Top 101 Brutes Quotes & Sayings

If sensuality be our only happiness we ought to envy the brutes, for instinct is a surer, shorter, safer guide to such happiness than reason.

For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?

Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.

Brutes by their natural instinct have produced many discoveries, whereas men by discussion and the conclusions of reason have given birth to few or none.

To reason with goverments, as they have existed for ages, is to argue with brutes. It is only from the nations themselves that reforms can be expected

Exterminate all the brutes!

O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee To temper man: we had been brutes without you.

The knowledge of numbers is one of the chief distinctions between us and the brutes.

There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

I believe we're brutes, but then, miraculously, there are those among us who stand up against that brutishness and remind us of the goodness we're capable of.

What is denominated discretion in man we call cunning in brutes.

Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of fate, All but the page prescribed, their present state: From brutes what men, from men what spirits know: Or who could suffer being here below?

"Face the brutes." That is a lesson for all life-face the terrible, face it boldly. Like the monkeys, the hardships of life fall back when we cease to flee before them.

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.

Brutes find out where their talents lie; a bear will not attempt to fly.

I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me.

The brave man seeks not popular applause, Nor, overpower'd with arms, deserts his cause; Unsham'd, though foil'd, he does the best he can, Force is of brutes, but honor is of man.

Now what is it moves our very hearts, and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? I suppose this first, that they have done no harm; next, that they have no power whatever of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which makes their sufferings so especially touching.

A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.

For it's "guns this" and "guns that," and "chuck 'em out, the brutes," But they're the "Savior of our loved ones" when the thugs begin to loot.

For fidelity, devotion, love, many a two-legged animal is below the dog and the horse. Happy would it be for thousands of people if they could stand at last before the Judgment Seat and say, I have loved as truly and have lived as decently as my dog, and yet we call them only brutes.

This whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid.

Men are not angels, neither are they brutes.

Outing is brutal and it should be reserved for brutes

Brutes abstract not. -- If it may be doubted, whether beasts compound and enlarge their ideas, that way, to any degree; this, I think, I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at all in them; and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to.

We are not distinguished from brutes by our senses, but by our understanding.

The Lord of Learning who upraised mankind from being silent brutes to singing men.

The Pythagoreans degrade impious men into brutes and, if one is to believe Empedocles, even into plants.

I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we donot teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual; however, for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.

Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities.

Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory.

The first essential character [of civilization], I should say, is forethought. This, indeed, is what mainly distinguishes men from brutes and adults from children.

Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.

Oh woman! lovely woman! nature made thee To temper man; we had been brutes without you; Angels are painted fair to look like you; There's in you all that we believe of heaven, Amazing brightness, purity, and truth, Eternal joy, and everlasting love.

[He] saw communism for the sham that it was--a bunch of brutes who seized power in the name of the people, only to repress the very people they claimed to champion.

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.

Man must get his thoughts, words and actions out of this vast moral jungle. We are not predators. We are, hopefully, more than instinctive killers and selfish brutes. Why take such a dim view of our potentials and capabilities?

But I do not admit the comparison between your slaves and even the lowest class of European free labourers, for the former are allowed the exercise of no faculties but those which they enjoy in common with the brutes that perish.

My great forte in killing buffaloes was to get them circling by riding my horse at the head of the herd and shooting their leaders. Thus the brutes behind were crowded to the left, so that they were soon going round and round.

The poor have often been subversive just because they don't always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work.

When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

As we to the brutes, poets are to us.

Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.

Brutes leave ingratitude to man.

Reason is the glory of human nature, and one of the chief eminences whereby we are raised above our fellow-creatures, the brutes, in this lower world.

Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the torturer.

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

Who can . . . guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

Nothing is gained except by sacrifice.... Do not degrade it to the level of the brutes.... Make yourselves decent men! ... Be chaste and pure! ... There is no other way. Did Christ find any other way?

The modern era of feminism relies on a lot of accepted premises. The biggest one is that men are predators, that they're mean. In their natural state they are brutes, bullies, and that women are endangered at the slightest bit of temper or anger.

Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

The instinct of brutes and insects can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living agent.

Mistress of love or of hate, occult science can dispense paradise or hell at its pleasure to human hearts; it disposes of all forms and confers beauty or ugliness; with the wand of Circe it changes men into brutes and animals alternately into men.

When men make themselves into brutes it is just to treat them like brutes.

People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?

How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes.

Switzerland is a curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world.

Men in England are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by brutes who refuse them bread, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern, and therefore wish to enslave.