Proto Man Quotes

Never contend with a man who has nothing to lose. Baltasar Gracian (Baltasar Gracián y Morales, SJ (January 8, 1601 – December 6, 1658) was a Spanish Jesuit and writer. His proto-existentialist writings were lauded by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.)

Let us be practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law.… [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African savannah three million or so years ago. Now, let us agree that we may pronounce whatever laws we like for this clever little creature, still it would be unwise to pet him.

He [Mr. Melbury] knew that a woman once given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came and made the best of it, without external interference; but for the first time he asked himself why this so generally should be done.

Notably, far from being a proto-socialist, Bolívar was a man who traveled with a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, a man who so admired Thomas Jefferson that he sent a favored nephew to study at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson had designed.

Let us be practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law.… [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African savannah three million or so years ago. Now, let us agree that we may pronounce whatever laws we like for this clever little creature, still it would be unwise to pet him.

Let us be practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law.… [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African savannah three million or so years ago. Now, let us agree that we may pronounce whatever laws we like for this clever little creature, still it would be unwise to pet him.” —REYNARD THOMPSON, A General Theory of Human Violence (1921)

Let us be practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law.… [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African savannah three million or so years ago. Now, let us agree that we may pronounce whatever laws we like for this clever little creature, still it would be unwise to pet him.” —REYNARD THOMPSON,    A General Theory of Human Violence (1921)

that enflamed itself being here, on hands and knees. Dirty girl. She burned. She made a vow: she would never crawl for another man. [The gods love to fuck with us, Mathilde would say later; she became a wife.] “Another?” Ariel said. He dipped it, put it at the end of the hallway, twenty yards away. “Crawl,” he said. He laughed. — THE WORD wife comes from the Proto-Indo-European weip. Weip means to turn, twist, or wrap. In an alternative etymology, the word wife comes from Proto-etc., ghwibh. Ghwibh means pudenda. Or shame.

The difference between a monarch and a dictator is that the monarchical succession is defined by law and the dictatorial succession is defined by power. The effect in the latter is that the fish rots from the head down — lawlessness permeates the state, as in a mafia family, because contending leaders must build informal coalitions. Since another name for a monarchist is a legitimist, we can contrast the legitimist and demotist theories of government. […] Perhaps unsurprisingly, I see legitimism as a sort of proto-formalism. The royal family is a perpetual corporation, the kingdom is the property of this corporation, and the whole thing is a sort of real-estate venture on a grand scale. Why does the family own the corporation and the corporation own the kingdom? Because it does. Property is historically arbitrary. The best way for the monarchies of Old Europe to modernize, in my book, would have been to transition the corporation from family ownership to shareholder ownership, eliminating the hereditary principle which caused so many problems for so many monarchies. However, the trouble with corporate monarchism is that it presents no obvious political formula. “Because it does” cuts no ice with a mob of pitchfork-wielding peasants. […] So the legitimist system went down another path, which led eventually to its destruction: the path of divine-right monarchy. When everyone believes in God, “because God says so” is a much more impressive formula. Perhaps the best way to look at demotism is to see it as the Protestant version of rule by divine right — based on the theory of vox populi, vox dei. If you add divine-right monarchy to a religious system that is shifting from the worship of God to the worship of Man, demotism is pretty much what you’d expect to precipitate in the beaker.

The parquet pressing into her palms and knees. She hated the part of her, small and hot, that enflamed itself being here, on hands and knees. Dirty girl. She burned. She made a vow: she would never crawl for another man. [The gods love to fuck with us, Mathilde would say later; she became a wife.] "Another?" Ariel said. He dipped it, put it at the end of the hallway, twenty yards away. "Crawl," he said. He laughed. The word wife comes from the Proto-Indo-European weip. Weip means to turn, twist or wrap. In an alternative etymology, the word wife comes from Proto-etc., ghwibh. Ghwibh means pudenda. Or shame.

