Top 100 Quotes About Savagery
#1. This watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man's fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form.
Tana French
#2. Something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was the childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that Man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places, who do not have to endure war's savagery, will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.
Eugene B. Sledge
#3. As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.
Sam Harris
#4. After our ages-long journey from savagery to civility, let's hope we haven't bought a round-trip ticket.
Cullen Hightower
#5. Mix an anorexic body with a heart made of pure fire and you are going to go with a savagery that's hard to explain.
Jeremy Clarkson
#6. The savagery of the picture strange and alluring, Frank smeared with blood and absolutely at ease. Barbarian, primitive, visceral; if Tony had been given to myth-making, he would have wondered if there could be any more frightening god than one who was simultaneously provider and destroyer.
Aleksandr Voinov
#7. Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.
Annie Lennox
#8. The 'gallows' are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism.
Arthur Koestler
#9. Something deep in the human psyche has always seemed to yearn for ever more enhanced levels of savagery.
Robert Dunbar
#10. Robespierre, crippled and blind, has yet to be healed to the knowledge that service - his desire - is a deed of savage-speaking gentleness, not soft-spoken savagery.
Tanith Lee
#11. No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.
Theodore Adorno
#12. If these modern peoples could inflict the most barbaric treatment and persecution on another group of human beings, then there was something very, very deplorable with our species. No amount of education or technological progress was going to make any difference in altering human savagery.
Mitchell Diamond
#13. Tonight, savagery in the streets of Iraq. Ten Americans die in a single day, four of them civilians murdered, mutilated and dragged through the streets ... What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy it may be, for some, the only job they can find.
Dan Rather
#15. What happens when a sheepdog gets bit by a wolf?"
"Duh. It becomes a wolf."
"No. It becomes a sheepdog that fights with the lawlessness and savagery of a wolf.
Karen Marie Moning
#16. Wolves and bears, they say, casting their savagery aside, have done like offices of pity.
William Shakespeare
#17. Poets write beautiful words to describe
savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.
Toba Beta
#18. Books were links that spanned such missing human bonds or even times of savagery and its resulting ages of ignorance.
Terry Goodkind
#19. The true nature of man left to himself without restraint is not nobility but savagery.
Steven James
#20. No matter how much the inhabitants might try to hide it, there was a savagery about this island, a bloodlust and pride that bound every mother, father, and child in a clannish commitment to the hunt.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#21. What lay at the bottom of their savagery, of course, was their idiotic belief in Calvinism - beyond question the most brutal and barbaric theology ever subscribed to by mortal man, whether in or out of the African bush.
H.L. Mencken
#22. I've since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.
Dean Koontz
#23. () Teeth clenched, she heard herself snarl out words in a voice feral in its savagery (...)
Stephen Lloyd Jones
#24. There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.
Don Winslow
#25. There is an undercurrent of savagery in the human psyche. Anyone who forgets this and doesn't guard against it, risks being swept away by it.
Lance Conrad
#26. One difference between savagery and civilization is a little courtesy. There's no telling what a lot of courtesy would do.
Cullen Hightower
#27. The cutthroat savagery of high school romance inspired in nearly all adults a collective amnesia. Having survived it themselves, they locked those memories far away in some dark chamber of their subconscious where things that are too terrible to contemplate are permanently stored.
Richard Russo
#28. There was a savagery to his smile, and a darkness in his eyes when he watched her. He was in love with her. And it hurt him.
Courtney Milan
#29. But then, it was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly. A
Kristin Cashore
#30. The ancient savagery that men call motherhood, who mistake its tenderness for weakness.
Diana Gabaldon
#31. People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable.
Dean Koontz
#32. And yet, when we stopped at the last hamlet and I saw him embrace the elders and leave gifts, saw the hope that he left behind, and remembered it was he who had saved Kaden from the savagery of his own kind, I wondered if anything I felt in my gut really mattered.
