Savage Not Average Quotes

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I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly-- almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man-- no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes.
Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)
You are the only judge of whether a piece of art is a piece of art! It’s the average man who is the judge. It’s not the effete academic who will determine whether a piece of art is a piece of art anymore than an academic can tell you whether a baseball player is really a great baseball player. It’s the fan in the stadium that will tell you whether he’s a great baseball player.
Michael Savage (Train Tracks: Family Stories for the Holidays)
No," Foyle roared. "Let them hear this. Let them hear everything." "You're insane, man. You've handed a loaded gun to children." "Stop treating them like children and they'll stop behaving like children. Who the hell are you to play monitor?" "What are you talking about?" "Stop treating them like children. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all out into the open." Foyle laughed savagely. "I've ended the last star-chamber conference in the world. I've blown that last secret wide open. No more secrets from now on.... No more telling the children what's best for them to know.... Let 'em all grow up. It's about time." "Christ, he is insane." "Am I? I've handed life and death back to the people who do the living and the dying. The common man's been whipped and led long enough by driven men like us.... Compulsive men... Tiger men who can't help lashing the world before them. We're all tigers, the three of us, but who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we're compulsive? Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?" "We're not saddled," Y'ang-Yeovil said quietly. "We're driven. We're forced to seize responsibility that the average man shirks." "Then let him stop shirking it. Let him stop tossing his duty and guilt onto the shoulders of the first freak who comes along grabbing at it. Are we to be scapegoats for the world forever?" "Damn you!" Dagenham raged. "Don't you realize that you can't trust people? They don't know enough for their own good." "Then let them learn or die. We're all in this together. Let's live together or die together." "D'you want to die in their ignorance? You've got to figure out how to get those slugs back without blowing everything wide open." "No. I believe in them. I was one of them before I turned tiger. They can all turn uncommon if they're kicked awake like I was.
Alfred Bester (The Stars My Destination)
Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.
Robert Charles Wilson (Axis (Spin Saga, #2))
On average, grasses produce three or four times more roots by weight than they do leaves and stems, giving them a root-to-shoot ratio that is ten times as high as that of a forest.
Candace Savage (Prairie: A Natural History of the Heart of North America)
I compared what was really known about the stars with the account of creation as told in Genesis. I found that the writer of the inspired book had no knowledge of astronomy -- that he was as ignorant as a Choctaw chief -- as an Eskimo driver of dogs. Does any one imagine that the author of Genesis knew anything about the sun -- its size? that he was acquainted with Sirius, the North Star, with Capella, or that he knew anything of the clusters of stars so far away that their light, now visiting our eyes, has been traveling for two million years? If he had known these facts would he have said that Jehovah worked nearly six days to make this world, and only a part of the afternoon of the fourth day to make the sun and moon and all the stars? Yet millions of people insist that the writer of Genesis was inspired by the Creator of all worlds. Now, intelligent men, who are not frightened, whose brains have not been paralyzed by fear, know that the sacred story of creation was written by an ignorant savage. The story is inconsistent with all known facts, and every star shining in the heavens testifies that its author was an uninspired barbarian. I admit that this unknown writer was sincere, that he wrote what he believed to be true -- that he did the best he could. He did not claim to be inspired -- did not pretend that the story had been told to him by Jehovah. He simply stated the "facts" as he understood them. After I had learned a little about the stars I concluded that this writer, this "inspired" scribe, had been misled by myth and legend, and that he knew no more about creation than the average theologian of my day. In other words, that he knew absolutely nothing. And here, allow me to say that the ministers who are answering me are turning their guns in the wrong direction. These reverend gentlemen should attack the astronomers. They should malign and vilify Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Herschel and Laplace. These men were the real destroyers of the sacred story. Then, after having disposed of them, they can wage a war against the stars, and against Jehovah himself for having furnished evidence against the truthfulness of his book.
Robert G. Ingersoll
So acts every ‘man-in-the-street’ in our own society, so has acted the average member of any society through the past ages, and so acts the present-day savage; and the lower his level of cultural development, the greater stickler he will be for good manners, propriety and form, and the more incomprehensive and odious to him will be the non-conforming point of view.
