Quotes about savage
page 3

“I start with the measures which the Government announced last Thursday, and which are the immediate occasion of today's debate, and to which the right hon. Gentleman finally came round - a trifle nervously, I thought - after ploughing through that tedious and tendentious farrago of moth-eaten cuttings presented to him by the Conservative Research Department. I must say that part of his speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

Source: Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1978/jun/14/economic-situation in the House of Commons (14 June 1978) on Sir Geoffrey Howe

Parting, Dead

“Thus did the Holy Harlots unhinge the brains of man,
and when they met and clashed with the pure Mountain Maidens,
they raised their white arms high, their armpits smelled of musk,
and, as the rites decreed, both fought their verbal war:
"God swoops from mountain peeks to eat and play on earth;
we are his food and drink and even his sacred toys —
and learn, O sterile maids, we are his soft, sweet mates.
Let her now leave who fears to merge with her dread God!"
The scornful savage mouth of Krino flashed reply:
"We will not leave! We guard the innocent soul of man!
God is a spirit with pure white wings, a soul that sails,
light, disembodied, deep in our thoughts, without embrace.
It's we who keep the world in bloom with virgin souls!"”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

From the Bull Ritual, Book VI, line 197
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

God, War, World, Fear

““What harm have the trees done them?” he said. “Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.””

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Arren)

Men, Tree, Grass

“The savage mind finds mysterious and arbitrary spiritual powers everywhere, in rivers and springs, inherent in the wind and rain, and presiding over the crops; but, with advance in civilization and the development of ordered knowledge, an ever wider compass is established as the for the reign of natural laws. Those who base their faith in God on the ever-receding miraculous phenomena, on the tacit assumption that human limitations prove the validity of religious interpretations, are ever pointing out some weak spots in the scientific web of cause and effect and saying "Here Science is baffled, and you must admit the need of God." But Science keeps extending her domain; and so the history of the thought of these men is the history of a continuous retreat. Their position is fundamentally a bad one because it makes God a personified symbol of our residuum of ignorance, and justifies Reinach's definition of religion as a "sum of scruples impeding the free use of the human faculties."”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin (1879–1967) American biologist (1879-1967)

No, the Creator must be seen as God of all Nature and of every natural law.
Life and Philosophy of W. H. Chamberlin (1925) pp.144-145

Men, God, Faith, Religion

“One cannot take up a leading article in even the foremost papers dealing with foreign relations, without finding it assumed that European governments have the instincts of savages and the foresight of cattle-lifters. Are we to assume that the governments of the world, which presumably are directed by men as farsighted as bankers, are permanently to fall below the banker in their conception of enlightened self-interest?”

Norman Angell book The Great Illusion

The Great Illusion (1910)

Men, World

“Arabic writing at the beginning of Islam was, therefore, not of the best quality nor of the greatest accuracy and excellence. It was not (even) of medium quality, because the Arabs possessed the savage desert attitude and were not familiar with crafts. One may compare what happened to the orthography of the Qur’an on account of this situation. The men around Muhammad wrote the Qur’an in their own script which, was not of a firmly established, good quality. Most of the letters were in contradiction to the orthography required by persons versed in the craft of writing…. Consequently, (the Qur’anic orthography of the men around Muhammad was followed and became established, and the scholars acquainted with it have called attention to passages where (this is noticeable). No attention should be paid in this connection with those incompetent (scholars) that (the men around Muhammad) knew well the art of writing and that the alleged discrepancies between their writing and the principles of orthography are not discrepancies, as has been alleged, but have a reason. For instance, they explain the addition of the alif in la ‘adhbahannahU "I shall indeed slaughter him" as indication that the slaughtering did not take place ( lA ‘adhbahannahU ). The addition of the ya in bi-ayydin "with hands (power)," they explain as an indication that the divine power is perfect. There are similar things based on nothing but purely arbitrary assumptions. The only reason that caused them to (assume such things) is their belief that (their explanations) would free the men around Muhammad from the suspicion of deficiency, in the sense that they were not able to write well. They think that good writing is perfection. Thus, they do not admit the fact that the men around Muhammad were deficient in writing.”

Ibn Khaldun book Muqaddimah

Muqqadimah, ibn Khaldun, vol. 2, p. 382
Muqaddimah (1377)

Men, Art, Thinking, Sense

“That austerity is a counterproductive economic policy in a situation of economic recession can be seen, rightly, as a “Keynesian critique.” Keynes did argue—and persuasively—that to cut public expenditure when an economy has unused productive capacity as well as unemployment owing to a deficiency of effective demand would tend to have the effect of slowing down the economy further and increasing—rather than decreasing—unemployment. Keynes certainly deserves much credit for making that rather basic point clear even to policymakers, irrespective of their politics, and he also provided what I would call a sketch of a theory of explaining how all this can be nicely captured within a general understanding of economic interdependences between different activities… I am certainly supportive of this Keynesian argument, and also of Paul Krugman’s efforts in cogently developing and propagating this important perspective, and in questioning the policy of massive austerity in Europe.
But I would also argue that the unsuitability of the policy of austerity is only partly due to Keynesian reasons. Where we have to go well beyond Keynes is in asking what public expenditure is for—other than for just strengthening effective demand, no matter what its content. As it happens, European resistance to savage cuts in public services and to indiscriminate austerity is not based only, or primarily, on Keynesian reasoning. The resistance is based also on a constructive point about the importance of public services—a perspective that is of great economic as well as political interest in Europe.”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

Amartya Sen, "What Happened to Europe?", New Republic (August 2, 2012)
2010s

Understanding, Question, Support, Effort

“In training Biu Jee we are taught to be free. The first forms tell us about normal situations. Biu Jee is for the abnormal situations. The ideas in Biu Jee sometimes will contradict normal Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) ideas in order to allow the person to survive in a bad situation. We are told to do what is necessary to survive and so there are no limitations. Styles have different concepts and objectives. With Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) we want to attack our opponent in a very direct and savage manner. Other styles will contradict this objective by attempting non-direct tactics. If we combine them our objectives can become confused in the heat of the fight. We will be less effective.”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Wong Shun Leung's Answer on the Question of "Do you feel that Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) has any limitations ? Many students like to combine boxing with kicking , throwing and grappling on the ground to develop eclectic systems." Mixed Martial Arts Source: Interview with Wong Shun Leung, by: Rusper Patel http://www.gongsauwong.com/interview.php

Idea, Fight, Personality, Training

“Thus, at eighteen, we find him, an English lordling, who could speak no English, and yet who could read and write his native language. Never had he seen a human being other than himself, for the little area traversed by his tribe was watered by no greater river to bring down the savage natives of the interior.
High hills shut it off on three sides, the ocean on the fourth. It was alive with lions and leopards and poisonous snakes. Its untouched mazes of matted jungle had as yet invited no hardy pioneer from the human beasts beyond its frontier.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 9 : Man and Man

Water, Reading

“Now remember courage, go to the door,
Open it and see whether coiled on the bed
Or cringing by the wall, a savage beast
Maybe with golden hair, with deep eyes
Like a bearded spider on a sunlit floor
Will snarl—and man can never be alone.”

Allen Tate (1899–1979) American poet, essayist and social commentator

The Wolves, from Collected Poems (1970).

Courage

“Pierrette, like all those who suffer more than they have strength to bear, kept silence. Silence is the only weapon by which such victims can conquer; it baffles the Cossack charges of envy, the savage skirmishings of suspicion; it does at times give victory, crushing and complete, — for what is more complete than silence? it is absolute; it is one of the attributes of infinity.”

Honoré de Balzac book Pierrette

Pierrette fit comme les gens qui souffrent au delà de leurs forces, elle garda le silence.Ce silence est, pour tous les êtres attaqués, le seul moyen de triompher: il lasse les charges cosaques des envieux, les sauvages escarmouches des ennemis; il donne une victoire écrasante et complète. Quoi de plus complet que le silence?Il est absolu, n'est-ce pas une des manières d'être de l'infini?
Source: Pierrette (1840), Ch. VI: An Old Maid's Jealousy

Silence, Suffering, Time, Victory

“What happened in Brussels was a co-production by adepts of two sick ideologies. The first one is Islamism in its many versions, including Khomeinism in Iran, Talibanism in Afghanistan, Salafism in Arab countries, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and ISIS and its offshoots across the globe. It will remain firmly in place until it implodes under the weight of its savage contradictions, as did the old Soviet Union, or is defeated in a war, as was the case with Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan. The other co-producer, the mushy and politically correct “liberal” ideology that has seduced segments of opinion in Western democracies, can and must be combated by all those who wish to protect the democratic system in an increasingly dangerous world.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Brussels is what happens when liberals don’t push immigrants to integrate" http://nypost.com/2016/03/27/brussels-is-what-happens-when-liberals-dont-push-immigrants-to-integrate/ New York Post (March 27, 2016). New York Post

War, World, Democracy, Country

“If it were not my purpose to combine foreign things with things Greek, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of Greek justice and peace over every nation, I should not content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Greeks should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos…”

Plutarch book Moralia

On the Fortune of Alexander, I, 332A Loeb, F.C Babbitt
Moralia, Others

Family, Peace, Justice, Search

“As the savages whom we have instructed are ready when left to themselves to return to their ancestral mode of life, so our young people quickly forget what they have learned at school, and sink back into the commonplace existence from which a right education would have saved them.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 241

Life, People, Education, School

“In primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity observed by divine kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many respects with the rules observed by homicides, mourners, women in childbed, girls at puberty, hunters and fishermen, and so on. To us these various classes of persons appear to differ totally in character and condition; some of them we should call holy, others we might pronounce unclean and polluted. But the savage makes no such moral distinction between them; the conceptions of holiness and pollution are not yet differentiated in his mind. To him the common feature of all these persons is that they are dangerous and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 21, Tabooed Things, § I : The Meaning of Taboo.

Women, Imagination, Girl, Appearance

“My own views began to change before the next Nazi move, the occupation of Austria in [March] 1938…. No longer was it possible for me to believe that Nazism was a temporary aberration in German politics, that the good sense of the German people would soon take care of the Fuehrer, and that the greater danger to peace was French over-reaction to Hitler's moves, with the United Kingdom supporting such reaction. This feeling was replaced by the fear of aggressive war brought about by the policy of a German regime which now must be considered as evil and savage and an immediate menace to freedom and to peace. This regime could not be allowed to triumph in Europe, for its triumph would be a threat to free men everywhere.”

