savage quotes

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad, and then made aneven moreterrifying discoverythe difference between very good writing and true art: it is subtle, but savage.

-Truman Capote
  In Vogue, Dec.

A savage place! as holyand enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  'Kubla Khan'.

Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.

-James Fenimore Cooper
  The American Democrat,'On the Disadvantages of a Monarchy'.

   It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black as the painted face of a savage.

- CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
  Of Coketown. Hard Times, bk.1, ch.5.

He is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made article.Dirty, ugly, disagreeableto all the senses, in body a common creature of the common streets, only in soul a Heathen. Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him: native ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish.

- CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
^3  Of  Jo. Bleak House, ch.47.

I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

-John Dryden
  The Conquest of Granada, pt.1, act1, sc.1.

Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own.

-W(illiam) E(wart) Gladstone
  Speech at Edinburgh Foresters'Hall, during the Midlothian Campaign, 26 Nov.

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter onlyas a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

-T(homas) H(enry) Huxley
^4  Collected Essays, no.4,'The Method of Zadig'.

Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

- RobertTraill Spence,Jr Lowell
  'For the Union Dead'.

Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey, But savage man alone does man betray.

-JohnWilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
  'A SatyrAgainst Mankind', l.129^30 (published1679).

It little profits that an idle king By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Matched with an age'  d wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

-Tennyson
  Poems,'Ulysses' (published1842), l.1^5.

I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

-Tennyson
  Poems,'Locksley Hall', l.168.

From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilizationworks its miracles and civilized man isturned almost into a savage.

- Alexis Charles Henri Cle  rel de Tocqueville
  Of Manchester. Journal entry, 2 Jul. Journeys to England and Ireland (translatedby George Lawrence andJPMayer,1958).

The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.

- H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells
  Love and Mrs Lewisham, ch.23.