Margaret Fuller Quotes

Man is born a barbarian, and only raises himself above the beast by culture.

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

We became Homo sapiens not that long ago, from the scientific perspective, and we've retained a lot of our beast nature. We've done all these amazing things in terms of our knowledge base and technology, and now we're flying around and using the Internet. But we're still very animalistic.

Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.

Savages have often been likened to children, and the comparison is not only correct but also highly instructive. Many naturalists consider that the early condition of the individual indicates that of the race,-that the best test of the affinities of a species are the stages through which it passes. So also it is in the case of man; the life of each individual is an epitome of the history of the race, and the gradual development of the child illustrates that of the species.

The feat represents immense achievement for the neotenic ape, species Homo sapiens. But behind this lie twooldattributesoftheapetribalismandinquisitiveness.

Without the restraints of religion and social worship, men become savages much sooner than savages become civilized by means of religion and civil government.

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

Man is born barbarous--he is ransomed from the condition of beasts only by being cultivated.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph

Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded.

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind.

We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.