Lester B. Pearson (1897–1972) 14th Prime Minister of Canada

Memoirs, Volume One

Men, War, People, Fear

“We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses are womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to E.M. Shavrova (September 16, 1891)
Letters

Dogs, Dreams, Heart

“We wait -- it seems for minutes -- looking at the night sky. Then, suddenly breaking the silence and making us start with alarm and fear… there is a savage, heart-rending, gurgling scream.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Fear, Silence, Waiting, Heart

“Had there been no other personal attribute to influence the final outcome, Tarzan of the Apes, the young Lord Greystoke, would have died as he had lived — an unknown savage beast in equatorial Africa.
But there was that which had raised him far above his fellows of the jungle — that little spark which spells the whole vast difference between man and brute — Reason. This it was which saved him from death beneath the iron muscles and tearing fangs of Terkoz.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 12 : Man's Reason

Death, Tear, Personality

“Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard God who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

God, Soul, Water, Passion

“In time the savage bull sustains the yoke,
In time all haggard hawks will stoop to lure,
In time small wedges cleave the hardest oak,
In time the flint is pierced with softest shower.”

Thomas Kyd book The Spanish Tragedy

Act II, sc. i
The Spanish Tragedy (1592)

Time

“The evidence introduced for political pessimism; the criminal, the lunatic, and the asocial individual, in a word, the second-rate citizen —these are not by nature as one finds them now but have been made so by society. It is said that they have never had a chance to be as they would be according to their nature, but were forced into the situation in which they find themselves through poverty, coercion, and ignorance. They are victims of society.
This defense against political pessimism regarding human nature is at first convincing. It possesses the superiority of dialectical thinking over positivistic thinking. It transforms moral states and qualities into processes. Brutal people do not “exist,” only their brutalization; criminality does not “exist,” only criminalization; stupidity does not “exist,” only stupefaction; self-seeking does not “exist,” only training in egoism; there are no second-rate citizens, only victims of patronization. What political positivism takes to be nature is in reality falsified nature: the suppression of opportunity for human beings. Rousseau knew of two aids who could illustrate his point of view, two classes of human beings who lived before civilization and, consequently, before perversion: the noble savage and the child. Enlightenment literature develops two of its most intimate passions around these two figures: ethnology and pedagogy.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

(describing Rousseau’s philosophy) p. 55
Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983)

People, Stupidity, Literature, Nature

“Straight to her face advanced the Athenian Lykos, and it must be said that it took no slender spirit for him to do so, such was the light of slaughter in the Amazon's eyes. "What do you call this, thou savage!" The prince gestured to the broth irrigating the walls and floors of the canyon. "Are these God's footsteps?" Is this the 'path of holiness' in which your race treads?" Theseus hastened forward, reining-in at his countryman's shoulder. "This is not war," Lykos bellowed to Antiope. "It is butchery!" Theseus sought to speak, as if to offer extenuation for the actions of the Amazons. Lykos cut him off with a curse. "You cannot defend the indefensible!"”

Steven Pressfield book Last of the Amazons

Lykos p. 153
Last of the Amazons (2002)

God, War, Light

“Nietzsche proposes the following brilliant hypothesis: The bad conscience is the deep-seated morbid condition that declared itself in man under the stress of the most radical change he has ever experienced when he found himself imprisoned in perpetuity within a society which was in- violable. All the strong and savage instincts such as adventurousness, rashness, cunning, rapacity, lust of power, which till then had not only been honoured, but actually encouraged, were suddenly put down as dangerous, and by degrees branded as immoral and criminal. Creatures adapted to a roving life of war and adventure suddenly saw all their instincts classed as worthless, nay, as forbidden. An immense despondency, a dejection without parallel, then took possession of them. And all these instincts that were not allowed an outward vent, turned inwards on the man himself feelings of enmity, cruelty, … violence, persecution, destruction and thus the bad conscience originated.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 39

Life, War, Feeling, Strong

“We’re sick and tired of these stories. The reason they keep using the word ‘cannibal’ about us is because they think we’re savages. It’s like calling Germans today Nazis because of their past, or Britain a land where witches are burned at the stake, of child slavery and public executions. It’s just lazy, racist journalism.”

Benny Wenda (1975) West Papuan activist

Survival and tribal people denounce ‘ludicrous’ cannibal claims http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/7807

Thinking, Past

“With my equipment, I walked toward a thatched cottage from which I saw smoke emerging. I was scarcely within pistol-shot range when I was surrounded by a large number of savages. They were very surprised to meet me, because I think I was the first they had seen dressed in bottles. And, to confound even more all the interpretations they might have given to this attire, I walked almost without touching the ground. They could not know that any jostling of my body raised me off the ground because the dew was heated by the noonday sun and that more bottles of dew might have taken me upwards into the air.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Thinking, Sun

“Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea
Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage
And make a northwest passage to the sea.”

Stan Rogers (1949–1983) Folk singer

Northwest Passage (1981)

Time, Sea

“The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental, between the material and the immaterial.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 55, The Transference of Evil.

Suffering

“I start with the measures which the Government announced last Thursday, and which are the immediate occasion of today's debate, and to which the right hon. Gentleman finally came round – a trifle nervously, I thought - after ploughing through that tedious and tendentious farrago of moth-eaten cuttings presented to him by the Conservative Research Department. I must say that part of his speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep.”

Geoffrey Howe (1926–2015) British Conservative politician

Hansard, House of Commons, 5th series, vol. 951 col. 1027.
Denis Healey, Howe's opposite number as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government, speaking in the House of Commons on 14 June, 1978.
About

Parting, Dead

“In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art – the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases – beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.”

