Primitive Quotes

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.”
― Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works

“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

“He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's even something -sub-human -something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something - ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in - anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is - Stanley Kowalski - survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you - you here - waiting for him! Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night! - you call it - this party of apes! Somebody growls - some creature snatches at something - the fight is on! God! Maybe we are a long way from beng made in God's image, but Stella - my sister - there has been some progress since then! Such things as art - as poetry and music - such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tendered feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march towards what-ever it is we're approaching . . . Don't - don't hang back with the brutes!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Try repeating “man is an animal" a few times, just to notice how unconvincing it sounds. There seems to be no way to get this idea into our heads, except by long rumination over the facts of evolution or perhaps by exposure to a primitive tribe or by being raised on a farm. Primitives sometimes see little difference between themselves and the animals around them. Karl von den Steinen was told by a Xingu that the only difference between them and the monkey was that they monkeys lacked the bow and arrow. And Jules Henry observed on the Kningang that dogs are not considered pets, like some of the other animals, but are on a level of emotional equality, like a relative. But in our own Western culture we have, for the most part, set a great distance between ourselves and the rest of nature, and language helps us to do this. Thus we say that a sheep “drops" its lamb, but a woman “gives birth"—it’s much more noble. Yet we have the right to make such distinctions because we assign the meaning to the world by naming names of things; we inhabit a different sphere and we capitalize naturally on the privilege.”
― Becker Ernest, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

“Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.”
― Gary Snyder, The Old Ways

“Can you be sure that others have not come before you and destroyed the pristine state of the native myth? Can you be sure that the natives are not humoring you or pulling your leg? Bronislaw Malinowski thought he had discovered a people in the Trobriant Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth. When asked how children were conceived, they supplied him with an elaborate mythic structure prominently featuring celestial intervention. Amazed, Malinowski objected that was not how it was done at all, and supplied them instead with the version so popular in the West today – including a nine-month gestation period. “Impossible,” replied the Melanesians. “Do you not see that woman over there with her six-month-old child? Her husband has been on an extended voyage to another island for two years.” Is it more likely that the Melanesians were ignorant of the begetting of children or that they were gently chiding Malinowski? If some peculiar-looking stranger came into my town and asked ME where babies came from, I’d certainly be tempted to tell him about storks and cabbages. Prescientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are.”
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

“The more primitive a man is the better he believes himself to be.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Flotsam

“I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.”
― Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps

“I once visited a village of primitive people.
At village, I felt time and life moved slower.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“By what criteria can one decide which of a person's countless beliefs are primitive? The essential factor is that they are taken for granted: a person's primitive beliefs represent the basic truths he holds about physical reality, social reality, and himself and his own nature. Like all beliefs, conscious or unconscious, they have a personal aspect: they are rooted in the individual's experience and in the evidence of his senses. Like all beliefs, they also have a social aspect: with regard to every belief a person forms, he also forms some notion of how many other people have the experience and the knowledge necessary to share it with him, and of how close the agreement is among this group. Unlike other beliefs, however, primitive beliefs are normally not open to discussion or controversy. Either they do not come up in conversation because everyone shares them and everyone takes them for granted, or, if they do come up, they are virtually unassailable by outside forces. The criterion of social support is totally rejected; it is as if the individual said: "Nobody else could possibly know or have experienced what I have." Or, to quote a popular refrain: "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen."
 A person's primitive beliefs thus lie at the very core of his total system of beliefs, and they represent the subsystem in which he has the heaviest emotional commitment.”
― Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study

“It was like he was a caveman grunting, "You woman. Me man. Let’s make babies together.”
― Missy Lyons, Alien Promise

“Things is very primitive in the jungle - no place to shit, sleep on the ground like an animal, eat out of cans, no place to take a bath or nothing, clothes is all rotting off.”
― Winston Groom, Forrest Gump

“Let us turn our gaze towards the Southern lands, where only the melancholy light of origins shines.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The conjunction of the 'straightest', most austere product of the Northern hemisphere—the presbyterian, the Anglo-Saxon, the quintessential hyperborean, in his pride and his theology—and the most primitive, regressive, impotent and also the most unselfconscious element that the Antipodes concealed under the sun: the Aboriginals. The clash resulted in the quasi-total extermination of the Antipodean, but the Southern hemisphere has not perhaps pronounced its last word yet.

