“We are beasts, you know, beasts risen from the savannas and jungles and forests. We have come down from the trees and up out of the water, but you can never, ever fully remove the feral nature from our psyches.”
“The cage has gotten bigger, and we can expect bigger beasts from it.”
“Theory has all too often been a zoo in which we cage the wild beasts of violence that inhabit our worlds. We then gaze at these beasts from a safe distance, we contemplate them, we theorize how they would act in their own environments - and we never go to those environments where the beasts roam freely to actually check our theories. To do so would be disastrous. It would point out the absurdity of our analyses and the illusion of safety so carefully crafted.”
“If we assume man has been corrupted by an artificial civilization, what is the natural state? the state of nature from which he has been removed? imagine, wandering up and down the forest without industry, without speech, and without home.”
“Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels.”
“If the human species is differentiated from the beasts by the marvel of consciousness, then we enact our humanity and the very authenticity of our being by straining to "know" through awareness the "unthinkable" experience of others.”