What is primitive?

Famous quotes containing the word primitive:

    Human beings will be happier—not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.
    Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)

    That primitive head
    So ambitiously vast,
    Yet so rude in its art,
    Is as easily read
    For the woes of the past
    As a clinical chart.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have.... Or, I would rather say, such were our groves twenty years ago.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)