strongly he felt, she'd have run out the door. He wasn't used to the possessive, or the savage joy she brought to his heart. It ate at his control, so he turned his attention to the music. He understood music.

  Patricia Briggs

  Running, Heart, Doors

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• The primitive in each of us climbs closer to the surface during the night, for the moon sings to it, and the cold void between the stars speaks its language. To that savage self, evil can look lovely in too little light.

  Dean Koontz

  Stars, Moon, Night

  Dean Koontz (2007). “False Memory”, p.136, Bantam

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• The value of a yellow metal (gold), originally chosen as money because it tickled the fancy of savages, is clearly a chancy and irrelevant thing on which to base the value of our money and the stability of our industrial system.

  Dennis Holme Robertson

  Yellow, Gold, Fancy

  Sir Dennis Holme Robertson (1929). “Money”

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