Primitive Skills Quotes

Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

I talk to children in schools all over the world, and I've found that both boys and girls are fascinated by how hunter-gatherers manage to survive entirely on what's around them in their environment: trees, rocks, animals and plants.

Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.

My dad liked to boil a squirrel head and suck the brains out the nose. Smaller than a chicken, bigger than a rat.

I think fire is so critical in the wild. You can cook with it, you can make tools, you can deter a predator, you can dry your clothes and you get that element of morale that matters so much when you're stuck in the middle of nowhere.

I can't start a fire with two sticks or hunt rabbits or anything like that.

Indeed, the maligned American pastime of baseball may be by-far the greatest and best sport by one criterion, when it comes to emulating and training for genuinely useful Neolithic skills! Think about it. The game consists of lots of patient waiting and watching (stalking), throwing with incredible accuracy and speed, sprinting, dodging... and hitting moving objects real hard with clubs! And arguing. Hey, what else could you possibly need? Now, tell me, how do soccer or basketball prepare you to survive in the wild, hm?

There's an absolute surety to the hands-on conservation lifestyle of hunting, fishing and trapping where you know you're going to consume today.

At this camp I had the unique experience of showing all these seasoned Westerners that it was possible to make a fire by the friction of two sticks. This has long been a specialty of mine; I use a thong and a bow as the simplest way.

I did a real boot camp once which with The Thin Red Line which was learning military exercises and this was far less strenuous. I really had a blast. We were all kind of thrown into the woods and we didn't have any of the modern conveniences that we take for granted. Learned how to survive without anything.

I like the skill set required to be an outdoorsman - to cook food over fire and to climb rocks without ropes, to move around using nothing but yourself and maybe some rudimentary tools.

Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.

In health of mind and body, men should see with their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and war with their arms, not with engine-beams, nor rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before you can see them.

What I miss is being close to nature - collecting your own water and generating your own electricity, catching your own food. I still dream of doing that with my own family, even if it's just for a year-long experiment, I would love to have tried that.

Shoes and clothing damage our ability to survive naked in the wilderness.

Growing up with Koli boys is a different experience. It teaches you survival.

I actually grew up watching 'Survivorman' and Bear Grylls. I know that pine needles are a good source of vitamin C and just random facts from watching the stuff.

People have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years: using whatever is available to build shelter. If you ponder what could be used, then building materials are everywhere.

If a dog happens to catch a rabbit or another animal, it can very easily remove the hide. If a cat catches a squirrel, they have no trouble with that. But if a person does that, they will work all day and all night to get the skin off of an animal, because they don't have long canine teeth anymore.

My nickname was Tarzan: I found my food in the jungle; I hunted birds.

If I had the chance to spend a day with Werner Herzog, I would want there to be a canoe involved. I want to be down in Patagonia or something, and kill some kind of wild beast and skin it and gut it and cook it. And then turn its fur into some kind of layer of warmth. And then trek through the hills.

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring

I could start a fire from scratch.

My survival skills are very good for Hollywood. Beyond that, I'm not really sure.

My Mother was a very wild Australian woman. When we were in Africa she could kill a snake with one blow from a crow bar, which she kept at the back door.