Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
You know, I'm cursed with morals. I was raised a certain way. I wish I wasn't. I wish I was raised by wolves.
I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.
Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.
We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles.
Man without conscience is wilder and more dangerous than any beast.
Man is worse than an animal when he is an animal.
Whenever man forgets that man is an animal, the result is always to make him less humane.
I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.
Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.
Instincts and fundamentals take over sometimes.
The mass of mankind are evidently slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts.
Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite - a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood.
The active part of man consists of powerful instincts, some of which are gentle and continuous; others violent and short; some baser, some nobler, and all necessary.
We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.
The savage in man is never quite eradicated.
Every man has a wild animal in him.
Frederick the Great
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.'
I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.
There's a real sense of fighting and destruction in our DNA that we don't get in touch with.
The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee.
A man who behaves like a beast is worse than the beast.
Animals we are, and animals we remain, and the path to our regeneration and happiness, if there be such a path, lies through our animal nature.
Man as a pure animal does not exist.
