"Atavistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... change self-will into strength of character, slyness into prudence, the desire to please into amiability, restlessness into personal initiative. It can only be brought about by recognising that evil, in so far as it is not atavistic or perverse, is as natural and indispensable as the good, and that it becomes a permanent evil only through ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... as inevitably leading to an attack on Austria, now applied the whole force of her diplomacy to stop the ball she had herself set running. The spectacle of Lord Palmerston trying to save or serve Austria, which he detested, in obedience to the atavistic tendencies of the Foreign Office, is a lesson in history. For English politicians of whatever party or private sentiments, Austria was still what Lord Castlereagh called her: "The great hinge on which the fate ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... shun all association with women but at the same time maintain that they have a cultural mission to populate the earth. We see here how the feelings associated with reproductive instincts have been faulty or inadequate. This return to something more primitive is an unhealthy atavistic tendency and makes for both ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... time he was getting old, and philosophic, and tolerant, and spiritually atavistic. He fired out the Second Reformed Wesleyans, called back the exiles from Samoa, invited in the traders, held a general love-feast, took the lid off, proclaimed religious liberty and high tariff, and as for himself went back to the worship of his ancestors, dug up the idols, reinstated ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... moaned. My feelings as I lifted her to a bunk were mixed. Being a reactionary, I still felt that woman's place was not in the Army or Navy. Yet I confess that the woman—or girl, rather—was ornamental. She was of the Iberian type. She was beautiful, and looked helpless. Some atavistic trait of the protective instinct in man made me take a little more pains in caring for her than I might ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... an englyn is," and after I was introduced the kind youth did so with pleasure, while he sold candles to one customer, soap to another, cheese to another, and herring to another. He first wrote the englyn in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in that tongue (for which no atavistic knowledge really served me), he said he would put it into English, and he did so. It was then not rhymed at both ends or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough, and if it had not the harp-like ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... something about Anne which fitted in with this atavistic idea. She was, more than Winifred, a hearthstone woman. A man might carry her over his threshold and find her when he came home o' nights. It was hard to visualize Winifred as waiting or watching or welcoming. ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... the two brothers years before, when, throwing him to the ground, Attalaq jumped on his brother's body and striking his head with stones beat him to death. Attalaq was a type of the older warriors; unlike his more gentle tribesmen he possessed the atavistic savagery of his forebears of centuries ago when it was ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... feelings with regard to Boyce's summons. If I talk about the Iron Hand of Fate you may think I am using a cliche of melodrama. Perhaps I am. But it expresses what I mean. Something unregenerate in me, some lingering atavistic savage instinct towards freedom, rebelled against this same Iron Hand of Fate that, first clapping me on the shoulder long ago in Cape Town, was now dragging me, against my will, into ever thickening entanglement with the dark and crooked destiny of ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke |
