Primitive Quotes - Page 2

• Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.

  Ayn Rand

  Racism, Form, Collectivism

  Ayn Rand (1999). “The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution”, p.158, Penguin

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• Good music is very close to primitive language.

  Denis Diderot

  Literature, Language, Music Is

  "Elements of Physiology". Book by Denis Diderot, 1875.

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• Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Reflection, People, Serious

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• Despite the theories traditionally taught in high-school social studies, the truth is: the more primitive the society, the more leisured its way of life.

  Peter Farb

  School, Way, Taught

  Peter Farb (1968). “Man's Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State”

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• It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

  Joseph Campbell

  Dream, Art, Philosophy

  Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.1, New World Library

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• 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.

  Karl Jaspers

  Men, Thinking, Primitive Man

  "Man in the Modern Age (Routledge Revivals)".

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

  Stephen Leacock

  Book, Reading, Class

  1913 Behind the Beyond,'Homer and Humbug'.

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• The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Swamps, Wilderness, Grows

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Maine Woods: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Volume III (of 20)”, p.87, Trajectory Inc

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• As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

  Herbert Spencer

  Fall, Self, Long

  "The Principles of Ethics" by Herbert Spencer, (Ch. 10), 1897.

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• The meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards—to chaotic darkness and the return to a primitive state.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Darkness, Movement, Return

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• -You're simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to... -To lay her cards out on the table.

  Tennessee Williams

  Simple, Thinking, Sides

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• The antique, almost primitive band he held between his fingers caught the sunlight, glinting silver. “I found this ring shortly after I was banished from heaven. I kept it to remind myself of how endless my sentence was, how eternal one small choice can be. I’ve kept it a long time. I want you to have it. You broke my suffering. You’ve given me a new eternity. Be my girl, Nora. Be my everything."

  Becca Fitzpatrick

  Girl, Long, Choices

  "Finale". Book by Becca Fitzpatrick, October 23, 2012.

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• Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.

  Victor Hugo

  Evil, Soul, Elements

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• All right, you primitive screwheads. Listen up. I'm Harry Dresden. I'm the new Winter Knight.

  Jim Butcher

  Winter, Knights, Harry Dresden

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• I am afraid that woman appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.

  Oscar Wilde

  Appreciate, Slave, Instinct

  Oscar Wilde, Moira Muldoon (2005). “The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings”, p.111, Simon and Schuster

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• I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared to the sophisticated business today.

  Tony Bennett

  Holiday, Records, Today

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• I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Long, Doe, Lovers

  Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “The Wisdom of Kierkegaard”, p.22, Simon and Schuster

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• Although Verwoerd thought Africans were lower than animals, his death did not yield us any pleasure. Political assassination is not something I or the ANC ever supported. It is a primitive way of contending with an opponent

  Nelson Mandela

  Animal, Yield, Political

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• Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Silly, Heart, Character

  Edgar Allan Poe (2004). “The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe”, p.63, Wordsworth Editions

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• It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Mean, Discovery

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• I thought it odd that the woman was over a thousand years old but thought the microwave was primitive.

  Kim Harrison

  Years, Odd, Microwaves

  Kim Harrison (2010). “Every Which Way But Dead”, p.40, HarperCollins UK

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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 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.

  Muhammad Asad

  Spiritual, Religious, Real

  Muhammad Asad (1961). “The Principles of State and Government in Islam”, p.10, Univ of California Press

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• You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Motivational, Atheist

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• 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.

  William Graham Sumner

  Life, Learning, Science

  Folkways ch. 1 (1906)

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