Quotes from Robert Ardrey

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

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.

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 our cultural traditions.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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 us, hours free for meditation, words to place our thoughts in order, the question like a restless ghost has prowled the cellars of our consciousness.

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.

Man beset by anarchy, banditry, chaos and extinction must at last resort turn to that chamber of horrors, human enlightenment. For he has nowhere else to turn.

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

Art is an adventure. When it ceases to be an adventure, it ceases to be art. Not all of us pursue the inaccessible landscapes of the twelve-tone scale, just as not all of us strive for inaccessible mountain-tops, or glory in storms at sea. But the human incidence is there. Could it be that these two impractical pursuits — of beauty and of adventure's embrace — are simply two differing profiles of the same uniquely human reality?

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.

STREETER: Let's just not argue. You can call me stupid, all right. I can call you a coward, all right. It's just I believe one thing, you believe something else. I think the world's got an outside chance, you believe it hasn't. That's all.

Learning, like oxygen, is something imbibed from the atmosphere about one.

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.

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

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

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.

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