Bronisław Malinowski (Argonauts of the Western Pacific)
The Swedish town of Överkalix has the most comprehensive and oldest birth, death, and crop records in the world. Their records go back generations—a remarkably rich data set. And in analyzing this data set, scientists found some fascinating correlations. There were good and bad years for the crops in Överkalix and some particularly bad years where families were forced to go hungry. But scientists discovered that when children suffered starvation between the ages of nine and twelve, their grandchildren would on average live thirty years longer. Their descendants had far lower rates of diabetes and heart disease. On the other hand, when children were well-fed during those ages, their descendants were at four times the risk for heart attacks and their life expectancy dropped. In some strange way, the trauma of starvation changed descendants’ genes to be more resilient. Healthier. More likely to survive.[5] — Clearly, it wasn’t just my ruthless nurture that had shaped me into who I was, though who knows what kind of rampant methylation savaged my epigenome during my beatings and assaults. Beyond that, every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. Just piecemeal moments I collected from Auntie over the years. My family tried to erase this history. But my body remembers. My work ethic. My fear of cockroaches. My hatred for the taste of dirt. These are not random attributes, a spin of the wheel. They were gifted to me with purpose, with necessity. I want to have words for what my bones know. I want to use those gifts when they serve me and understand and forgive them when they do not.
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
And now I am engulfed in this new flavor, so different from the light but humorless flavor of the Anapa and the thick bitter taste of the Mumbanyo, this rich deep resonant complex flavor that I am only getting my first sips of and yet how do I explain these differences to an average American who will take one look at the photographs and see black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages?
Lily King (Euphoria)
It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked.... Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization.
Henry David Thoreau
The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop. The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi. The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.) Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the engine that drives almost all of this activity is snow. This means that the bulk of the Colorado’s discharge tends to come down in one headlong rush. Throughout the autumn and the winter, the river might trickle through the canyonlands of southern Utah at a mere three thousand cubic feet per second. With the melt-out in late May and early June, however, the river’s flow can undergo spectacular bursts of change. In the space of a week, the level can easily surge to 30,000 cfs, and a few days after that it can once again rocket up, surpassing 100,000 cfs. Few rivers on earth can match such manic swings from benign trickle to insane torrent. But the story doesn’t end there, because these savage transitions are exacerbated by yet another unusual phenomenon, one that is a direct outgrowth of the region’s unusual climate and terrain. On
Kevin Fedarko
females actually outperform males in terms of the average length of their killing careers. As reported in a 2011 study, the killing careers of females average between eight and eleven years while the average for male serial killers is two years.
Scott A. Bonn (Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World's Most Savage Murderers)
Level of Learning" By Aron Micko H.B In the test score someone got an average; Some exams are hard, especially in college. I saw student's expressions like an image; Some teachers are villains like a dream blockage. We need to help ourselves and to encourage; Because I saw a similar face of discouraged. If I calculate the years we are the same age; Talking to them is like a hope of advantage. A history that we need to be real footage; The similarity of laughed we boosting knowledge. We forgot for the meantime the problem of the savage; Just like we are living in the old version village. Now we know how to deal with time manage; Just like I heal myself using a bandage. We are ready again to take damage; Now I know the meaning of true courage.
Aron Micko H.B
A key point in my work: Randomness has more than one "state," or form, and each, if allowed to play out on a financial market, would have a radically different effect on the way prices behave. One is the most familiar and manageable form of chance, which I call "mild." It is the randomness of a coin toss, the static of a badly tuned radio. Its classic mathematical expression is the bell curve, or "normal" probability distribution-so-called because it was long viewed as the norm in nature. Temperature, pressure, or other features of nature under study are assumed to vary only so much, and not an iota more, from the average value. At the opposite extreme is what I call "wild" randomness. This is far more irregular, more unpredictable. It is the variation of the Cornish coastline-savage promontories, craggy rocks, and unexpectedly calm bays. The fluctuation from one value to the next is limitless and frightening. In between the two extremes is a third state, which I call "slow" randomness.
