Primitive Culture Quotes

Wherever there is animal worship, there is human sacrifice.

The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind,' puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.

I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.

They do not carry arms nor are they acquainted with them, because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and through ignorance cut themselves. They have no iron.

As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.

Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.

… savages … barbarians

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

But as a heathen tells us, there is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish as not to be imbued with the conviction that there is a God.

If humanity is being swallowed by a modern primitivism, imagination might be the thing that saves us all.

Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.

Samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive - because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

The art and architecture of the past that we know is that which remains. The best is that which remains where it was painted, placed or built. Most of the art of the past that could be moved was taken by conquerors. Almost all recent art is conquered as soon as it's made, since it's first shown for sale and once sold is exhibited as foreign in the alien museums. The public has no idea of art other than that it is something portable that can be bought. There is no constructive effort; there is no cooperative effort. This situation is primitive in relation to a few earlier and better times.

Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.

A kind of white people are found here, who live like savages. Hunting is their chief occupation.

By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.

The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.

We probably, as primitive people, made music before we actually had a language, and that's where language comes from.

The savage and women are not what we call intellectual because they are not taught to know and manipulate the materials of knowledge.

Many savage nations worship trees, and I really think my first feeling would be one of delight and interest rather than of surprise, if some day when I am alone in the woods one of the trees were to speak to me.

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages.

Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.