Robert Ardrey

The city is a cultural invention enforcing on the citizen knowledge of his own nature. And this we do not like. That…

— Robert Ardrey

Do you care about freedom? Dreams may have inspired it, and wishes prompted it, but only war and weapons have made it…

— Robert Ardrey

If you watch lizards and lions copulating, then you will see that in 200 million years the male has not had a…

— Robert Ardrey

The dog barking at you from behind his master's fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the…

— Robert Ardrey

Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born. The home of our fathers was that African highland reaching north from…

— Robert Ardrey

“I have lived my life in the shelter of too many northern alliances. I have made alliance with the gentle cow, the…

— Robert Ardrey

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the…

— Robert Ardrey

The hunter died when he achieved supremacy. Perhaps the death of the hunter will be the long monument to interglacial man. We…

— Robert Ardrey

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the…

— Robert Ardrey

Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.

— Robert Ardrey

Natural selection deals ruthlessly with any population, bird or beaver, which fails to solve the problems of its environment with all those…

— Robert Ardrey

There is nothing so moving - not even acts of love or hate - as the discovery that one is not alone.

— Robert Ardrey

Man is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calender. We are…

— Robert Ardrey

Far from the truth lay the antique assumption that man had fathered the weapon. The weapon, instead, had fathered man.

— Robert Ardrey

A bird does not fly because it has wings; it has wings because it flies.

— Robert Ardrey

But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we…

— Robert Ardrey

Is it possible that the environmental severity of the 1930s induced-particularly in the most aware, alert, and compassionate of [British] men-a morality…

— Robert Ardrey

We may agree, for example, that our societies must provide greater security for the individual; yet if all we succeed in producing…

— Robert Ardrey

Classic is our daring, classic our cowardice. Classic is our cruelty, classic our charity.

— Robert Ardrey

Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival.

— Robert Ardrey

What truly leads the evolutionary procession, in other words, is behavior.

— Robert Ardrey

“Man is neither unique nor central nor necessarily here to stay. But he is a product of circumstances special to the point…

— Robert Ardrey

“What we call patriotism, in other words, is a calculable force which, released by a predictable situation, will animate man in a…

— Robert Ardrey

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder…

— Robert Ardrey

A human being is a problem in search of a solution.

— Robert Ardrey