Savagery quotes:

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Religion is the last refuge of human savagery. -- Alfred North Whitehead
Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live. -- Octavia Butler
It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves. -- Will Self
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
Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt. -- H. Rider Haggard
The law should be the point at which savagery ended because civilization stood in its path. -- Ariana Franklin
Violence in any form is evil and to kill innocent animals in tantamount to blatant savagery. -- Sathya Sai Baba
Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness. -- Jean Dubuffet
The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery! -- Robert E. Howard
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
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
The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life. -- Thorstein Veblen
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
The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century. -- Harold Innis
Passion has overthrown tyrants and freed prisoners and slaves. Passion has brought justice where there was savagery. Passion has created freedom where there was nothing but fear. Passion has helped souls rise from the ashes of their horrible lives and build something better, stronger, more beautiful. -- Jim Butcher
I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society. I reject the notion that the death penalty has any essential deterrent effect on potential offenders. I am convinced that the contrary is true - that savagery begets only savagery. -- Andrei Sakharov
As for the Jews, their explanation of anti-Semitism is more characteristic yet. In addition to the usual cliche, "with hatred and savagery" - naturally with no motive, they do not care to discuss motives - according to them, anti-Semitism is a madness, an intellectual degeneration, an affliction of the spirit. -- A. C. Cuza
The legislator commands the future; to be feeble will avail him nothing: it is for him to will what is good and to perpetuate it; to make man what he desires to be: for the laws, working upon the social body, which is inert in itself, can produce either virtue or crime, civilized customs or savagery. -- Louis Antoine de Saint-Just
We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. -- H. P. Lovecraft
Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other. -- Carl von Clausewitz
There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery. -- Don Winslow
Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion. -- Annie Lennox
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
There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time. -- James Henry Breasted
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
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
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
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
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
The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery. -- George Bernard Shaw
The true nature of man left to himself without restraint is not nobility but savagery. -- Steven James
After our ages-long journey from savagery to civility, let's hope we haven't bought a round-trip ticket. -- Cullen Hightower
The English, who eat their meat red and bloody, show the savagery that goes with such food. -- Julien Offray de La Mettrie
A wedding is a funeral which masquerades as a feast. And the greater the pageantry, the deeper the savagery. -- Julie Burchill
One difference between savagery and civilization is a little courtesy. There's no telling what a lot of courtesy would do. -- Cullen Hightower
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
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
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
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
The African tribesman, with his complete contempt for truth and his emphasis on brutality and savagery for others but not for himself, is a no-civilization. -- L. Ron Hubbard
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
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
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
We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isnâ??t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planetâ??s random geological savagery. -- Arthur C. Clarke
No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it. -- Anne Rice
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
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
The most important point of [Susan] Fiske's work is that it provides a taxonomy for our differing feelings about different Thems - sometimes fear, sometimes ridicule, sometimes contemptuous pity, sometimes savagery. -- Robert M. Sapolsky
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. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse? -- John Barth
He tasted each one of them. The raw power and majesty of Wrath. The vast strength of Rhage. The burning, protective loyalty of Phury. The cold savagery of Zsadist. The sharp cunning of Vishous. -- J.R. Ward
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
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
Users of clichÃ©s frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter. -- Patrick Cockburn

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