Primitive Lifestyle Quotes

They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

I don't keep a mobile, I am not computer savvy; I am not on any website. I live like a cave man.

The custom of these savages is to live as brute beasts in the mountains which are very rugged in that part of Ireland where we lost ourselves. They are great walkers, and inured to toil. The men are all large-bodied, and of handsome features and limbs and are as active as deer. The most of the women are very beautiful but badly got up. They do not eat more than once a day, and this is at night; and that what they usually eat is butter with oat bread. They drink sour milk, for they have no other drink; they don’t drink water although it is the best in the world. In feast days they eat some meat half-cooked without bread or salt as that is their custom.

We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion-guilt-free at last!

What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?

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

For 'Jeremiah Johnson,' nobody wanted to make that film. I went to Sydney Pollack, and I said, 'Sydney, I live in the mountains, and I would like to make a film about a person that had to exist in the mountains and survive in the mountains.'

I don't even own a cell phone.

I wish I were with some of the wild people that run in the woods, and know nothing about accomplishments!

Your body's made to run, to walk, to trek long distances and carry things, work in a forest, and hunt animals. You have to keep it alive to function.

The Indian...stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison.

The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!

Maybe primitive people have less bullshit to let go of, to give up. A person has to be willing to give up everything—not just wealth. All the bullshit he's been taught—all society's brainwashing. You have to let go of all that to get to the other side. Most people aren't willing to do that.

We didn't have electricity when I was a kid. We had to watch TV by candlelight. No, that's a silly joke.

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.

The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in -telephonic, technological and relational -to alter even the slightest bit of behavior in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work.

I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.

Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

In the middle of the woods Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo. Two old chairs and half a candle, One old jug without a handle- These were all the worldly goods.

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

I was raised in a tribal situation, among cannibal people.

The gentleman will please remember that when his half-civilized ancestors were hunting wild boar in Silesia, mine were princes of the earth.

For the 99 percent of the time we've been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine.

The manner of their living is very barbarous, because they do not eat at fixed times, but as often as they please