Savagery Quotes

“There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!”
― Robert E. Howard, King Kull

“Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war.”
― Nikola Tesla

“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, Graceling

“The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. 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, Ethics of Belief and Other Essays

“It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend.
And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.
Let the fool gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink.
But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength.
Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance?
Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Laws are made not to be broken.
They are made to curb our savagery.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“Poets write beautiful words to describe
savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“She was destruction given form and purpose. Hers was an elegant savagery.”
― Rachel Vincent, Menagerie

“He is in love with you. I read the fucking letters. And you love him. Damn you! Damn you to hell, Elysse!” he roared, towering over the foot of the bed. “You are supposed to love me!”

-Alexis de Warenne”
― Brenda Joyce, The Promise

“Consistent inhumanity is the sign of savagery.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Revolution Indomable

“When a beast invades your house and starts abusing your loved ones, would you sit back waiting for the authorities to intervene - you may, but I can't - I won't - for me family and society are one, and when wild animals run rampant abusing that family of mine, I would die defending my family, not sit back like a spineless coward.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Revolution Indomable

“When darkness becomes tradition, someone must rise as the destroyer of that tradition.”
― Abhijit Naskar, No Foreigner Only Family

“Dogs and roses. All these suburban houses bespangled with roses and bristling with dogs. A dog behind every rose bush. For people and their hellish imaginaries, dogs are as ornamental as roses. In reality, the roses are just as vicious as the dogs or an electrified fence. There are too many of them, they are too red, their carnivorous petals close on a forbidden space. The pleasantness of the residential suburbs, the pleasantness of the sarcophagi of greenery where the television aerials gleam. The pleasantness of aphanisis in the death-laden detached houses, set in a bower of lilacs and hollyhocks. The only sign of the frenzied urge to bite and fight, the only sign of the vitrified and howling passions beneath the film of plastic is the beast of the Apocalypse, barking on the horizon beyond the flower beds.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Once more
The guns roar.
Once more
The call goes forth for men.
Again
The war begins.
Again
False slogans become a bore.
Yet no one cries:
Enough! No more!
Like angry dogs the human race
Loves the snarl upon its face.
It loves to kill.
The pessimist says
It always will.
That I do not believe.
Some day
The savage in us will wear away.
Some day quite clearly
Men will see
How clean and happy life can be
And how,
Like flowers planted in the sun,
We, too, can give forth blossoms,
Shared by everyone.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“I use myself as a form of knowledge. I know you through and through, by means of an incantation that comes from me to you. To stretch out savagely while an inflexible geometry vibrates behind everything.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“What is animal, what is human, can't be determined by appearance, it’s only determined by action.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Revolution Indomable

“Revolution Sonnet

What is revolution you ask!

Revolution is an alarm,
To wake up the sleeping population.
Revolution is a weapon,
To fight tyranny and exploitation.
Revolution is a vaccine,
To prime the society against inhumanity.
Revolution is an insanity,
To humanize the paradigm of sanity.
Revolution is a tsunami,
To wash away all that's foul and carnal.
Revolution is a tornado,
To weaken the grasp of the animal.
Whenever savages raise their fangs most appalling,
Be not a mute witness but a revolution sanctifying.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Revolution Indomable

“Let Anyone be the King,
Make that person realise You're playing The Chess.”
― Ravevx

“When People Ask You,
Who You Are?
Don't Tell Them,
Show Them.”
― Ravevx

“The rains pound and the winds tear and the landscape is shredded under the weight of the storm. Yet the savagery of the storm can never lay a hand on the person whom God has laid His hand upon. Therefore as you live your life, live it in a manner that you never fear the forecast.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Lines drawn by savages are bound to be crossed by thinking humans. If we don't, out of fear of persecution, then we shall never see the light of civilization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting

“She thought of the animals at the Zoo. She and Bub had gone there one Sunday afternoon. They arrived in time to see the lions and tigers being fed. There was a moment, before the great hunks of red meat were thrust into the cages, when the big cats prowled back and forth, desperate, raging, ravening. They walked in a space even smaller than the confines of the cages made necessary, moving in an area just barely the length of their bodies. A few steps up and turn. A few steps down and turn. They were weaving back and forth, growling, roaring, raging at the bars that kept them from the meat, until the entire building was filled with the sound, until the people watching drew back from the cages, feeling insecure, frightened at the sight and the sound of such uncontrolled savagery. She was becoming something like that.”
― Ann Petry, The Street

“Man's savagery is unmatched. Compared to his savagery, the cruelty of the animal world looks almost benign.”
― KRISHNA MURTHY ANNIGERI VASUDEVA RAO, FLOWERS OF STARDUST

“To lose respect for the humanity of another human being is to begin slipping into an animalistic savagery that devours our own humanity in the betrayal of another.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Mustapha Mond shook hands with all three of them; but it was to the Savage that he addressed himself. "So you don't much like civilization, Mr. Savage," he said.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous, knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most desperate assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one’s self with war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and the Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples.”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women

“As he speaks, his eyes slither warily from one of us to another, reminding me of the Time Warner executives I once lunched with years ago, who seemed poised at all times between arrogance and deference, nervously calculating which to project. A line from a Robert Lowell poem comes to mind: “a savage servility/slides by on grease.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream