Primal Behavior Quotes

Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

When we're threatened, it's very easy to appeal to our basic natures.

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

How like us is that filthy beast the ape.

We didn't ever want 'Tarzan' to feel like he was just a man. We didn't want him to stand up straight or wave good-bye. We wanted to make sure he always had that piece of gorilla in him, that he always had an animal attitude about him.

When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast.

Man is more ape than many of the apes.

Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

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

We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

Sure the Internet is the future, but what we do on the Internet is still very primal.

I paid a worker at New York's zoo to re-open it just for me and Robin (his wife). When we got to the gorilla cage there was 1 big Silverback gorilla there just bullying all the other gorillas. They were so powerful but their eyes were like an innocent infant. I offered the attendant $10,000 to open the cage and let smash that silverback's snotbox! He declined.

I rely a great deal on animal instincts.

Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.

You can see the true heart of a man when you're out in the woods with a weapon

It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.

Everybody knows how to throw a punch. Not correctly - he or she might not know how to turn the wrist or know what part of the hand to hit with. But humans instinctively know to fight, whether they bite or claw or pull hair. It's an instinct.

We may be human, but we're still animals.

Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

Quarreling over food and drink, having neither scruples nor shame, not knowing right from wrong, not trying to avoid death or injury, not fearful of greater strength or of greater numbers, greedily aware only of food and drink - such is the bravery of the dog and boar.

If a woman gets insomnia, you never know where you're going to find her furniture the next morning. It's primal. We have so little we can control, but we can perfect the way our room looks.

We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.

Men are, by nature, hunters, and women have been put in the position of being the prey.