Plato records the dialogues that Socrates had with a number of bystanders, like Euthyphro, Gorgias, and Meno. In these dialogues, Socrates employs Logos to prove that there is only one God, one ultimate standard of goodness (virtue), and that man cannot know about God unless He reveals Himself to us. These, and many other logical proofs by Socrates, resulted in two things: First, he was put to death by the Greeks for “corrupting the youth” and “atheism” because he argued against the prevailing view of this time (sound familiar?). And second, five hundred years later, he would be recognized as the first proto-Christian. His views became the center of Hellenistic philosophy, in which Christianity was formed.

Christ was an Aryan, and St. Paul used his doctrine to mobilise the criminal underworld and thus organise a proto-Bolshevism. This intrusion upon the world marks the end of a long reign, that of the clear Graeco-Latin genius. What is this God who takes pleasure only in seeing men grovel before Him? Try to picture to yourselves the meaning of the following, quite simple story. God creates the conditions for sin. Later on He succeeds, with the help of the Devil, in causing man to sin. Then He employs a virgin to bring into the world a son who, by His death, will redeem humanity! I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mahomet, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians ! In your lifetime, you used to hear the music of Richard Wagner. After your death, it will be nothing but hallelujahs, the waving of palms, children of an age for the feeding-bottle, and hoary old men. The man of the isles pays homage to the forces of nature. But Christianity is an invention of sick brains : one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation. I begin to lose all respect for humanity when I think that some people on our side, Ministers or generals, are capable of believing that we cannot triumph without the blessing of the Church. Such a notion is excusable in little children who have learnt nothing else. For thirty years the Germans tore each other to pieces simply in order to know whether or not they should take Communion in both kinds. There's nothing lower than religious notions like that. From that point of view, one can envy the Japanese. They have a religion which is very simple and brings them into contact with nature. They've succeeded even in taking Christianity and turning it into a religion that's less shocking to the intellect. By what would you have me replace the Christians' picture of the Beyond? What comes naturally to mankind is the sense of eternity and that sense is at the bottom of every man. The soul and the mind migrate, just as the body returns to nature. Thus life is eternally reborn from life. As for the "why?" of all that, I feel no need to rack my brains on the subject. The soul is unplumbable. If there is a God, at the same time as He gives man life He gives him intelligence. By regulating my life according to the understanding that is granted me, I may be mistaken, but I act in good faith. The concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination. Think of those who look down from on high upon what happens on earth: what a martyrdom for them, to see human beings indefatigably repeating the same gestures, and inevitably the same errors ! In my view, H. S. Chamberlain was mistaken in regarding Christianity as a reality upon the spiritual level. Man judges everything in relation to himself. What is bigger than himself is big, what is smaller is small. Only one thing is certain, that one is part of the spectacle. Everyone finds his own rôle. Joy exists for everybody. I dream of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the preservation of the species. It's our duty to encourage that idea : let the man who distinguishes himself in the service of the species be thought worthy of the highest honours.

V případě hmyzu, který má složité genitálie, se nemohou dvě skupiny pářit kupříkladu proto, že mezi pohlavními orgány obou druhů je jednoduše morfologický nesoulad. Vypadá to asi stejně, jako kdybyste chtěli strčit hradní klíč do bezpečnostního zámku.

„<...>kartais, ypač paryčiais, ir man pačiam atrodo, jog esmi tikras pamišėlis...O dienai išaušus, jog tai pasaulis – bepročių pilnas, ir aš vienintelis sveiko proto tarp jų; taigi, sutikite, jūsų šviesybe, klausimas, kas šiais laikais yra beprotybė, - itin keblus, nelygu, kaip pažiūrėsi.

Peale’s proto–prosperity gospel actually complemented the scarcity mentality Fred continued to cling to. For him, it was not “the more you have, the more you can give.” It was “the more you have, the more you have.” Financial worth was the same as self-worth, monetary value was human value. The more Fred Trump had, the better he was. If he gave something to someone else, that person would be worth more and he less. He would pass that attitude on to Donald in spades.

