Plato
Philosopher
"When man is not properly trained, he is the most savage animal on the face of the globe."
Savages quotes
Savages
235 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Plutarch
Philosopher, Historian
"No beast is more savage than man when possessed with power answerable to his rage."
Jonathan Swift
Satirist, Writer
"So geographers, in Africa maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns"
B. B. King
Musician
"Music is good for everybody. They say it soothes the savage beast. Well, I think theirs a beast in all of us. So let's get some more music and soothe all the beasts out there."
William Shakespeare
Playwright, Poet
"In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke."
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Savages quotes (page 1 of 12)
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"Quadruped lions are said to be savage, only when they are hungry; biped lions are rarely sulky longer than when their appetite for distinction remains unappeased."
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"He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, to effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action."
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"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual."
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"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world."
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"Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful--but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away."
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"The white men in our colonies are too frequently the savages"
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"War is a survival among us from savage times and affects now chiefly the boyish and unthinking element of the nation."
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"Ants and savages put strangers to death."
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"Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them."
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"Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production."
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"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool."
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"Neither earth nor ocean produces a creature as savage and monstrous as woman."
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"The affiliation clause in our Constitution is a privilege: a courtesy to a sympathetic body. Were you not a Mason, or Co-Mason, you would have to be proposed and seconded, and then examined by savage Inquisitors, and then-probably-thrown out on the garbage heap. Well, no, it's not as bad as that; but we certainly don't want anybody who chooses to apply. Would you do it yourself, if you were on the Committee of a Club? The O.T.O. is a serious body, engaged on a work of Cosmic scope. You should question yourself: what can I contribute?"
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"The dark side of blogging is, of course, people can be (and are) just savage and uncivilized, deeply cruel and fully unaccountable."
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"If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality."
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"No European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies."
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"Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours."
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"La poe sie veutquelque chose d'e norme, debarbare et de sauvage. Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage."
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"Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare."
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"And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man."
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