Edgar Rice Burroughs Quotes

On a deeper level, I think many stories - especially thrillers - can be a journey to the heart of darkness.

It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction.

When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect.

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

There's something in human nature that says we need to have at least one symbolic place where chaos and dark desires can live.

I think that there's a hidden darkness in all of us!

Every man has a wild animal in him.

A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.

Justice is inextricably linked to revenge, which is both morally right and a deeply internalized instinct as innate to man as breathing, having sex, falling in love, and making war.

Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human.

Give a truly good person power, and they’re still a good person. Give a bad person power, and they’re still a bad person. The question is always about the person in between. The one that isn’t evil, or good, but just ordinary. You don’t always know what an ordinary person is like on the inside.

It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leporous.

We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.

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. So, I think about hierarchies. I think about evolution. I think about how we stack up, how we sit on top of each other. How we pray that we know what we're up to.

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

Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.

Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.

Every heart is the lair of a ferocious animal. The greatest wrong that you can put upon a man is to provoke him to let out his beast.

We lost this animal instinct that we used to have. We use a very low percentage of our instinct.

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

Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.

Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.

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