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Animal Quotes

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Animal Quotes

“As musicians it's often difficult. You go to a dinner party and most people treat you like some kind of exotic animal and in a way like you don't have any problems and that it's all fantastic and glamorous and that you wake up in the morning, you kick the groupies out of bed, you roll onto the floor onto a needle, right, which fills you with a lovely substance, you roll into the gutter and you stare at the moon and out comes beautiful poetry. The fact of the matter is that that's nonsense. It's a lot of hard work.”

“As long as you have markets, you'll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter.”

“Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats outof bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped. Probably their instinct is wise. Who knows?”

“Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. … Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was … that some people can do sums. … It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations could only be made by very clever people.”

“One can't imagine a Hollywood film whose entire purpose was to ridicule, say, homosexual activists, feminists, animal rights crusaders, or environmentalists. That would be blasphemy. Hollywood understands that religious people, particularly Christians, are the last group in America besides businessmen who may be defamed with impunity.”

“Science tries to answer the question: "How?" How do cells act in the body? How do you design an airplane that will fly faster thansound? How is a molecule of insulin constructed? Religion, by contrast, tries to answer the question: "Why?" Why was man created? Why ought I to tell the truth? Why must there be sorrow or pain or death? Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.”

“The Magna Carta is an early reminder of the crucial difference between freedom and liberty. Liberty is freedom that is unique to humans, it is guaranteed by law. All animals are free, but in a system of humans total freedom is anarchy. Humans have thrived by letting a dominant authority regulate freedom. Liberty is a freedom that the authority has granted or has been persuaded to grant. For centuries, the state and the people have negotiated, peacefully and violently.”

“Man is taking over the forests and polluting the oceans, the animal species are threatened. I try to contribute as much as I can. We're really messing up our environment. I try to get people more aware of what's going on so that they can, even in a local way, try to prevent pollution to their lakes and rivers and prevent nuclear dumping in the oceans - it's bad enough that they're doing it in residential areas, but putting it in the ocean! Eventually it's going to pollute our food resources and, if the ocean dies, we're gone.”

“Animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with each other for thatthat stands for food or leadership: such things as our paper symbols of wealth (money, bonds, titles), badges of rank to wear on our clothes, or low-number license plates, supposed by some people to stand for social precedence. For animals the relationship in which one thing stands for something else does not appear to exist except in very rudimentary form.”

“Historian Larry Hise notes in his book Pro-Slavery that ministers 'wrote almost half of all defenses of slavery published in America.' He listed 275 men of the cloth who used the Bible to prove that white people were entitled to own black people as work animals.”

“The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures.”

“Tragically, some people are genetically more susceptible than others to agripoisons and industrial pollutants. Genetic engineering to correct these medical problems is a narrow (reductionistic) and instrumental (mechanistic) response to a problem that is fundamentally conceptual: namely, our attitude toward life and our mistreatment of the Earth, plants, and animals-and ourselves in the process.”

“The survey of more than 100 waterways downstream from treatment plants and animal feedlots in 30 states found minute amounts of dozens of antibiotics, hormones, pain relievers, cough suppressants, disinfectants and other products. It is not known whether they are harmful to plants, animals or people. The findings were released yesterday on the Web site of the United States Geological Survey, which conducted the research, and in an online journal, Environmental Science and Technology.”

“Society expects man to be a passive social animal who believes like the People of the Field in "Jurgen" that "to do what you always have done" and "what is expected of you" are the twin rules of life. This, is course, is not true. The wanton crucifixion of impulses, the unnecessary blocking and frustration of the drives and urges, are an evil that reflects itself in sophistication, ennui and boredom, dissatisfaction, melancholy, fatigue, anxiety and neurosis.”

“People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous.”

“A lot of people who work with wildlife work with wildlife to satisfy their own egos. And I don't really agree with that. What I do is get in nice and close to the animal to make the animal look good. My aim in this world is to make that brown snake, that crocodile, that koala, that red-backed spider, that black widow, look good. That's my job. I have absolutely no problem with my ego or my staff's ego.”

“Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn't fit into an existing paradigm.For a long time the story that we've been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn't particularly special. What I'm trying to convey in my book [The Sixth Extinction] is that we are unusual.”