Benoît B. Mandelbrot (The (Mis)Behavior of Markets)
The five stages of model development. —Donald Knuth, Stanford computer scientist Knuth discovered that computer program development goes through five stages. These steps also apply to building models, and I rigorously adhere to them in my consulting work. 1. Decide what you want the model to do. 2. Decide how to build the model. 3. Build the model. 4. Debug the model. 5. Trash stages 1 through 4 and start again, now that you know what you really wanted in the first place. Once you realize that step 5 is inevitable, you become more willing to discard bad models early rather than continually to patch them up. In fact, I recommend getting to step 5 many times by building an evolving set of prototypes. This is consistent with an emerging style of system development known as Extreme Programming.2 To get a large model to work you must start with a small model that works, not a large model that doesn’t work. —Alan Manne, Stanford energy economist
Sam L. Savage (The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty)
The Reconstruction era—the dozen or so years following the end of the Civil War in 1865—had been a horrific time for southern White men like Wade Hampton who were used to ruling their Black people and their women. They faced and beat back with violence and violent ideas a withering civil rights and Black empowerment movement—as well as a powerful women’s movement that failed to grab as many headlines. But their supposed underlings did not stop rebelling after the fall of Reconstruction. To intimidate and reassert their control over rebellious Blacks and White women, White male redeemers took up lynching in the 1880s. Someone was lynched, on average, every four days from 1889 to 1929. Often justifying the ritualistic slaughters on a false rumor that the victim had raped a White woman, White men, women, and children gathered to watch the torture, killing, and dismemberment of human beings—all the while calling the victims savages. Hate fueled the lynching era. But behind this hatred lay racist ideas that had evolved to question Black freedoms at every stage. And behind these racist ideas were powerful White men, striving by word and deed to regain absolute political, economic, and cultural control of the South.24
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
I believe there's no such thing as normal, only average and I'd much rather be abnormal then lavished. Is it so deplorable to live like a savage? For some it may seem horrible but to me it feels like an advantage. Cause nature is my storage and the earth is my canvass. I'm hoarding the truth and sharing my standards. But nothings rhetorical because I don't have all the answers. Maybe I'm just ordinary and your above the standard because I can't see anything extraordinary in being pampered. Even if I'm purportedly being hampered or metaphorically a damper, periodically a tramper. I'm still inexorably going to transfer thoughts with an importable laughter like a mad man captured in a portable disaster that only knows the way down the corporate ladder. But in order to matter you may need an assortment of matter that unfortunately doesn't matter. Fuck being normal or subordinately average, I'm inordinately going to salvage a historical palace as I stubbornly traverse upon this flat earth in search of omnipotent caverns.
Josiah Payne
It is strange that he should have wished to convert these savage foes. Baptism as a penalty of defeat might lose its spiritual quality. The workings of the spirit are mysterious, but we must still wonder how the hearts of these hard-bitten swordsmen and pirates could be changed in a single day. Indeed these mass conversions had become almost a matter of form for defeated Viking armies. It is reported that one old veteran declared he had been through this washing twenty times, and complained that the alb with which he was supplied was by no means up to the average standard. But Alfred meant to make a lasting peace with Guthrum.
Winston S. Churchill (The Birth of Britain (A History of the English Speaking Peoples #1))
As a result, tax revenues and state budgets shrink, at least in relative terms per capita. National debt inevitably grows in order to at least partially cover the shortfall. Of course, it grew enormously after governments bailed out the banks in the wake of the financial crash. The British government did so to the tune of 136.6bn and has admitted that it will never recoup at least £27bn of that amount. In the US the bailout cost at least $14.4 trillion.[56] At the start of of 2019, the US’s national debt stood at nearly $22 trillion, having increased by 10% since Trump took office two years earlier. Under his predecessor Barack Obama, the national debt increased 100%, from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. National debt has to be repaid to the government’s creditors: bondholders, ie people, companies and foreign governments; international organisations such as the World Bank; and private financial institutions. If debt is not or cannot be repaid it becomes increasingly difficult to attract creditors. US national debt when the Great Depression kicked off stood at 16% of GDP and rose to 44% when the depression ended at the end of World War Two. Before the The Great Recession it stood at 65% and by 2013 had exploded to over 100%.[57] Gross national debt and household debt have been at record highs at the same time for the first time ever. Austerity, the socialisation of national debt, therefore becomes an economic necessity, not simply an unfair and immoral ‘political choice’, as is claimed by democratic socialists. That public spending as a share of national income in Britain in 2017 (39.6%) was at the same level as in 2007 (39.6%) after seven years of debt servicing via savage cuts to state welfare and public services suggests national income must have fallen per capita. Indeed, official forecasts suggest that GDP per adult in 2022 will be 18% lower than it would have been had it grown by 2% a year since 2008 – it has averaged 1.1% – broadly the expected rate of growth at that time.
