Top 1200 Primitive Man Quotes & Sayings

Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man's origin, capacity and responsibility.

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.

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

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.

The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man, unable to understand the phenomena of nature, and harassed by them, saw in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.

The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: Look what I killed. Aren't I the best?

If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts.

The only information we have about the early history of the dance comes to us from the rock paintings created by primitive man tens of thousands of years ago in what is now France.

It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.

The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but from what we can judge today of any civilisation. The type of man dominant today is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.

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.

Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.

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.

Man must be able to escape civilization if he is to survive. Some of his greatest needs are for refuges and retreats where he can recapture for a day or a week the primitive conditions of life.

But primitive man had enemies real as well as imaginary, and they were not subject to priestly sorceries.

Violence is the tool of the barbarian; aggression is the method of the primitive; bloodshed is the way of the savage; cruelty is the manner of the brutish! To be called as a 'civilised,' man must be peaceable!

Civilized life, if it is to be stable, must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting. In Australia, where people are few, and rabbits are many, I watched the whole populace satisfying the primitive impulse in the primitive manner by the skilful slaughter of many thousands of rabbits.

CENTAUR, n. One of a race of persons who lived before the division of labor had been carried to such a pitch of differentiation, and who followed the primitive economic maxim, "Every man his own horse."

It's the same thing as a primitive of Africans, Indians, nomads or whatever - when they start getting up and doing their ritual and doing the dance, it's just what's coming through. It's the spirit. Rock 'n' roll is still primitive.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man

We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow.

Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in India only.

More and more, as civilization develops, we find the primitive to be essential to us. We root into the primitive as a tree roots into the earth. If we cut off the roots, we lose the sap without which we can't progress or even survive. I don't believe our civilization can continue very long out of contact with the primitive.

By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.

In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex).

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

Anthropology studies different cultures; mainly primitive, but it doesn't think its own culture is primitive, unfortunately. There is no field that you can study today that isn't trapped in the culture in some way. It's hard to escape your culture.

Scientists believe they may have discovered a primitive form of life on Jupiter's moon Europa. That primitive form of life? You guessed it, Frank Stallone.

The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.

Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations.

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.

A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,--such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

Samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive - because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.

Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.

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.

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.

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

To primitive man, the sky was wonderful, mysterious and awesome, but he could not even dream of what was within the golden disk or silver points of light so far beyond his reach.

Thus the creative genius may be at once nave and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person.

The man or nation of high culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions and honour, but beyond a certain point, primitive will or desire cannot be curbed.

A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed.

In the world which we know, among the different and primitive geniuses that preside over the evolution of the several species, there exists not one, excepting that of the dog, that ever gave a thought to the presence of man.

The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It's problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems.

The primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman is not only a sick man, he is above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.

The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.

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.

We are not primitive. We live differently to you, but we do not live exactly like our grandparents did, nor do you. Were your ancestors 'primitive'? I don't think so. We respect our ancestors. We love our children. This is the same for all people.

The religious urge in man is not a mere passing phase in the history of his spiritual development, but the ultimate source of all his ethical thought and all his concepts of morality; not the outcome of primitive credulity which a more "enlightened" age could outgrow, but the only answer to a real, basic need of man at all times and in all environments. In another word, it is an instinct.

No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.

American radio is the reverse of the Shakespearean stage. In Shakespeare's time the world's greatest dramas were acted with the most primitive technical arrangements; on the American air the world's most primitive writing is performed under perfect technical conditions.

The sarin gas is a very primitive gas. You can have it done in the backyard of a house ; it's a very primitive gas. So, it's not something complicated.

There is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man. A close connection between race and personality has never been established.

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.

Human beings are born with the instinct to express themselves through movement. Even before he could communicate with words, primitive man was dancing to the beat of his own heart.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

[Rock 'n' roll] is still a primitive form and there's no way you can get away from that. It's one of the primitive art forms and that's why it's good and that's why it's lasted...you know, it hasn't become sophisticated and it's not in the opera house.

What is conserved in the ground? Stone, bronze, ivory, bone, sometimes pottery. Never wood objects, no fabric or skins. That completely skews our notions about primitive man.

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage-the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterologic al traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.

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.