Aš bjaurus, bet aš galiu nupirkti gražiausią moterį. Vadinasi, aš nesu bjaurus, nes bjaurumo poveikį, jo atbaidančią jėgą panaikina pinigai. Tegu aš - pagal savo individualybę - luošas, bet pinigai man suteikia 24 kojas. Vadinasi, aš nesu luošas. Aš blogas, nedoras, nesąžiningas, menko proto žmogus, bet pinigai gerbiami, vadinasi, gerbiamas jų savininkas. Pinigai yra didžiausias gėris - vadinasi, geras ir jų savininkas. Be to, pinigai išvaduoja mane nuo vargo būti nedoram, - todėl ir anksto manoma, jog aš doras.

The problem seems to lie in different concepts of what we mean by a Hidden Variable. Dr. Bohm, the man who suggested the design of the Aspect experiments, means something that Einstein and other proto-Hidden Variable theorists had not conceived. From Bohm's point of view, the Aspect experiments weaken the case for local hidden variables, but they tend to support the concept of non-local hidden variables.

Jefferson made no consistent effort to abolish slavery ... It would be nice if Jefferson were the proto-abolitionist that the memorial and the park service brochure pretend he was ... his memorial needs to be more complex than it is ... the National Park Service could supply the contexts missing from the juxtaposed questions on its panels. Then visitors could see Jefferson as a man who not only envisioned but also betrayed the hopes of mankind.

Fornander says that from ancient times, the three genealogies he lists were considered as equal in authority and independent of each other. He considered them the most accurate of the many he received. The Kumuhonua and Pa‘ao genealogies were of the priests and chiefs of Hawai‘i. The Kumu‘uli genealogy was of the chiefs of Kaua‘i and O‘ahu. It is interesting that all three record the first man and his three sons, and Nu‘u (Noah) and his three sons. The Kumuhonua and the Pa‘ao genealogies both continue to include Lua Nu‘u who corresponds to Abraham and his two sons, Kū Nawao (corresponding to Ishmael) and Kalani Mene Hune (corresponding to Isaac). They also include the two sons of Kalani Mene Hune, Aholoholo (Esau) and Kinilau-a-Mano (Jacob), and Kinilau-a-Mano’s twelve sons. These genealogies end with Papa Nui, the legendary female progenitor of the Polynesian people. These genealogies are from the later comers to Hawai‘i, the people who came from Tahiti. The genealogy of Kumu‘uli includes Nu‘u (Noah) but does not include Lua Nu‘u (Abraham) or his descendants. This genealogy ends with Wakea, the legendary male progenitor of the Hawaiian people.29 One could speculate that the Hawaiian people are the joining of two different groups of Proto-Polynesians in the marriage of Papa and Wakea. One line, the line of Wakea, splitting off towards the east at the time of the Tower of Babel, and the other splitting off toward the east sometime after the Israelites entered Canaan.*

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. Every Culture passes through the age phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age.

It is in the Dionysian mysteries where I have noted the most tantalizing hints of a Proto-Indo-European creation story in Ancient Greece. Specifically, we see similar narratives in association with the Orphic mysteries, a secretive cult which was supposedly initiated by the poet Orpheus. Orphic beliefs are difficult to pin down with specificity, but there is a widely attested Orphic belief that humans were created from the bodies of titans. Either their limbs, ashes, or blood. The specific variant quoted from Olympiodorus is one of the latest and best known. In his narrative, the Titans attack Dionysus, who turns into a bull to try to escape them. The titans then tear him (still in the form of a bull) limb from limb and devour him, thus symbolically performing the sacrificial Dionysian rite of Omophagia. Later, Zeus incinerates the titans and mankind is created from their ashes.10 According to the late Roman writer Olympiodorus, the implication is that humans have some “titanic” essence in them, but also some Dionysian essence.11 Thus, humans are the product of a sacrificial rite involving a divine bull-man.

The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.

