Primitive Quotes - Page 6

• Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.

  Donna Tartt

  Children, Emotional, Adults

  "A Conversation with Donna Tartt, Author of THE LITTLE FRIEND". Interview, www.penguinrandomhouse.com. October 22, 2002.

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• Some form of gnosis or immediacy is attached to all thinking as its root-form or primitive origination; every act of thinking has this passive derivation, this coming-into-being of thinking not out of nothing (as it likes to imagine) but out of some unthinkable something. But the most self-abstractivist or self-reductivist kind of thinking cannot tolerate even the notion (much less the traumatic experience or confrontation) of an incurable pathos, a weakness or blind-spot, within consciousness. The very idea is an insult to the autonomy or self-determinability of ego/will/reason.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Thinking, Ideas

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• The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Past, Guarantees That, Childhood

  Isaiah Berlin (2014). “Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought”, p.387, Princeton University Press

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• Tribal life comes automatically to an end when a primitive people begins to live in a town or a city, for sooner or later a tribal organization is found to be incompatible with life in a city.

  Arthur Keith

  Cities, Organization, People

  Sir Arthur Keith (1947). “Evolution and Ethics”

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• Men were only made into 'men' with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally 'a man' any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Men, Males, Gender

  Wyndham Lewis (1989). “The Essential Wyndham Lewis: An Introduction to His Work”, Andre Deutsch Limited

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• I like druggy downtown kids who spray paint walls and trains. I like their lack of training, their primitive technique. I think it hurts you, when you stay too long in school.

  Lou Reed

  Art, Hurt, Wall

  Lou Reed (2008). “Pass Thru Fire: The Collected Lyrics”, p.339, Da Capo Press

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• It is odd to think that there is a word for something which, strictly speaking, does not exist, namely, "rest." We distinguish between living and dead matter; between moving bodies and bodies at rest. This is a primitive point of view. What seems dead, a stone or the proverbial "door-nail," say, is actually forever in motion. We have merely become accustomed to judge by outward appearances; by the deceptive impressions we get through our senses.

  Max Born

  Moving, Science, Thinking

  Max Born (2013). “The Restless Universe”, p.1, Courier Corporation

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• My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

  Jane Campion

  Keys, Musical, Emotion

  "How we made: Michael Nyman and Jane Campion on The Piano". Interview with Anna Tims, www.theguardian.com. July 30, 2012.

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• People didn't vote left or right in the election. They voted for putting an end to all the primitive political history.

  Fatos Nano

  People, Political, Election

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• Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials -- to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only one woman's hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas under the pot that is boiling over, soothe the older child who has broken a toy, and open both doors at once. She is a nutritionist, a child psychologist, an engineer, a production manager, an expert buyer, all in one. Her husband sees her as free to plan her own time, and envies her; she sees him as having regular hours and envies him.

  Margaret Mead

  Baby, Husband, Children

  Margaret Mead (1975). “Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world”, William Morrow & Co

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• What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

  George Eliot

  Tragedy, Needs, Gone

  George Eliot (1873). “Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse: Selected from the Works of George Eliot”, p.101

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• Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.

  Timothy Leary

  Mean, Reality, Names

  "The Intelligence Agents". Book by Timothy Leary, 1979.

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• The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a resonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: `The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.'

  Chinua Achebe

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Things Fall Apart ch. 1 (1958)

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• The genetic stage of a gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the local God. Jehovah of Genesis is a low-level barbarian macho punk God. He boastfully claims to have created the heaven and the stars and the world, but provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupations, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and hatred of women are primitive mammalian brain. His petty prides are primate.

  Timothy Leary

  Stars, Pride, Personality

  Timothy Leary (2009). “Evolutionary Agents”, p.41, Ronin Publishing

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• The United Nations represents not a final stage in the development of world order, but only a primitive stage. Therefore its primary task is to create the conditions which will make possible a more highly developed organization.

  John Foster Dulles

  Organization, Order, Tasks

  John Foster Dulles (1957). “War Or Peace”

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• Robotics are beginning to cross that line from absolutely primitive motion to motion that resembles animal or human behavior.

  J. J. Abrams

  Animal, Lines, Behavior

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.

  Frank Herbert

  Machinery, Ambiguous, Gross

  Frank Herbert (2008). “Dune Messiah”, p.175, Penguin

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• Russia, Russia - unwashed, backward, appealing Russia, so ashamed of your own backwardness, so orientally determined to conceal it from us by clever deceit. So sensitive and so suspicious in the face of the wicked, civilized west. I shall always remember you slyly, touchingly, but with great shouting and confusion - pumping hot water into our sleeping car in the frosty darkness of a December morning in order that we might not know, in order that we might never realize, to how primitive a land we had come.

  George F. Kennan

  Morning, Clever, Sleep

  "George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy". Book by David Allan Mayers, p. 30, 1988.

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• The terms 'male' and 'female' must be understood as representing no mere primitive opposition of sex to sex; but as defining two worlds of differing quality, in either of which men and women may jointly move and live.

  Laura Riding

  Sex, Moving, Men

  "A Personal Letter, With a Request for a Reply (1937)". "The World And Ourselves". Book by Laura Riding, www4.ntu.ac.uk. 1938.

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• Science as we now understand the word is of later birth. If its germinal origin may be traced to the early period when Observation, Induction, and Deduction were first employed, its birth must be referred to that comparatively recent period when the mind, rejecting the primitive tendency to seek in supernatural agencies for an explanation of all external phenomena, endeavoured, by a systematic investigation of the phenomena themselves to discover their invariable order and connection.

  George Henry Lewes

  Agency, Order, Mind

  George Henry Lewes (1864). “Aristotle: a chapter from the history of science including analyses of Aristotle's scientific writings”, p.26, London : Smith, Elder and Company

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• Economy and ideology. The claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works.

  Antonio Gramsci

  Expression, Practice, Political

  "Selections from the Prison Notebooks". Book by Antonio Gramsci, 1971.

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• I'm not a real gadgety person. In fact, some people think that I'm kind of primitive.

  Dave Matthews

  Real, Thinking, People

  Source: www.today.com

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• Comprehensibility is the highest law of all. Unity must be there. There must be means of ensuring it. All the things familiar to us from primitive life must also be used in works of art.

  Anton Webern

  Art, Mean, Law

  Anton Webern (1975). “The path to the new music”, European Amer Music Dist Corp

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• It may seem absurd to believe that a 'primitive' culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.

  Helena Norberg-Hodge

  Believe, Culture, Earth

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• An important advance in the life of a people is the transformation of the religion of fear into the moral religion. But one must avoid the prejudice that regards the religions of primitive peoples as pure fear religions and those of the civilized races as pure moral religions. All are mixed forms, though the moral element predominates in the higher levels of social life. Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of the idea of God.

  Albert Einstein

  Character, Race, Ideas

  Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw (2012). “Einstein on Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms”, p.47, Courier Corporation

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