Top 778 Primitive Quotes & Sayings

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

As for the primitive, I hark back to it because we are still very primitive. How many thousands of years of culture, think you, have rubbed and polished at our raw edges? One probably; at the best, no more than two. And that takes us back to screaming savagery, when, gross of body and deed, we drank blood from the skulls of our enemies, and hailed as highest paradise the orgies and carnage of Valhalla.

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.

We need saints; we need this head - this talking head - to communicate. Every single religion you have people that go in-between, that can talk to god or communicate ideas. Then there are the talking heads in the news every time we watch TV. No matter how complex, you still need a person there to tell you what happened: a storyteller of sorts. I find that fascinating that we feel so attached to this primitive mode of connection, this primitive interface to the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I want to be as though newborn. To be almost primitive.

the emotions at death, as at birth, are instinctive and primitive.

It's a primitive thing, kings and queens.

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.

The primitive sign of wanting is trying to get.

Stories are the most primitive and purest form of communication.

Even primitive areas can produce a superstar.

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.

At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.

When civilizations collide, it usually isn't the more primitive one that prevails.

Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.

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.

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.

A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

Primitive does not mean stupid.

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.

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.

The freedom of cross country is so primitive. It's woman vs. nature.

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.

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).

Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.

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.

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.

It's unbelievable the primitive feelings that are aroused by rapid change.

Socialism is a return to primitive conditions.

I'm very primitive; I write with a pen.

Generalizing a type of people is really primitive.

In action be primitive; in foresight, a strategist.

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

It is the mark of a primitive society to view regression as progress.

The Dalmatian breed of dog has many primitive characteristics.

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

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.

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.

We're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn’t the fact that they were primitive — the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed.

Food is the most primitive form of comfort.

I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

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.

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

Condemned and executioner with aren't coupled in a primitive rite.

I'm trying to make a primitive painting. I'm trying to summon the archaic. I want to enter into a primitive situation. This is my protest against the sensory deprivation that we experience, which is due to this tendency towards globalization, towards homogenization, towards the generic - a technological standard rather than an aesthetic standard. I'm mining history, trying to regenerate a pictorial situation that is more humanistic. It's not about commodification, it's not about fitting into some sort of corporate structure. It's opposed to that direction.

How to become a really modern society when today we are so - as a human being, we feel so powerful. We have high technology and a superb way of controlling our life. And at the same time, in many ways we are so primitive. We are not on - even just a step away from the most brutal and primitive crudity. To be very crude on those issues, which is always challenges and we always have to look at the situation like a mirror, to draw some understanding.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

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

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.

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

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.

Eating meat is primitive, barbaric, and arrogant.