Robert Ardrey Quotes

25 quotes in 395 categories

• We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels.
• Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival.
• The hunter died when he achieved supremacy. Perhaps the death of the hunter will be the long monument to interglacial man. We denied a future…
• There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one…
• There is nothing so moving - not even acts of love or hate - as the discovery that one is not alone.
• Man is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calender. We are not so unique…
• A bird does not fly because it has wings; it has wings because it flies.
• Far from the truth lay the antique assumption that man had fathered the weapon. The weapon, instead, had fathered man.
• Do you care about freedom? Dreams may have inspired it, and wishes prompted it, but only war and weapons have made it yours.
• While we pursue the unattainable, we make impossible the realizable.
• Why is man man? As long as we have had minds to think with, stars to ponder upon, dreams to disturb us, curiosity to inspire…
• The dog barking at you from behind his master's fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.
• Classic is our daring, classic our cowardice. Classic is our cruelty, classic our charity.
• What truly leads the evolutionary procession, in other words, is behavior.
• Sex is a sideshow in the world of the animal, for the dominant color of that world is fear.
• Animal language is a contagious expression of mood effecting communication between social partners.
• Men, unlike mockingbirds, have the capacity for systematic self-delusion. We echo each other with equal precision, equal eloquence, equal assurance.
• Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born. The home of our fathers was that African highland reaching north from the Cape to…
• Is it possible that the environmental severity of the 1930s induced-particularly in the most aware, alert, and compassionate of [British] men-a morality which makes no…
• Natural selection deals ruthlessly with any population, bird or beaver, which fails to solve the problems of its environment with all those resources, learned or…

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