Anne Rice book The Vampire Lestat

The Vampire Lestat (1985)

Beauty, Art, Perfection

“It is children and savages and the illiterate who have the most implicit faith. It is said that unbelief is sin. This is not so; it is nobler to doubt than to believe, for to doubt is often to take sides with fact against oneself. Nietzsche said that this is characteristic of "higher men."”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 88

Men, Children, Faith

“Why do we forget our childhood? With rare exceptions we have no memory of our first four, five, or six years, and yet we have only to watch the development of our own children during this period to realize that these are precisely the most exciting, the most formative years of life. Schachtel’s theory is that our infantile experiences, so free, so uninhibited, are suppressed because they are incompatible with the conventions of an adult society which we call ‘civilized’. The infant is a savage and must be tamed, domesticated. The process is so gradual and so universal that only exceptionally will an individual child escape it, to become perhaps a genius, perhaps the selfish individual we call a criminal. The significance of this theory for the problem of sincerity in art (and in life) is that occasionally the veil of forgetfulness that hides our infant years is lifted and then we recover all the force and vitality that distinguished our first experiences—the ‘celestial joys’ of which Traherne speaks, when the eyes feast for the first time and insatiably on the beauties of God’s creation. Those childhood experiences, when we ‘enjoy the World aright’, are indeed sincere, and we may therefore say that we too are sincere when in later years we are able to recall these innocent sensations.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Source: Collected Poems (1966), pp. 16-17

Life, God, Children, World

“Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.”

George Saintsbury (1845–1933) British literary critic

Vol. 1, p. 203
A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day

Literature

“I was wise to quit writing for the Sun back in January, 1941, for it was obvious by then that Roosevelt would horn into the war soon or late, and I knew by bitter experience in the last war that I'd be throttled at once. Since then I have thought out many likely articles, but not one of them has been printable. In these days, indeed, my very vocabulary is prohibited. I couldn't so much as mention Roosevelt or Churchill or any of the other frauds without having to face a savage official onslaught, with all blows directed below the belt. The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

April 1, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

War, Fraud, Sun

“Do not expect help.' 'One should always hope.' 'Then hope for a handsome savage with kindly ways.”

David Gemmell book Quest for Lost Heroes

Source: Drenai series, Quest for Lost Heroes, Ch. 2

Hope, Way, Help

“Who do you want to be: the spergs and savages who started wars and rubbed blood on their faces; or the reasonable gentlemen who allow the best ideas to win?”

Lauren Southern (1995) Canadian libertarian commentator

6:13-6:21.
2017 New Year's Resolutions for Millennials

War, Idea

“And that, of course, is the tragic flaw in the narcotics laws — that possession of marijuana is a felony. Regardless of whether it is as harmless as some believe, or as evil and vicious as others believe, savage and uncompromising law is bad law, and the good and humane judge will jump at any technicality that will keep him from imposing a penalty so barbaric and so cruel. The self-righteous pillars of church and society demand that "the drug traffic be stamped out" and think that making possession a felony will do the trick. Their ignorance of the roots of the drug traffic is as extensive as their ignorance of the law.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1969)

Law, Penalty, Thinking, Evil

“It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both. This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders' motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world. Instead, we are deluding the ignorant and the semi-savage by telling them that no political knowledge is necessary—that our system is only a matter of subjective preference—that any prehistorical form of tribal tyranny, gang rule, and slaughter will do just as well, with our sanction and support. It is thus that we encourage the spectacle of Algerian workers marching through the streets [in the 1962 Civil War] and shouting the demand: "Work, not blood!"—without knowing what great knowledge and virtue are required to achieve it. In the same way, in 1917, the Russian peasants were demanding: "Land and Freedom!" But Lenin and Stalin is what they got. In 1933, the Germans were demanding: "Room to live!" But what they got was Hitler. In 1793, the French were shouting: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!"”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

What they got was Napoleon. In 1776, the Americans were proclaiming "The Rights of Man"—and, led by political philosophers, they achieved it. No revolution, no matter how justified, and no movement, no matter how popular, has ever succeeded without a political philosophy to guide it, to set its direction and goal.
The Ayn Rand Column

War, World, Way, Motivation

“Today summoned painfully to earth by a short fat English magician with a dangerous stammer*.
*Dangerous because any verbal hiccup while giving me my orders would break my bonds and uncage my savage wrath. Ooh, gave myself a bit of a shiver writing that. That's literary talent.”

Jonathan Stroud (1970) British writer of fantasy fiction

The Bartimaeus Trilogy Official Website, Bart's Journal

“I poured on a rainstorm of fire and brimstone as hot as I could, and you know something of what that is. I believe that I never said anything more savage in the pulpit or on the stump.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

Letter to Eunice Lovejoy https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA192#v=onepage&q&f=false 1860s

“The alternative to getting help from the IMF would be economic policies so savage I think they would produce riots in the streets, an immediate fall in living standards and unemployment of three million.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

On ITN's News at Ten (29 September 1976).
1970s

Thinking, Help

“So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o'er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

On Poetry: Poetry, a Rhapsody (1733)

“All savageness is a sign of weakness.”
Omnis enim ex infirmitate feritas est.

Seneca the Younger Moral Essays

De Vita Beata (On the Happy Life): cap. 3, line 4
Alternate translation: All cruelty springs from weakness. (translator unknown)
As quoted in Caxtoniana: A Series of Essays on Life, Literature, and Manners (1864), Harper & brothers, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, p. 174 (in the essay The Sympathetic Temperment).
Moral Essays

“As I looked round the clearing at the ranks of squatting warriors and the small isolated group of my own men, I knew that this moonlight meeting in unknown Africa with a savage potentate who hated Europeans was the realization of my boyhood dreams. I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental. The knowledge that somewhere in this neighbourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying.”

Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) British explorer

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 146.

Men, Hate, Dreams, Hope

“Who killed John Keats?
"I," says the Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly;
"'Twas one of my feats."”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

John Keats (c. 1821).

“With cruell tusks a savage boar imploys,
Who all king Œneus' fertile fields destroys:
The stately trees tore from their fiber'd roots,
Silver'd with blossoms of delicious fruits.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

Book IX
Homer His Iliads Translated (1660)

Tree

“Did Libya invade Italy or was it Italy that invaded Libya? You attack us now as you did then. In other ways, with other systems, by supporting Israel, opposing Arab unity and our revolutions, frowning on Islam and calling us fanatics. We’ve been too patient with you. We’ve put up with your provocation for too long. If we hadn’t been so wise, we would have gone to war with you a thousand times. We didn’t because we think the use of force is a last resort for survival and because we have always been on the side of civilisation. After all, during the Middle Ages we civilised you. You were poor barbarians, primitive, savage creatures.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Interview with Oriana Fallaci (2 December 1979), Corriere della Sera
Interviews

War, Age, Way, Support

“Savage – There is only one way fit for a man – Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 100
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

People, Way

“On account of their savage nature, the Bedouins are people who plunder and cause damage. They plunder whatever they are able to lay their hands on without having to fight or to expose themselves to danger. They then retreat to their pastures in the desert. They do not attack or fight except in self-defence. Every stronghold or (locality) that seems difficult to attack, they by-pass in favour of some less difficult (enterprise). Tribes that are protected by inaccessible mountains are safe from their mischief and destructiveness. The Bedouins would not cross hills or undergo hardship and danger in order to get to them. Flat territory, on the other hand, falls victim to their looting and prey to their appetite whenever they (have the opportunity of) gaining power over it. Then they raid, plunder, and attack that territory repeatedly, because it is easily (accessible) to them. Eventually, its inhabitants succumb utterly to the Bedouins and then are pushed around by them in accordance with changes of control and shifts in leadership. Eventually, their civilization is wiped out. God has power over His creatures.”

Ibn Khaldun book Muqaddimah

Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal, p. 118, Princeton University Press, 1981.
Muqaddimah (1377)

God, People, Mountain, Nature

“The enemy fought with savage fury, and met death with all its horrours, without shrinking or complaining: not one asked to be spared, but fought as long as they could stand or sit.”

Davy Crockett (1786–1836) American politician

General John Coffee, on American Indian fighters in the Battle of Tallushatchee, in an official report to Andrew Jackson (November 1813), as quoted in Life of Andrew Jackson (1860) by James Porton
Misattributed

Death

“The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured- especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 245.

Life, People, World, Faith

“I’m a big believer that if America, if this country hasn’t broken your heart, then you don’t love her enough. Because there’s things that are savagely wrong in this country.”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

[Rutz, David, Booker: Things Are ‘Savagely Wrong’ in America, https://freebeacon.com/politics/booker-things-savagely-wrong-america/, 21 August 2018, The Washington Free Beacon, August 3, 2018]
2018

Love, Heart, Country

“The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest, where all human things…have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.”

Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American teacher and writer

Source: The Greek Way (1930), Ch. 1

Flowers, Business

“From this moment on, the child becomes a political object—to a certain extent, the living security deposit of enlightenment. The child is the “noble savage” in one’s own house. Through appropriate education care must be taken in the future that innocent children are not made into the same artificial social cripples the previous system produced. Children are already what the new bourgeois humans believe they want to become.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), pp. 55-56

Children, Education, Future, Housing

“Don't be surprised if I behave like a savage. I am a savage.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.usfca.edu/~southerr/boxing/fury.html
On himself

“Yet Dafydd's humour does not obscure, any more than Chaucer's does, the underlying seriousness of his poetry. Behind his poems of requited and unrequited love, whether idyllic or idealizing, whether streaked by savage jealousy or a profound feeling of betrayal reminiscent of Troilus and Criseyde, there runs a sense of the cruel impermanence of the world.”

Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) Welsh poet

Patrick Sims-Williams, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 302.
Criticism

Love, World, Jealousy, Feeling

“The most pitiless warriors against drugs have always been militant progressives. In China, the most savage attack on drug use occurred when the country was convulsed by a modern western doctrine of universal emancipation — Maoism. It is no accident that the crusade against drugs is led today by a country wedded to the pursuit of happiness — the United States. For the corollary of that improbable quest is a puritan war on pleasure.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Unsaved: Artificial Paradises (p. 141)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

War, Pleasure, Wedding, Universe

“Now I am prepared to maintain," said Chaffery, proceeding with his proposition, "that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry … Were I not of a profoundly indolent, restless, adventurous nature, and horribly averse to writing, I would make a great book of this and live honored by every profound duffer in the world.”

H. G. Wells book Love and Mr Lewisham

Love and Mr Lewisham (1899), Ch. 23

Lie, Books, World, Communication

“The greatest threat to the war on terrorism isn't the Islamic insurgency — our military can handle the savages. It's traitorous liberals trying to lose the war at home.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"When Will NYT Reveal One of al Qaeda's Secret Programs?" http://humanevents.com/2006/06/28/when-will-nyt-reveal-one-of-al-qaedas-secret-programs/ (28 June 2006). 2006

War, Home

“I always knew children were anti-social. But the children of the West Side - they're savage.”