Ted Reese (Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown)
With him, I feel all the extremes. There’s nothing average about what we have.
Meghan March (Rogue Royalty (Savage Trilogy, #3))
The wise are instructed by mathematics, average minds by science, the stupid by bad philosophy, and the brute by religion and mysticism. What was Cicero’s fate? He was executed by order of Mark Antony. Fulvia, Antony’s wife, spat on the great orator’s severed head and then, setting it on her knees, opened the mouth that had spoken so eloquently against her husband and made so many wondrous speeches. With a pin from her hair, she savagely pierced Cicero’s dead tongue. We won’t let the stupid silence us. Reason shall prevail. The Brazen Head still lives.
Thomas Stark (Holenmerism and Nullibism: The Two Faces of the Holographic Universe (The Truth Series Book 9))
There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he’s a limited reader. Why limited? That’s easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Misérables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they’re exhausted! Why? It’s obvious! One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he’s cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly—as if wrapped in swaddling clothes, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives—he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what’s called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood.
Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives)
East Side High became well known some years ago when its former principal, a colorful and controversial figure named Joe Clark, was given special praise by U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. Bennett called the school “a mecca of education” and paid tribute to Joe Clark for throwing out 300 students who were thought to be involved with violence or drugs. “He was a perfect hero,” says a school official who has dinner with me the next evening, “for an age in which the ethos was to cut down on the carrots and increase the sticks. The day that Bennett made his visit, Clark came out and walked the hallways with a bullhorn and a bat. If you didn’t know he was a principal, you would have thought he was the warden of a jail. Bennett created Joe Clark as a hero for white people. He was on the cover of Time magazine. Parents and kids were held in thrall after the president endorsed him. “In certain respects, this set a pattern for the national agenda. Find black principals who don’t identify with civil rights concerns but are prepared to whip black children into line. Throw out the kids who cause you trouble. It’s an easy way to raise the average scores. Where do you put these kids once they’re expelled? You build more prisons. Two thirds of the kids that Clark threw out are in Passaic County Jail. “This is a very popular approach in the United States today. Don’t provide the kids with a new building. Don’t provide them with more teachers or more books or more computers. Don’t even breathe a whisper of desegregation. Keep them in confinement so they can’t subvert the education of the suburbs. Don’t permit them ‘frills’ like art or poetry or theater. Carry a bat and tell them they’re no good if they can’t pass the state exam. Then, when they are ruined, throw them into prison. Will it surprise you to be told that Paterson destroyed a library because it needed space to build a jail?
Jonathan Kozol (Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools)
[Everest’s] fatality rate - the percentage of climbers who went above Base Camp and died - had averaged 0.7 the previous decade [1998 - 2008]…In 2008, the fatality rate of those leaving [K2] base camp for a summit bid was 30.5%, higher than the casualty rate at Omaha Beach on D-Day.
Peter Zuckerman, Amanda Padoan (Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day)
Before 2008, only 278 people had stood on K2’s summit. Everest’s summit roll was 4,115, and its fatality rate—the percentage of climbers who went above Base Camp and died—had averaged 0.7 for the previous decade. Although the Himalayan Database crunches the numbers for Everest, no accurate statistics exist for K2. Climbers of the Savage Mountain can’t reliably approximate their chances of survival and don’t want to. In 2008, the fatality rate of those leaving Base Camp for a summit bid was 30.5 percent, higher than the casualty rate at Omaha Beach on D-day. Among high-altitude climbers if not statisticians, there’s no comparison: K2 is more lethal than Everest.
Peter Zuckerman (Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day)