The Most Savage Quotes

#1. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Bertrand Russell

#2. My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#3. The most savage and voracious animal never kills to increase his wealth, or open a way to grandeur. It slays to satisfy his hunger, or in a natural defense of his own life, or of those whom he is prompted by instinct to preserve.

Mary Collyer

#4. Against my will, I became a witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and to the most savage triumph of brutality ever chroniclednever before did a generation suffer such a moral setback after it had attained such intellectual heights.

Stefan Zweig

#5. Nature allows one kind to kill another, it's part of the law ... you wonder if man might not be the most savage of all creatures. He's among the few that preys on nearly every other being, that constantly preys on his own species.

Leonard Budgell

#6. Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

Michel De Montaigne

#7. In the name of justice the most savage and revolting acts are perpetrated.

Ricardo Flores Magon

#8. When man is not properly trained, he is the most savage animal on the face of the globe.

Plato

#9. Man ... is a tame or civilized animal; never the less, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill- educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures.

Plato

#10. The most savage people are also the ugliest.

Mary Somerville

#11. If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil . He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#12. The story of Psyche finally made sense to him- why a mortal girl would be so afraid. Why would she risk breaking the rules to look the god of love in the face, because she feared he might be a monster.
Psyche had been right. Cupid was a monster. Love was the most savage monster of all.

Rick Riordan

#13. Your kind, Aleran, are the most vicious and gentle, most savage and noble, most treacherous and loyal, most terrifying and fascinating creatures I have ever seen.' Her fingers brushed over his cheek again. 'And you are unique among them.

Jim Butcher

#14. Being touched by Jericho Barrons with kindness makes you feel like you the biggest, most savage lion in the jungle, lying down, placing your
head it its mouth and, rather than taking your life, it licks you and
purrs.

Karen Marie Moning

#15. Of all the discoveries which men need to make, the most important, at the present moment, is that of the self-forming power treasured up in themselves. They little suspect its extent, as little as the savage apprehends the energy which the mind is created to exert on the material world.

William Ellery Channing

#16. The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

James G. Frazer

#17. For it is most true that a natural and secret hatred and aversation towards society in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast.

Francis Bacon

#18. The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#19. From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#20. The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest strength, of most powerful life. It is the maximum of the savage.

Novalis

#21. Squat, swarthy and powerful, the bandit was a mixture of Comanche and Comanchero bloods, revealing the most sadistic and savage traits of both.

Joe Millard

#22. Adam had seen many of Ronan's dreams made real by now, and he knew how savage and lovely and terrifying and whimsical they could be. But this girl was the most Ronan of any of them that he's seen. What a frightened monster she was.

Maggie Stiefvater

#23. Anyone who has to fight, even with the most modern weapons, against an enemy in complete command of the air, fights like a savage against modern European troops, under the same handicaps and with the same chances of success.

Erwin Rommel

#24. My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially.

Cheryl Strayed

#25. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.

Henry David Thoreau

#26. Probably in all our history no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese. Emotions forgotten since our most savage Indian wars were reawakened.

Allen Nevins

#27. The birch-bark canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect things of the kind constructed by human art.

William Cullen Bryant

#28. They forget that the vampaneze were once our brothers, that by destroying them, we destroy a part of ourselves. Most vampire never realize how pointless and savage war truly is. You were smart enough to see through the truth. Don't ever forget it.

Darren Shan

#29. I worship nothing. Not a good lie nor a dark one. If nature is proof of God's amazing creation then I have truly seen the light, and the light is black. Nature is genius at its most cruel and savage. No benevolent God could have come up with such an outrage.

Gary Numan

#30. The Indian who fells the tree that he may gather the fruit, and the Arab who plunders the caravans of commerce are actuated by the same impulse of savage nature, and relinquish for momentary rapine the long and secure possession of the most important blessings.

Edward Gibbon

#31. I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.

Marguerite Yourcenar

#32. Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

Ludwig Wittgenstein