Primitive Quotes - Page 19

• Nuclear weapons are inherently threatening to all of civilization. If that had been a nuclear weapon at the World Trade Center, even the most primitive kind of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, you wouldn't have a Manhattan. There wouldn't be a democracy of any kind in America.

  Robert Scheer

  Civilization, America, Democracy

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Sociopaths are not afraid of very much, except for physical harm and dying - really primitive, basic kinds of fears. The problem with being alone for a sociopath is boredom.

  Martha Stout

  Boredom, Dying, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• A lot of people seem to get carried away that something that's made out of paper mâché is going to be better than not. And I always thought the original King Kong, that terrible little puppet with its hair going in all directions, was far more magical than Peter Jackson's incredibly beautifully rendered King Kong. So there's something to be said for a more primitive version of things. I think it's because it makes the audience work a little bit more, because you've got to invest it with life and reality, so I like doing that.

  Terry Gilliam

  Reality, Thinking, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• How do we get utopian thinking in a dystopian world? These days we aren't talking to each other - we're screaming and trying to hit each other over the head with rocks and sticks. A primitive fury has been unleashed by a president who has no culture, who cannot read, and who wants to determine power and aggression.

  Carolee Schneemann

  Thinking, Trying, President

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I know I am a human being. I can give myself to one year for a project. That is why I say I'm primitive in the way I work, especially compared to most artists. I came to New York in 1974, knowing that it is the art center of the world. But I didn't go to find people for my work. I do the work, and the people come to me, and I learn from them. That has always been my approach - to do the job first and then to respond to it after I finish and learn what people think about it. That's how I develop, and I'm more of an outsider in that way.

  Tehching Hsieh

  Art, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• As primitive as digital can be, there is nothing automatic in the methods I use, it's all basically done by hand. I know nothing about computers. I don't like computers. I use them for writing because I have to. I have never had a conversation about computers in my life.

  Jonathan Meades

  Writing, Done, Computer

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Historically the customs and traditions of day-to-day life in Africa have been dismissed by Western cultural anthropologists as primitive, chaotic, pagan activities that should be replaced by Christianity, the only civilized religion. The West has also long assumed that it should convert tribal cultures to literacy, which is to say an entirely different way of looking at the world, of living in the world. Most Africans who have achieved a comfortable Western lifestyle are Christian. Why? Because it comes with the package: Christian-ity, literacy, and a material lifestyle all come together.

  Malidoma Patrice Some

  Christian, Long, Together

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• In the Depression, besides everybody being poor, our entertainment was much more primitive and innocent. The comic strip, which I so venerated, was still a very new form. Movies had just become talkies. Radio had just gone coast to coast for the first time. Network radio had just begun when I was a kid. So all of these forms were more or less in their infancy, and feeling their oats. Comics were fresh and funny and nervy, and in a sense, defiant of the prevailing culture.

  Jules Feiffer

  Kids, Feelings, Culture

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• I'm very pessimistic about adaptations from one medium to another. I've got a very kind of primitive, Puritan view of it. I tend to think that if something was derived for one medium, then there's no real immediate reason to think that it's necessarily going to be as good or better if adapted into another one. There have been very good stage plays that have made some very good films. But there are not so many differences between the theater and the cinema as there are between the cinema and, say, reading a book or reading a comic.

  Alan Moore

  Real, Book, Reading

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• We literally have some of us in the modern culture trying their best to stomp out every other way of life, really. People in tribes are depicted as completely primitive and crazy. The way that we live is very pigheaded and very unaccepting of other ways of life, especially in America.

  Mr. Lif

  Crazy, People, Trying

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

  Don DeLillo

  White Noise, Greater

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.181, Pan Macmillan

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• But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?

  Nick Hornby

  Powerful, Creating, Years

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• I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Spring, Order, Flying

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.22, A&C Black

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• When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly. A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly. We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.

  Jean Cocteau

  Dream, Animal, Reality

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• Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.

  Northrop Frye

  Children, Mean, Thinking

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• In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.

  Stefan Zweig

  Hate, Optimistic, Psychosis

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• Philip Galanes makes his debut with a novel that is both heartbreaking and deftly comic, the story of a young man struggling with his most primitive desires--wanting and needing. It is a novel about the complex relationships between parents and children, a story of loss and of our unrelenting need for acknowledgment, to be seen as who we are. And in the end it is simply a love story for our time.

  A.M. Homes

  Children, Struggle, Loss

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• It is one thing to say, "Some men shall rule," quite another to declare, "All men shall rule," and that in virtue of the most primitive, the most rudimentary attribute they possess, that namely of sex.

  Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi

  Sex, Men, Male Dominance

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• Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should not be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.

  James G. Frazer

  Buddhism, Blow, Roots

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• Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men; the world is a jungle to them.They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history.

  Christina Stead

  Men, Primitive Man, Dawn

  Christina Stead (2012). “House of All Nations”, p.122, Open Road Media

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• People in the future look back on primitive machinery or technology or painting, and in some ways, it always seems amazingly intricate and finely wrought.

  Robyn Hitchcock

  Technology, People, Looks

  Interview with Christopher Bahn, www.avclub.com. November 13, 2007.

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• But the fact that the word "chattel" has survived as the inclusive legal term for all movable goods, points, not merely to the great importance of cattle in primitive times, but to the importance of the notion of sale or barter in generating the institution of property.

  Edward Jenks

  Facts, Institutions, Importance

  Edward Jenks (1922). “A Short History of English Law: From the Earliest Times to the End of the Year 1919”

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• I'd support life extension by whatever means, from cryonic suspension to cyborgism to coding ourselves into our computers or whatever. There is nothing noble or beautiful or dignified about dying. Like poverty, it is ugly, nasty, brutal and primitive.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Beautiful, Mean, Support

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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• Ireland regards sex, when she regards it at all, with an entirely primitive and practical eye.

  Susan Mitchell

  Sex, Eye, Practicals

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• just as violence is the last refuge of the inarticulate, so it is also the first resort of the incompetent, the easy out for the man who is capable of expressing himself only in the most primitive and vulgar of dramatic terms. He leaves us with only the obscenity of violence per se - and the pornographer thereof will always be with us, in film as in any other medium. And so will his audience.

  Judith Crist

  Men, Lasts, Violence

  Judith Crist (1968). “The private eye, the cowboy, and the very naked girl: movies from Cleo to Clyde”

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