Robert Ardrey Quotes

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

We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels.

Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival.

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?

What could not be denied was that in vast segments of the animal world natural selection of the most qualified individuals took place not by competition for females but by competition for space.

Man is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calendar. We are not so unique as we should like to believe.

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 else knows either.

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

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

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

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.

While we pursue the unattainable, we make impossible the realizable.

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

Men, unlike mockingbirds, have the capacity for systematic self-delusion. We echo each other with equal precision, equal eloquence, equal assurance.

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

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

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

Animal language is a contagious expression of mood effecting communication between social partners.

For the soundest of evolutionary reasons man appears at his best when times are worst.

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

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 to our sucessor beings.

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

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 sense today?

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

What we call patriotism, in other words, is a calculable force which, released by a predictable situation, will animate man in a manner no different from other territorial species.