Wyndham Lewis Quotes

Basically, we are all chimps. The human side is at the front of our forehead, but the chimp is the part that lashes out. When I play, I am completely chimp-orientated.

I approach my character with the question: What would an animal think? How would an animal respond? A lot of times, it's quick action and no fear, and sometimes it's irrational fear. You don't always know.

It was a natural process, because when we go to the ring we are human beings, but once you feel the punches and the competition that's when the beast comes out and takes hold of us.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

But the truth is that Homo sapiens is a sensual species. I think all species are, to one degree or another.

Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.

Men are beasts and even beasts don't behave as they do.

I think by and large, humans prefer to think of themselves as minds from the neck up. We don't really like to think of ourselves as another animal, another digesting, excreting, mating, snoring, sleeping kind of sack of guts. I don't think we like that. I think we'd rather not be reminded of it.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating. It means nothing.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

I have an odd theory on happiness, and it bothers people. My general theory is that happiness is a reward for an animal doing what it should be doing. So if a horse runs, it feels happy. Or if you are too thin, you can't be happy, because evolution wants you to be tense and anxious, trying to wake up in the morning looking for food.

Only when you have crossed the river, can you say the crocodile has a lump on his snout.

We resemble computers intellectually and animals emotionally.

People are animals, man.

Dogs don't bark at parked cars.

Creatures which, lacking mankind's superior brain power, did not concern themselves with finding someone to blame, and instead tried to find someone to eat.

The animals to whom nature has given the faculty we call cunning know always when to use it, and use it wisely; but when man descends to cunning he blunders and betrays.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.

I think we give human beings too much credit. We're primates, you know.

The laws of animality govern almost the whole of history.

...no cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them.

I do think on some basic level we are animals, and by instinct we kind of breed accordingly. But as much as I believe that, I work really hard when I'm in a relationship to make it work in a monogamous way.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.