Marc Connelly (1890–1980) American playwright

Quote in: Otto Penzler The Vicious Circle (2007) p. 18
Voices offstage: a book of memoirs, (1968)

Children

“But what you’re talking about means giving up all that—just the noble primitive, simple and self-sufficient. He’s going to chop down a tree—who sold him the ax? He wants to shoot a deer—who made his gun?…There never was and there never could be a noble simple creature such as you described. He’d be an ignorant savage, with dirt on his skin and lice in his hair. He would work sixteen hours a day to stay alive at all. He’d sleep in a filthy hut on a dirt floor. And his point of view and his mental processes would be just two jumps above an animal.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Beyond This Horizon

Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 6, “We don’t speak the same lingo”, pp. 73-74

Sleep, Tree, Animals

“The social value of freeing women from a harem-enclosed existence to a life of activity can be questioned only by those advocates of a "man's world" who wish to perpetuate its butchers and savage jungle law.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

As quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.7 in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn,
Attributed

Life, Women, World, Law

“I'm not going to vote. I won't vote for a Catholic and I won't vote for a damned Republican. Maybe I've said that before. My ancestors were all Catholic and not very far back. And I have reason to hate the church.
I feel a curious kinship, though, with the Middle Ages. I have been more successful in selling tales laid in that period of time, than in any other. Truth it was an epoch for strange writers. Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. The slight knowledge which filtered through the monastaries from the ancient sources of decayed Greece and fallen Rome, was so distorted and perverted that by the time it reached the people, it resembled some monstrous legend. And the vague minded savages further garbed it in heathen garments. Oh, a brave time, by Satan! Any smooth rogue could swindle his way through life, as he can today, but then there was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living.
I hate the devotees of great wealth but I enjoy seeing the splendor that wealth can buy. And if I were wealthy, I'd live in a place with marble walls and marble floors, lapis lazulis ceilings and cloth-of-gold and I would have silver fountains in the courts, flinging an everlasting sheen of sparkling water in the air. Soft low music should breathe forever through the rooms and slim tigerish girls should glide through on softly falling feet, serving all the wants of me and my guests; girls with white bare limbs like molten gold and soft dreamy eyes.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Harold Preece (received October 20, 1928)
Letters

Life, God, Hate, Children

“It is impossible to explain the recent works of these 'savages' as a formal development and new interpretation of Impressionism... The most beautiful prismatic colors and the celebrated Cubism are now meaningless goals for these 'savages.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

1911 - 1914, The 'Savages' of Germany' (1912)

Beauty, Color

“But revolutionary is not an acceptable term to those who benefit from, and deny at the same time, the savage exploitativeness of the social system.”

Herbert Schiller (1919–2000) American media critic

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Six, In the Core Of power, p. 154

Time

“Some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses.”

Flann O'Brien (1911–1966) Irish writer

Page 17
The Best of Myles (1968)

People, Books, Housing

“In one point the plan was fatally defective, since it involved the deadly enmity of a race whose character and whose power were as yet but ill understood,--the fiercest, boldest, most politic, and most ambitious savages to whom the American forest has ever given birth.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. II, Ch. 13 Discovery of Lake Huron
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Birth

“His eyes were frighteningly alive, the curve of his mouth savage and pleased. It suddenly didn't seem at all surprising that he should be able to pull things from his dreams. In that moment, Blue was a little in love with all of them. Their magic. Their quest. Their awfulness and strangeness. Her raven boys.”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

Blue
The Raven Cycle Series, The Dream Thieves (2013)

Love, Dreams, Boy

“The confused mass of rules of conduct called law, which has been bequeathed to us by slavery, serfdom, feudalism, and royalty, has taken the place of those stone monsters, before whom human victims used to be immolated, and whom slavish savages dared not even touch lest they should be slain by the thunderbolts of heaven.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Source: Law and Authority (1886), I

Law

“The social conditions of the British people in the early years of the twentieth century cannot be contemplated without deep anxiety. … We are at the cross-ways. If we stand on the old happy-go-lucky way, the richer classes ever growing in wealth and in number, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remaining plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery, then I think there is nothing before us but savage strife between class and class, with an increasing disorganization, with an increasing destruction of human strength and human virtue—nothing, in fact, but that dual degeneration which comes from the simultaneous waste of extreme wealth and of extreme want.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 138-139
Early career years (1898–1929)

People, Way, Thinking, Wealth

“A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to shame the boldest sons of toil.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Introduction
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Death, Men, Mountain, Parent

“The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies — a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themself fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 1

Women, Pain, Marriage, Youth

“The lure of Egypt, gentlemen, and the greater exotic lure of the lands beyond. The East – does not our way lie there? Europe shall, after tomorrow, be wholly ours. We do not wish America or Africa, shapeless savage continents with no future. But ah, the East. India, China, fabulous Japan. And, of course,’ with a fierce savagery replacing the mystic look, ‘we have the mission of striking at the enemy of mankind in that very East where he has so precarious a toehold”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Lie, Way, Future

“I know nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and what I have looked in the face in this world here, where I find myself. And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them—none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way.”