Mary E. Pearson
#33. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America's model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them? The
Margot Lee Shetterly
#34. I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them
Chinua Achebe
#35. The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.
Steven Pinker
#36. Moved by an unconsious sentiment born out of solitude and savagery - idle tales of a noughty child who sometimes reflects and who is always a lover of the beautiful - the beauty that is personal - the only beauty that is human.
Paul Gauguin
#37. It is a fine line, in all of us, between civilization and savagery. To any who think they would never cross it, I can only say, if you have never known what it is to be utterly betrayed and abandoned, you cannot know how close it is.
Jacqueline Carey
#38. As the cat lapses into savagery by night, and barbarously explores the dark, so primal and titanic is a woman with the love madness.
Gelett Burgess
#39. There is no such thing as compromising between civilization and savagery. Civilization must always defend itself against savagery or else fall to it.
Terry Goodkind
#40. What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.
Thomas Sowell
#41. Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.
Herman Melville
#42. The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.
Mark Twain
#43. Violence in any form is evil and to kill innocent animals in tantamount to blatant savagery.
Sathya Sai Baba
#44. We are compelled to choose," he sometimes complained, "between the savagery of Communism and the vulgarism of America.
Pearl S. Buck
#45. You could kill a bloke with rules, Tom knew that. And yet sometimes they were what stood between man and savagery, between man and monsters.
M.L. Stedman
#46. Laws are made not to be broken.
They are made to curb our savagery.
Toba Beta
#47. Ideology brings about a disastrous fusion: that of violence and righteousness - a savagery without stain.
Martin Amis
#48. So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.
Arundhati Roy
#49. They understood only too well the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought.
William Golding
#50. Art and savagery, aesthetics and violence. Were they contradictory or symbiotic?
Christopher Brookmyre
#51. I am a woman searching for her savagery
even if it's doomed
June Jordan
#52. The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#53. A wedding is a funeral which masquerades as a feast. And the greater the pageantry, the deeper the savagery.
Julie Burchill
#54. Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.
Jane Addams
#56. Well, it certainly is for men, because large numbers of men living together can easily become like wild animals. Men are brutes at heart, and without the civilising influence of women they quickly revert to savagery.
Jennifer Worth
#57. The family dinner table is the cornerstone of civilization and those who 'graze' from refrigerators or in front of the television sets are doomed to remain in a state of savagery.
Judith Martin
#58. Taking them out of the picture, so to speak, what football really is, the savagery, the core root of football, it doesn't change. It really puts the real in football.
Lawrence Taylor
#59. The savagery and power of Edith Wharton's ghost stories surprised me.
Michael Dirda
#60. He couldn't drive the horror of cannibalism from his brain, just as he couldn't wholly suppress a simple observation that seemed to rebut their savagery: these were the nicest man-eating barbarians a lonely wanderer could ever hope to encounter.
Monte Reel
#61. We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn't. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet's random geological savagery.
Arthur C. Clarke
#62. The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.
George Bernard Shaw
#63. At the beginning of June 1944, the war was reaching a climax. German troops had been brutalised by the savagery of the ongoing fighting in Russia, where the Red Army was secretly preparing its vast encirclement of the Germans' Army Group Centre.
Antony Beevor
#64. Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Willa Cather
#65. It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.
Will Self
#66. Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.
Theodore Roosevelt
#68. Maybe the devil in human beings isn't the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we've done is create the devil in our own image
Dean Koontz
#69. The champion of justice [ ... ] would be as a man who has fallen among wild beasts, unwilling to share their misdeeds, and unable to hold out singly against the savagery of all.
Plato
#70. An innings of neurotic violence, of eccentric watchfulness, of brainless impetuosity and incontinent savagery - it was an extraordinary innings, a masterpiece and it secured the Ashes for England [on Pietersen's Ashes winning innings, 2005
Simon Barnes
#71. Oh! To be beyond the pale once more, out of civilization into savagery? I abhor civilization!
