Terry Notary Quotes

When they face desperation... human beings become animals.

My point of view is that men are basically animals, and I'm okay with that.

As free and crazy as we want to be, and how much we want to make the world a canvas, there's also a part of us that doesn't want to make any mark.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

I'm not so sure it's so civilized to be civilized all the time.

According to my observations, mankind are among the most easily tamable and domesticable of all creatures in the animal world. They are readily reducible to submission, so readily conditionable (to coin a word) as to exhibit an almost incredibly enduring patience under restraint and oppression of the most flagrant character. So far are they from displaying any overweening love of freedom that they show a singular contentment with a condition of servitorship, often showing a curious canine pride in it, and again often simply unaware that they are existing in that condition.

Humans were free before the word freedom became necessary.

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

For once you must try not to shirk the facts: mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.

I always find you go back to an animal; it will always show you the sort of primal aspects of behavior. You always know how to respond if you choose that.

We are not free, it was not intended we should be. A book of rules is placed in our cradle, and we never get rid of it until we reach our graves. Then we are free, and only then.

It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, 'till he returns to them again.

How we act with each other really reveals our most animal instincts.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Human history began with an act of disobedience and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think... This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep.

Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.

Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls.

I groaned. Man and his codes! Even in a lawless inferno, man has to give himself some honor, he's so desperate to separate himself from the beasts.

The collective dream is the hypnosis of social conditioning. Only sages, psychotics & geniuses manage to break free.

Normal is a cycle on the washing machine. There is no such thing when it comes to human beings.

Having to be different is the same trap as having to be the same.