Charles Dickens book Little Dorrit

Bk. I, Ch. 11
Little Dorrit (1855-1857)

Women, Men, People, World

“There are certain great sentiments which simultaneously possess many minds and make what we call the spirit of the age. That spirit at the close of the last century was peculiarly humane. From the great Spanish Cardinal Ximenes, who refused the proposal of the Bishop Las Casas to enslave the Indians; from Milton, who sang, 'But man over man He made not Lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free', from John Selden, who said, 'Before all, Liberty', from Algernon Sidney, who died for it, from Morgan Godwyn, a clergyman of the Established Church, and Richard Baxter, the Dissenter, with his great contemporary, George Fox, whose protest has been faithfully maintained by the Quakers; from Southern, Montesquieu, Hutcheson, Savage, Shenstone, Sterne, Warburton, Voltaire, Rosseau, down to Cowper and Clarkson in 1783 — by the mouths of all these and innumerable others Religion, Scepticism, Literature, and Wit had persistently protested against the sin of slavery. As early as 1705 Lord Holt had declared there was no such thing as a slave by the law of England. At the close of the century, four years before our Declaration, Lord Mansfield, though yearning to please the planters, was yet compelled to utter the reluctant 'Amen' to the words of his predecessor. Shall we believe Lord Mansfield, who lived in the time and spoke for it, when he declared that wherever English law extended — and it extended to these colonies — there was no man whatsoever so poor and outcast but had rights sacred as the king's; or shall we believe a judge eighty-four years afterwards, who says that at that time Africans were regarded as people 'who had no rights which the white man was bound to respect?”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

I am not a lawyer, but, for the sake of the liberty of my countrymen, I trust the law of the Supreme Court of the United States is better than its knowledge of history.
1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

People, Age, Religion, Law

“We sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in their silos. Even now, we're standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive because we've declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies, more moral, more civilized. Our image is at stake, we insist.
But we didn't come this far because we are made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. Yes, that was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on, to grab this land from whomever, and we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
And so it goes with most great nation-states, which feeling guilty about their savage pasts, eventually civilize themselves out of business, and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry, up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.”

Paul Harvey (1918–2009) American broadcaster

Commenting on historical military and social policies, during his ABC News broadcast (23 June 2005); quoted in "Agression Dominates the Airwaves" by Saul Landau, at Transnational Institute (19 July 2005) http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=1859&username=guest@tni.org&password=9999&publish=Y.

Men, Way, Feeling, Business

“The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life — much less intelligence — beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

"Credo" (1991); also in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! : Collected Essays, 1934-1998 (1999), p. 360
1990s

Life, Disappointment, Intelligence

“The one thing that drives me up the wall is [people] saying, 'Look at all the deaths you Americans have caused in Iraq.' No! 'Scuse me? We invaded the place, we knocked over Saddam, and then Iraqis began killing each other… [B]ut who is doing this killing? Give me a break. These are Iraqis killing each other. So what did we do? If you're saying it's our fault that we unmasked them as knuckle-dragging savages from the 10th century — fine! I'll take credit.”

John Gibson (media host) (1946) American radio talk show host

April 25, 2007 http://mediamatters.org/research/200704250008

Death, People

“The last and greatest herald of Heaven's King,
Girt with rough skins, hies to the deserts wild,
Among that savage brood the woods forth bring,
Which he than man more harmless found and mild.”

William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649) British writer

"For the Baptist" Flowers of Sion (1623).

“Are you not ashamed to mix tame fruits with blood and slaughter? You are indeed wont to call serpents, leopards, and lions savage creatures; but yet yourselves are defiled with blood, and come nothing behind them in cruelty. What they kill is their ordinary nourishment, but what you kill is your better fare.”

Plutarch book Moralia

I, 2
Moralia, Of Eating of Flesh

“The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus, such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and receiver of the stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by what I observed at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

VIII. Information, Language, and Society. p. 157.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Intelligence, Communication, Learning, Memory

“A savage (or primitive) man, questioned (or asked) on what is good and what is wrong, answered: 'Right is when I defeat (or beat or hit) and deprive (or strip) others; wrong is when I am beated and deprived by them.' This is ("c'est là," Fr.) the voice of the natural man, who does not understand that good is always good, and wrong is always wrong, whether it happens to ourselves or it happens to others.*”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 43.

Understanding, Question, Nature

“Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick (1972)

Truth, Painting

“I want to know, for example, why beauty exists," she [Gabrielle] said, "why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power? Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough.”

Anne Rice book The Vampire Lestat

The Vampire Lestat (1985)

Life, God, Beauty, Feeling

“Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of affairs derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that can not be shaken. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks..”

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist

1920s, Lecture on Dada', 1922

Love, People, Truth, Food

“There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized. There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Frozen Horses and Deserts of Brick (p. 25)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

War, Animals

“A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Time

“All Christian missionaries say that Jesus was a very calm and peace loving person. But in reality he was a hot-tempered persons destitute of knowledge and who behaved like a wild savage. This shows that Jesus was neither the son of God, nor had he any miraculous powers. He did not possess the power to forgive sins. The righteous people do not stand in need of any mediator like Jesus. Jesus came to spread discord which is going on everywhere in the world. Therefore, it is evident that the hoax of Christ’s being the Son of God, the knower of the past and the future, the forgiver of sin, has been set up falsely by his disciples. In reality, he was a very ordinary ignorant man, neither learned nor a yogi.”

Dayanand Saraswati (1824–1883) founder of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement

"Hindu Nationalists of Modern India" by Jose Kuruvachira, p. 20

Love, God, People, World

“And waste their music on the savage race.”

