Simone Weil Quotes

Man as a pure animal does not exist.

At the root of the Noble Savage myth is this basic truth: the savage is good, but he's also violent. This is why Rousseau propounded the need for contracts between the savage and society. The savage also shows that in order to understand the need for civilization and culture, mankind needs to see barbarism. One could not exist without the other.

It may be a mistake, that man, in a state of nature, is more disposed to cruelty than courtesy.

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

It's human nature to be curious about people, and to be more curious about young people than old people. We want to cheer something on at the same time we want to tear it down. That's just so normal.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

You can find inspiration for man's behaviour wherever you look.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

I know I am among civilized men because they are fighting so savagely.

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

My experience is that aggression is a universal trait in human beings - girls feel it in any sort of environment, same-sex or co-ed.

For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

Are we savages or what?

Civilization has taught us to eat with a fork, but even now if nobody is around we use our fingers.

War is, we have been forced to admit, even in the face of its huge place in our civilization, an asocial trait.

If we do not exert the right of eating our neighbor, it is because we have other means of making good cheer

Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

The human race afraid of nothing, rushes on through every crime.

People who type with their iPhones on loud are barbarians and probably killers.

Humans can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet they're potentially more vicious than any other. They are the only ones who can be persuaded to hate millions of their own kind whom they have never seen and to kill as many as they can lay their hands on in the name of their tribe or their God.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.