Primitive may refer to:
- Anarcho-primitivism, an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization
- Primitive culture, one that lacks major signs of economic development or modernity
- Noble savage, uncorrupted by the influences of civilization
- Primitive communism, a pre-agrarian form of communism according to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- Primitive Church, another name for early Christianity
- Primitive Baptist, a religious movement seeking to retain or restore early Christian practices
- Primitive (phylogenetics) characteristic of an early stage of development or evolution, cf. basal
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Famous quotes containing the word primitive:
“A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In some ways being a parent is like being an anthropologist who is studying a primitive and isolated tribe by living with them.... To understand the beauty of child development, we must shed some of our socialization as adults and learn how to communicate with children on their own terms, just as an anthropologist must learn how to communicate with that primitive tribe.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. We do not know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and taught.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)