Edward Young (1683–1765) English poet

Satire V, l. 228.
Love of Fame (1725-1728)

Music

“The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
A chafing savage, down the decent street;
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.”

Claude McKay (1889–1948) Jamaican American writer, poet

The White House, l. 5-8

Passion

“The newspapers print what the people want, and thus does the savage still swing his club and flourish his spear.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 142.

People

“Goddess of woods, tremendous in the chase
To mountain boars, and all the savage race!
Wide o'er the ethereal walks extends thy sway,
And o'er the infernal mansions void of day!
Look upon us on earth! unfold our fate,
And say what region is our destined seat?
Where shall we next thy lasting temples raise?
And choirs of virgins celebrate thy praise?”
Diva potens nemorum terror silvestribus ac spes! Cui licet anfractus ire per ethereos, Infernasque domos terrestria iura resolve. Et dic quas terras nos habitare velis. Dic certam sedem qua te venerabor in euum. Qua tibi virgineis templa dicabo choris.

Geoffrey of Monmouth The History of the Kings of Britain

Diva potens nemorum terror silvestribus ac spes!
</ref>Cui licet anfractus ire per ethereos,
Infernasque domos terrestria iura resolve.
Et dic quas terras nos habitare velis.
Dic certam sedem qua te venerabor in euum.
Qua tibi virgineis templa dicabo choris.
Bk. 1, ch. 11; pp. 100-101.
Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain)

Fate, Mountain

“Up to eight feet long and as heavy as a lioness, the adult Komodo dragon brandishes steak-knifelike teeth - sharp, recurved blades with serrated cutting edges. Showing the same sagacity found in veteran Nile crocodiles, fully adult dragons know their hunting territory from years of experience. They know where to lie along hilly game trails, awaiting the light footsteps of a deer. Attacks are instant successes or failures because the ora has no stamina, and if it misses on the first short rush, it has little sustained speed for a long pursuit. When an attack succeeds, the cruel rows of slashing teeth cut fearful wounds on the rump and thigh of ambushed animals and the stricken prey may die of massive infection days later even if it manages to break free from the dragon's mouth. Tethered livestock suffer truly terrible cuts across the legs when an ora slinks into the compound under cover of the warm Indonesian nights. Several humans, both native and European visitors, have died in savage daylight attacks. The victims simply had no warning sign that the ora was waiting patiently a few feet from the trail's edge.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 62-63
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Lie, Fear, Game, Failure

“Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Money, Effort, Evil

“The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Ayn Rand Ford Hall Forum lecture, 1974, text published on the website of The Ayn Rand Institute http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_america_at_war_israeli_arab_conflict

Men, Support, Science, Fight

“And nothing inhibited fourth-century orators in the assembly and the law-courts from indulging in savage slander, without a touch of humour in it.”

Moses I. Finley (1912–1986) American historian

Source: Democracy Ancient And Modern (Second Edition) (1985), Chapter 5, Censorship in Classical Antiquity, p. 171-172

Law

“With each tentative tiptoe and stumble, I had to inwardly assure myself that I was a good comedian and that my life was not pointless. “I am addicted to comfort,” I thought as I tumbled into the wood chips. I have become divorced from nature; I don’t know what the names of the trees and birds are. I don’t know what berries to eat or which stars will guide me home. I don’t know how to sleep outside in a wood or skin a rabbit. We have become like living cutlets, sanitized into cellular ineptitude. They say that supermarkets have three days’ worth of food. That if there was a power cut, in three days the food would spoil. That if cash machines stopped working, if cars couldn’t be filled with fuel, if homes were denied warmth, within three days we’d be roaming the streets like pampered savages, like urban zebras with nowhere to graze. The comfort has become a prison; we’ve allowed them to turn us into waddling pipkins. What is civilization but dependency? Now, I’m not suggesting we need to become supermen; that solution has been averred before and did not end well. Prisoners of comfort, we dread the Apocalypse. What will we do without our pre-packed meals and cozy jails and soporific glowing screens rocking us comatose? The Apocalypse may not arrive in a bright white instant; it may creep into the present like a fog. All about us we may see the shipwrecked harbingers foraging in the midsts of our excess. What have we become that we can tolerate adjacent destitution? That we can amble by ragged despair at every corner? We have allowed them to sever us from God, and until we take our brothers by the hand we will find no peace.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Life, God, Peace, Food

“The Occidental man is not so bad... Not bad at all, the brave Aryan [inhabitant of the Saraha]... I'm not unhappy to be living with him again.... one need not go outside of Europe in order to find truly "savage" individuals... These savage values to which I attribute more value than all others, appear to show themselves, in our worlds of Europe and America, more forcefully and tempestuously than in all other worlds..”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quotes in his letter to Jaque Berne, 29 April, 1949 (the day after his return to Paris); as cited in ; as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, p. 250 1940's

World, Appearance

“Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.”

Elizabeth Kostova book The Historian

Source: The Historian (2005), Ch. 25

Life, Way, Travel, Understanding

“Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear. Dying comes down to a biological chance and that is of no consequence. Disappearing is of a far higher order of necessity. You must not leave it to biology to decide when you will disappear. To disappear is to pass into an enigmatic state which is neither life nor death. Some animals know how to do this, as do savages, who withdraw while still alive, from the sight of their own people.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

1980s, Cool Memories (1987, trans. 1990)

Life, Death, People, Chance

Quotes about savage page 3

Quotes about savage
page 3