The Aboriginals were certainly had. They were led to claim for themselves stretches of land which in the days when they had been left alone they had roamed through as nomads with never a thought of ownership. Their claim was directed towards an object they had never possessed and which they would have thought it contemptible and sacrilegious to possess. Typical Western cunning. In return they have palmed off an even deadlier virus on to us—the virus of origins.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“A huge portion of what the civilized know more than the primitive is about the unnatural world.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“In the West we know the military uniform, clerical collar, medical goatee, and judge's wig. But where people are naked, it is the body itself that must be changed.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“There is no such thing as ‘primitive’ people, except as created by other people’s primitivism. Primitivism is any cultural framework that typifies a set of others as incarnating an archaic condition of humanity radically different from the condition of the stereotypers themselves.”
― Rupert Stasch

“It is by no means clear that the other exists for everyone. Does the other exist for the Savage or the Primitive? Some relationships are asymmetrical: the one may be the other for the other without this implying that the other is the other for the one. I may be other for him even though he is not the other for me.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“A great deal of various cultural elements naturally grew from a real need of responding to [mostly] human psychology and biology, with varying degrees of attention to environments, circumstances and chance.

Some solutions, how ever well intentioned - may have an impatient character due to the hardship of those times. Likewise - on the other side, certain modern aspects of society may have developed cultural elements which would not be possible without some disregard for hardship. Hardships, with which the very wellbeing of our biology find itself deeply entangled - depending heavily on balance.

We may recognize that in times of increased patience - come oppurtunity for reflection in hope to encourage greater balance.”
― Monaristw

“God - A mystery, a great difficulty for us to define. Nevertheless we agree, the truly highest possible state of being.

Perspective - To see.

Humble - Seeing how the chemical rush we feel in our bodies [almost urging us to feel great or proud] is completely unfounded if God is also in the room.

If we are greater than someone, it is only by a very small amount. But, we have a tendency of allowing a single drop of water to soak us in full.

It may be true that chimps differ from us only by a miniscule percent, though it's worth noting that each difference as meassured within percent can be very unequal. Great value can spring from small contributions as meassured in size or otherwise.

It can be healthy to always compare ourselves to God, before comparing ourselves to others. As the Sun to the Earth, before the Earth to the Moon.

Standing firm.”
― Tharistw

“I thought with resignation that men seemed in some ways to pass their lives on an unregenerately primitive level.”
― Mary Stewart

“It seems that before the Europeans came to the Americas, our highly cultured Indian woman usually held an honored position in the "primitive" society in which she lived. She was mistress of the home and took full part in tribal elections. The position of the woman was not only free, but honorable. She was a strong laborer, a good mechanic, a good craftsman, a trapper, a doctor, a preacher and, if need be, a leader. It seems that among the so-called SAVAGE people of this continent, women held a degree of political influence never equaled in any CIVILIZED nation.”
― Enriqueta Vasquez, Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: Writings from El Grito del Norte (Hispanic Civil Rights (Paperback))

“Writing a book is both rewarding and inspiring The preparation, research and introduction of new chapters to an ever increasing text provides enormous excitement as one gets closer and closer to completion The culmination of all the hours of work combined with the emotional input in its creation cannot describe the sense of pride and accomplishment when it is finally published”
― Roy Taylor, African Sunsets: A Settlers' Story

“We could be Immortal

If we just let go of hate
If we just let go of chaos
If we just let go of war
If we just let go of guns


We could be Immortal

If we just embraced love

Put human beings & nature first

But instead we choose
To be the worst examples
Of our primitive selves

Lacking in all of our best virtues
Lacking in any new ideas or values

Without these realizations
We go one step forward &
Always two steps back

Never succeeding
Never growing

Dead”
― R.M. Engelhardt, R A W POEMS R.M. ENGELHARDT

“What is primitive in me is my warmth; I have a sort of primitive love and primitive sympathy for people, for all people.”
― Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork

“It's been two hundred thousand years,
since we developed the face of human.
Question is, how many more millennia,
till we develop the heart of human!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat

“She was too ignorant, uneducated, in that kind of physically sophisticated, lovely-assed Texan way. An American primitive.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“This does not mean (as is so often thought) that primitive man, in order to explain natural phenomena, imparts human characteristics to an inanimate world. Primitive man simply does not know an inanimate world. For this very reason he does not 'personify' inanimate phenomena nor does he fill an empty world with the ghosts of the dead, as 'animism' would have us believe.

The world appears to primitive man neither inanimate nor empty but redundant with life; and life has individuality, in man and beast and plant, and in every phenomenon which confronts man — the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the eerie and unknown clearing in the wood, the stone which suddenly hurts him when he stumbles while on a hunting trip. Any phenomenon may at any time face him, not as 'It', but as 'Thou'. In this confrontation, 'Thou' reveals its individuality, its qualities, its will. 'Thou' is not contemplated with intellectual detachment; it is experienced as life confronting life, involving every faculty of man in a reciprocal relationship. Thoughts, no less than acts and feelings, are subordinated to this experience.”
― Henri Frankfort, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man