Robert Ardrey Quotes

We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels.

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

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?

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.

Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born. The home of our fathers was that African highland reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the Nile. Here we came about-slowly, ever so slowly-on a sky-swept savannah glowing with menace.

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

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.

But 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? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. 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.

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

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?

Sex is a sideshow in the world of the animal, for the dominant color of that world is fear.

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

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.

Natural selection deals ruthlessly with any population, bird or beaver, which fails to solve the problems of its environment with all those resources, learned or unlearned, which may be at its disposal.

The city is a cultural invention enforcing on the citizen knowledge of his own nature. And this we do not like. That we are aggressive beings, easily given to violence; that we get along together because we must more than because we want to, and that the brotherhood of man is about as far from reality today as it was two thousand years ago; that reason's realm is small; that we never have been and never shall be created equal; that if the human being is perfectible, he has so far exhibited few symptoms - all are considerations of man from which space tends to protect us.

We may agree, for example, that our societies must provide greater security for the individual; yet if all we succeed in producing is a providing increased anonymity and ever increasing boredom, then we should not wonder if ingenious man turns to such amusements as drugs, housebreaking, vandalism, mayhem, riots, or - at the most harmless - strange haircuts, costumes, standards of cleanliness, and sexual experiments.

Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival.

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

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