Robert Ardrey Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

Intelligence is no human sideshow but an evolutionary main event. The power to foresee, to call upon the past in terms of the future, to evaluate, to imagine solutions, is a power flowing from old time springs. The human mind may be denied the policeman's privilege of arresting this instinct or that. It may sit as no more than a moderator in the eternal instinctual debate. But it is a moderator with unlimited investigative powers.

Robert Ardrey
As life is larger than man, so is life wiser than we are. As evolution has made us possible, so will evolution sit in final judgment. As natural selection declared us in, so natural selection should our hubris overcome us... declare us out.

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

Robert Ardrey
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.

Robert Ardrey
There are times when anthropomorphisms are almost irresistible to even the most rigorous scientists. As unlikely victims as Niko Tinbergen and David Lack have found the word "righteous" inescapable when describing the behavior of a territorial proprietor threatened by an intruder.

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

Robert Ardrey
Man is man, and not a chimpanzee, because for millions upon millions of years we killed for a living.

Robert Ardrey
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.

Robert Ardrey
Acquired characteristics cannot be inherited, and... within a species every member is born in the essential image of the first of its kind. African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man

Robert Ardrey
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.

Robert Ardrey
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.

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

Robert Ardrey
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.

Robert Ardrey
I find myself frequently maintaining to any young passer-by upon whose attention I can force myself that a genuinely creative career must like a milking stool stand on three legs. There must be accident, there must be sweat, there must be dissatisfaction. That one must work hard is too obvious for comment here. That one must be endowed with native dissatisfaction is very nearly as obvious, for it is the engine that drives you: dissatisfaction with the world and the arts as you find them, dissatisfaction with your own best efforts to capture the uncapturable. What is not so obvious is the support which one must gain from accident, from those dispositions of wind and stars over which one has no control.

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

Robert Ardrey
We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers beside.

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

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

Robert Ardrey
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.

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

Robert Ardrey
A skepticism concerning what one beholds - whether in the arts, in the sciences, or in the deeply etched channels of fashionable response - contains a force essential to the survival of civilized man.

Robert Ardrey
Man is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calender. We are not so unique as we should like to believe. And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.

Robert Ardrey
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.

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

Robert Ardrey
The philosophy of the impossible has been the dominant motive in human affairs for the past two centuries. We have pursued the mastery of nature as if we ourselves were not a portion of that nature. We have boasted of our command over our physical environment while we ourselves have done our urgent best to destroy it.

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

Robert Ardrey
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 to 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.

Robert Ardrey
Man is neither unique nor central nor necessarily here to stay. But he is a product of circumstances special to the point of disbelief. And if man in his current predicament seeks a fair mystique to see him through, then I can only suggest that he consider his genes. For they are marked. They are graven by luck beyond explanation. They are stamped by forces that we shall never know. But even so, in the hieroglyph of the human emergence certain symbols must stand for all to read: Change is the elixir of the human circumstance, and acceptance of challenge the way of our kind. We are bad-weather animals, disaster's fairest children. For the soundest of evolutionary reasons man appears at his best when times are worst.

Robert Ardrey
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?

Robert Ardrey
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.

Robert Ardrey