“Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.””
Quotes by James Savage
“As Benjamin Franklin put it, “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”48””
“He burned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realize the enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. He bore cynically with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and humiliating sense of transgression.””
“This (primitive-to-civilized) continuum inevitably conflates the meaning of civilized in everyday conversation-"refined or enlightened"- with "having a complex division of labor," the only definition that anthropologists defend... Was the Third Reich civilized, for instance? Most anthropologists would answer yes... If we refuse to label the Third Reich civilized, are we not using the term to mean "polite, refined"? If so, we must consider the Arawaks civilized, and we must also consider Columbus and his Spaniards primitive, if not savage.””
James Savage was an American historian and genealogist, known for his meticulous research and contributions to the understanding of early New England settlers. Born in 1767, he dedicated much of his l...