Empirical logic achieved a signal triumph in the Old Testament, where survivals from the early proto-logical stage are very few and far between. With it man reached a point where his best judgments about his relation to God, his fellow men and the world, were in most respects not appreciably inferior to ours. In fundamental ethical and spiritual matters we have not progressed at all beyond the empirico-logical world of the Old Testament or the unrivalled fusion of proto-logical intuition, 64 [see Coomaraswamy, Review of Religion, 1942, p. 138, paragraph 3] empirico-logical wisdom and logical deduction which we find in the New Testament. In fact a very large section of modern religion, literature and art actually represents a pronounced retrogression when compared with the Old Testament. For example, astrology, spiritism and kindred divagations, which have become religion to tens of millions of Europeans and Americans, are only the outgrowth of proto-logical interpretation of nature, fed by empirico-logical data and covered with a spurious shell of Aristotelian logic and scientific induction. Plastic and graphic art has swung violently away from logical perspective and perceptual accuracy, and has plunged into primordial depths of conceptual drawing and intuitive imagery. While it cannot be denied that this swing from classical art to conceptual and impressionistic art has yielded some valuable results, it is also true that it represents a very extreme retrogression into the proto-logical past. Much of the poetry, drama and fiction which has been written during the past half-century is also a reversion from classical and logical standards of morality and beauty into primitive savagery or pathological abnormality. Some of it has reached such paralogical levels of sophistication that it has lost all power to furnish any standards at all to a generation which has deliberately tried to abandon its entire heritage from the past. All systematic attempts to discredit inherited sexual morality, to substitute dream-states for reflection, and to replace logical writing by jargon, are retreats into the jungle from which man emerged through long and painful millennia of disillusionment. With the same brains and affective reactions as those which our ancestors possessed two thousand years ago, increasing sophistication has not been able to teach us any sounder fundamental principles of life than were known at that time. . . . Unless we can continue along the pathway of personal morality and spiritual growth which was marked out for civilized man by the founders of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, more than two thousand years ago, our superior skill in modifying and even in transforming the material world about us can lead only to repeated disasters, each more terrible than its predecessor. (Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 5th Ed. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 31-33.)

It was a primitive instinct connecting the two of them, some shared genetic memory born thirteen thousand years earlier when proto-dogs and human beings joined in their co-evolution, started living together and forged powerful emotional bonds. The boy had seen wolves before, but never a domesticated Basset hound. He knew wolves could be dangerous. But, for whatever reason, he trusted the dog.

It's a psychological fantasy of the dream type, more like Kafka I suppose, or like 'The Man Who Was Thursday.' There is no fantasy premise: that is, a fantastic postulate from which things proceed logically; the beginning is natural, factual, normal, as in Hubbard's 'Fear;' the ordinary world, in fact. From there, the book 'degenerates into sheer fantasy,' as my agent puts it. It progresses, I would say, into greater and deeper levels of fantasy; a trip into the dream-regions of symbolism, the unconscious, etc. as one finds in 'Alice in Wonderland,' where the work ends with a final cataclysm of dream-fantasy. I'm saying all this because my point is this: I'm not sure a reader of fantasy would consider this a fantasy. He might consider this merely 'morbid neurotic psychological investigations for sick minds' as del Rey tends to put it. Actually, I think all human minds, sick or well, have regions of dream-symbolism; I see nothing morbid in these symbolistic worlds . . . they have their own logic and structure, their own typical relationships, as Lewis Carroll showed. Not a chaotic or formless world, at all . . . a world that fascinates me. But perhaps not of interest to fantasy readers. Yet, I don't know what else to call this. I call Kafka's work 'fantasies,' for want of a better name. Or Conrad Aiken's ' Silent Snow, Secret Snow.' Or even THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, and certainly Molnar's 'Liliom,' or the plays of the Capek brothers, or that ghastly Maeterlinck 'Bluebird' thing, and certainly Ibsen's 'Peer Gynt.' To me, the myth and the dream are related; I see myths as symbolistic proto-type experiences, archaic and timeless, occurring in the individual subconscious. The fairy tale, the myth, the dream, are all related. And I see nothing morbid in it . . . the button molder, in 'Peer Gynt' absolutely terrifies me. I sense meaning, there. I can't exactly define it rationally . . . perhaps that's why Ibsen chose to present it that way; perhaps these symbols can't be reduced to exact literal descriptions. Like poetic images, they can't be translated.