I could neither laugh with nor at the solemn utterances of men I esteemed ponderous asses; nor could I laugh, nor engage in my old-time lightsome persiflage, with the silly superficial chatterings of women, who, underneath all their silliness and softness, were as primitive, direct, and deadly in their pursuit of biological destiny as the monkeys women were before they shed their furry coats and replaced them with the furs of other animals.

Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged.

Primitive communism, chattel C, serf slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the evolution of society.

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

I longed for Mum in the most primitive way.

A century hence, 2000 may be viewed as quite a primitive period in human history. It’s something to hope for.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, ‘Does he have to be old?