Isabella L. Bird
#72. Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. ... Collectivism is not the 'New Order of Tomorrow.' It is the order of a very dark yesterday.
Ayn Rand
#73. The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!
Robert E. Howard
#74. [D]espite the patina of civility coating most of modern society, underneath it is a thick layer of savagery.
Gene Doucette
#75. The law should be the point at which savagery ended because civilization stood in its path.
Ariana Franklin
#76. The unsparing savagery of stories like the Robber Bridegroom is a sharp reminder that fairy tales belong to the childhood of culture as much as the culture of childhood ... they capture anxieties and fantasies that have deep roots in childhood experience
Maria Tatar
#77. Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.
Jean Dubuffet
#78. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
Karl Rove
#79. Any man who is a man may not, in honor, submit to threats or violence. But many men who are not cowards are simply unprepared for the fact of human savagery.
Jeff Cooper
#80. There was a curious mixture in the boy, of uncompleted savagery, and uncompleted civilization.
Charles Dickens
#81. I blinked at my mate. Then grinned, not bothering to hide the savagery within it. "Hybern has no idea about the hell that's about to rain down upon them, do they." "Here's to family reunions," was all Rhys said. Then
Sarah J. Maas
#82. Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
Octavia E. Butler
#83. I've made books my life because they let me escape this world of cruelty and savagery.
Jeff Zentner
#84. The world of nature, at once a vision of exquisite beauty and an arena of brutal savagery, is a dynamic system of delicate balances.
S. Bradley Stoner
#85. These will suffice; who knows but we may be on a slope which leads down to
aboriginal savagery. But of this 1 am sure: if we are to escape, we must not yield a foot upon demanding a fair field and an honest race to all ideas.
Nelson Algren
#86. At that time I was only twenty-four years old. My life then was already gloomy, disorderly, and solitary to the point of savagery.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#87. It was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly.
Kristin Cashore
#88. The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.
George Bernard Shaw
#89. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery.
Paul Graham
#90. Some goodness in this world is understood by the presence of the opposite. One will value light in the middle of darkness, and appreciate clemency by encountering savagery. Likewise, a meeting is properly indulged after having known the devastating account of goodbye.
Aishah Madadiy
#91. the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#92. The English may love gardening and fishing, but they have never struck me as being close to nature. Their way of expression is 'the hollyhocks are awfully good' sort of thing, all done in very good taste. The savagery of nature is something they don't dwell upon.
Denholm Elliott
#93. When people look most vicious, what you are seeing is not their animal side. It is the savagery that only humans can muster.
Robin Hobb
#94. No system of religion should go in partnership with barbarism. Neither should any Christian feel it his duty to defend the savagery of the past.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#95. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
William Kingdon Clifford
#96. In the midst of nature's savagery, human beings sometimes (rarely) succeed in creating small oases warmed by love. Small, exclusive, enclosed spaces governed only by love and shared subjectivity.
Andy Miller
#97. A country should be judged by how it treats its minorities. To the extent it protect them, it stands for the ennobling values of empathy and compassion, for justice rooted, not in might, but in human equality, and for civilization instead of savagery.
Mohsin Hamid
#98. Faced with the challenge of an endless universe, Man will be forced to mature further, just as the Neanderthal-faced with an entire planet-had no choice but to grow away from the tradition of savagery.
Dean Koontz
#99. The Wit is more curse than gift, I sometimes think. Perhaps the hardest part of possessing it is witnessing so completely the casual cruelty of humans. Some speak of the savagery of beasts. I will ever prefer that to the thoughtless contempt some men have towards animals.
Robin Hobb
#100. Just because we are capable of art didn't what lay in front of him could be dismissed as aberration, that we could take what we admired and fence that off as human, dismissing the rest as monstrous. The same hands committed both. Brains don't undermine the savagery. They made us better at it.
Michael Marshall
