Robert Ardrey Quotes

#1. What we call patriotism, in other words, is a calculable force which, released by a predictable situation, will animate man in a manner no different from other territorial species.

Robert Ardrey

#2. If you watch lizards and lions copulating, then you will see that in 200 million years the male has not had a single new idea.

Robert Ardrey

#3. Natural selection deals ruthlessly with any population, bird or beaver, which fails to solve the problems of its environment with all those resources, learned or unlearned, which may be at its disposal.

Robert Ardrey

#4. Do you care about freedom? Dreams may have inspired it, and wishes prompted it, but only war and weapons have made it yours.

Robert Ardrey

#5. While we pursue the unattainable, we make impossible the realizable.

Robert Ardrey

#6. Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.

Robert Ardrey

#7. Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born. The home of our fathers was that African highland reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the Nile. Here we came about-slowly, ever so slowly-on a sky-swept savannah glowing with menace.

Robert Ardrey

#8. Far from the truth lay the antique assumption that man had fathered the weapon. The weapon, instead, had fathered man.

Robert Ardrey

#9. Sex is a sideshow in the world of the animal, for the dominant color of that world is fear.

Robert Ardrey

#10. What could not be denied was that in vast segments of the animal world natural selection of the most qualified individuals took place not by competition for females but by competition for space.

Robert Ardrey

#11. There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either.

Robert Ardrey

#12. Men, unlike mockingbirds, have the capacity for systematic self-delusion. We echo each other with equal precision, equal eloquence, equal assurance.

Robert Ardrey

#13. What truly leads the evolutionary procession, in other words, is behavior.

Robert Ardrey

#14. Man beset by anarchy, banditry, chaos and extinction must at last resort turn to that chamber of horrors, human enlightenment. For he has nowhere else to turn.

Robert Ardrey

#15. A bird does not fly because it has wings; it has wings because it flies.

Robert Ardrey

#16. Animal language is a contagious expression of mood effecting communication between social partners.

Robert Ardrey

#17. The hunter died when he achieved supremacy. Perhaps the death of the hunter will be the long monument to interglacial man. We denied a future to our sucessor beings.

Robert Ardrey

#18. There is nothing so moving - not even acts of love or hate - as the discovery that one is not alone.

Robert Ardrey

#19. Is it possible that the environmental severity of the 1930s induced-particularly in the most aware, alert, and compassionate of [British] men-a morality which makes no sense today?

Robert Ardrey

#20. We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?

Robert Ardrey

#21. Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival.

Robert Ardrey

#22. A human being is a problem in search of a solution.

Robert Ardrey

#23. Classic is our daring, classic our cowardice. Classic is our cruelty, classic our charity.

Robert Ardrey

#24. Why is man man? As long as we have had minds to think with, stars to ponder upon, dreams to disturb us, curiosity to inspire us, hours free for meditation, words to place our thoughts in order, the question like a restless ghost has prowled the cellars of our consciousness.

Robert Ardrey

#25. STREETER: Let's just not argue. You can call me stupid, all right. I can call you a coward, all right. It's just I believe one thing, you believe something else. I think the world's got an outside chance, you believe it hasn't. That's all.

Robert Ardrey

#26. The dog barking at you from behind his master's fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.

Robert Ardrey

#27. We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels.

Robert Ardrey