No man can regard the way of war as good. It has simply been our way. No man can
evaluate the eternal contest of weapons as anything but the sheerest waste and the
sheerest folly. It has been simply our only means of final arbitration. Any man can
suggest reasonable alternatives to the judgment of arms. But we are not creatures of
reason except in out own eyes.

Robert Ardrey
African Genesis
1961

Three billion years of organic evolution lie behind us. It is a respectable age, almost a
third as long as that of the universe itself. Three billion years of circumstance and
chance, of infinite trial and infinite error, of forgotten failures and compounding
successes, have arranged the being called MAN. The errors, the failures, we may forget
with brief mourning. These were not of our ancestry. They were tried and found
wanting, condemned to extinction. Shall it be told on the record of living beings that
after three billion years the supreme experiment, MAN, was found wanting?

Robert Ardrey
The Social Contract
1970


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