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Animals Quotes

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Animals Quotes

“The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation. It is only the wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesh, and they pay for the greater licence of privilege, by subjection to supernumerary diseases.”

“Healing is about choices—choices to treat or not to treat, to choose one type of intervention over another, or to choose one method of treatment in conjunction with another. One choice does not eliminate all other possibilities. You can choose and choose again. The most important choice is the decision to heal; all else follows.”

“They’re service dogs,” Norah said, without missing a beat. “So they have to stay with us.” Patel looked at the mutts dubiously. “These are service dogs?” “Yes,” Norah said serenely. One of the things that Alicia had always admired about Norah was the fact that she was a committed liar. Not to be confused with a good liar; Norah’s gift was the ability to come up with a lie on the spur of the moment and remain committed to it against all logic and reason. “For…?” The pause was negligible. “Irritable bowel syndrome.” The detectives exchanged a look. Hando, still stroking the dog’s chin, snorted. “You have service dogs for IBS?” “Of course.”

“So many of the animals are sensitive, exquisitely attuned to the emotional state of those around them. They can pick up the smallest frequencies of distress or anger, and it can make them act in ways that clueless keepers disapprovingly call "erratic." It's not erratic, though, to be influenced by the mood of someone close to you. Humans do it all the time.”

“Simply raising the theme of animals in the Third Reich means that our narrative is no longer only an account of what human beings have done to one another, but also about our relations with the natural world. If,viewed against the magnitude and terror of historical events, our personal lives appear almost trivial, the lives of animals may seem more so, and even to raise the subject can at first seem either insensitive or pedantic. At the same time, this new dimension places the events in an even vaster perspective still, one in which even the greatest battles and horrendous crimes can begin to fade into insignificance. This is the standpoint of evolutionary time, in which humankind itself may be no more than a relatively brief episode. Perhaps the focus on animals may help us to find a more harmonious balance between the personal, historic, and cosmic levels, on which, simultaneously we conduct our lives.”

“The instant that you forget about the consequences of your actions on other people, is the moment that you are about to lose your humanity. We all are related, no matter, what skin color, sexual orientation, gender or religion we hold. We all like rosary beads. Our existence is depended to the rest, if one bead falls apart, the rest of us will do too. Our humanity defines by how we accept, respect and support each other, otherwise we are simply a bunch of animals acting according to our instinct and killing one another to survive.”

“Chronicling the passage of whales has led me to an understanding that we, as a species, now sand at a crossroads. We can face the possibility of our own extinction and work to avert it, or we can flow the more traditional path of earths organisms and fall blindly over the edge. If there's one trait that characterised human beings, it's the will to survive. This, I believe, will motivate us to work with the natural world rather than opposite it, which is all we need to do to give the children of earth - of all species - the opportunity to thrive.”

“Sea World was treading carefully. Park officials stated repeatedly how essential and valuable Tilikum had been to their operations. This is true. Zoos and circuses are a business, and Blackstone paid 2.3 billion dollars for its purchase. The most productive employees in that business, in terms of labor and revenue, are the orcas themselves. Tilikum has performed for almost nineteen years in Orlando, sired thirteen calves, and produced in the range of a billion dollars in revenue. Nevertheless, Sea World did not believe that Tilikum had earned the right to retire. None of that billion dollars would be used to build an ocean sanctuary for older captive orcas. They do not deserve it.”

“Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately. Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.”

“Film does not replace language, for it cannot exist without it. Film displaces language, exposes the abyss that threatens to engulf every semantic signification. Film parasitizes language, much as the animal does, drawing into its imaginary panorama that which remains undisclosed in discursivity. Cinema is a parasite.”

“This is God's universe and he is the master gardener of all. If we were to eliminate all colors in his garden,then what would be a rainbow with only one color? Or a garden with only one kind of flower? Why would the Creator create a vast assortment of plants, ethnicities, and animals, if only one beast or seed is to dominate all of existence?”

“It's just that the animals matter in a way that's hard to define. They matter not only because a particular species will die out if we don't lock its last members away in here, but because they belong to us, to the whole story of this Earth, and without them the story would not be as beautiful or as profound. Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hummingbird beat its tiny wings to a stillness as it draws the nectar out of a flower with its long, curled tongue will know what I mean. The natural world is beautiful even when it is terrible, even when it is engaged in ritual slaughter. Any antelope who has ever felt the hot breath of a lion on its neck will know what I mean. In that last moment of its life, the antelope surely regrets that it will never again experience the thrum of the savannah under hoof, the generous shade of the acacia tree, the smell of water running over smooth white rocks. It wishes not to have to leave this beautiful world. The natural world and the nonhuman beings in it are part of what makes this life worth living. If we kill all the beauty around us, we kill a part of ourselves. These thoughts whirl around pointlessly in my head, never resolving, just coming back to their starting point like a snake devouring its tail.”

“Much as I'd always enjoyed the balm of the plants and flowers, it had never occurred to me to aspire to work in here. I suppose I've been so single-mindedly committed to the animals, with their flesh-and-blood needs and their inescapable demands, that these other gentler living things have been obscured to me. I regret that now. There was always so much more than I have allowed myself to see.”

“On the black earth on which the ice plants bloomed, hundreds of black stink bugs crawled. And many of them stuck their tails up in the air. "Look at all them stink bugs," Hazel remarked, grateful to the bugs for being there. "They're interesting," said Doc. "Well, what they got their asses up in the air for?" Doc rolled up his wool socks and put them in the rubber boots and from his pocket he brought out dry socks and a pair of thin moccasins. "I don't know why," he said. "I looked them up recently--they're very common animals and one of the commonest things they do is put their tails up in the air. And in all the books there isn't one mention of the fact that they put their tails up in the air or why." Hazel turned one of the stink bugs over with the toe of his wet tennis shoe and the shining black beetle strove madly with floundering legs to get upright again. "Well, why do you think they do it?" "I think they're praying," said Doc. "What!" Hazel was shocked. "The remarkable thing," said Doc, "isn't that they put their tails up in the air--the really incredibly remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we'd probably be praying--so maybe they're praying." "Let's get the hell out of here," said Hazel.”

“Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.”

“If we act today, we can ensure that our children will look out on the ocean and know underneath the surface, a shark will be swimming, standing guard over its dominion, protecting the ocean, the greatest miracle on earth, just as it has done for more than 450 million years”

“Almost everyone will proclaim they are against bullying. No one likes a bully, right? At the same time, most of those same people will state the slogan of the day, "I respect the police.", or, "I respect the police, but...". To that I ask, "What is it you respect about them?" Do you respect that they'd shoot your dog or child in a heartbeat? Do you respect them leaving thousands of dogs in hot cars to die? Do you respect them shooting hundreds of thousands of dogs? (10,000 a year for 20 years would be hundreds of thousands!). Do you respect that there are cops in prison for murder, rape, and child molestation who are still collecting their pensions? I could probably make this list 100 pages long if I wanted to, but I hope you get the point. The point is that when we say we respect bullies and bullying, we are part of the problem, not the solution.”

“I believe I am not interested to know whether Vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. The pains which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity towards it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further. I have tried to understand why it should be considered a kind of credit and a handsome thing to belong to a human race that has vivisectors in it.”

“The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.”

“Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.”

“Honeybees possess amazing numerical skills that rival those of many vertebrates. Honeybees have a reputation of being insect geniuses: not only can they enumerate and order numbers, but they also possess elaborate working memory to ponder about upcoming decisions, understand abstract concepts such as 'sameness' and 'difference', and learn intricate skills from other bees. And they achieve all of this with fewer than one million neurons.”

“We like to romanticize the wild, raw, majestic beauty of nature. But when you take a closer look, nature is really just a giant fuckfest. That beautiful bird chirping? It's a mating call. That pretty little bird is trying to get laid. And why does the peacock have such beautiful feathers? To attract females. Because he's trying to get laid.”

“The notion that talking-animal narratives are not really about animals—that the worthwhile ones, at least, must surely be about something more than mere animals—is quite consistent with the far wider cultural trivialization and marginalization of the animal. The animal content of literary, artistic and other cultural productions is seldom regarded as a serious or proper field of inquiry.”

“If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life. The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE. And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.”

“...Everything that’s not asexual has two sexes, male and female. Most of the time it takes one of each to reproduce. Then there’s the whiptail lizard. This is a lizard that lives way the fuck out there in the middle of the desert, and sometimes it’s hard to find another lizard to mate with out there. Therefore, what the female whiptail can do is sort of make her eggs start dividing on their own. She makes daughters, clones of herself. It’s called parthenogenesis.”

“Sanders, and many other politicians, also voted for the 2014 Farm Bill, which continues a long tradition of using taxpayer money to subsidize farms. These well-intentioned subsidies pay for programs like “crop insurance, disaster payments, and counter cyclical payments, to name a few (Simon, p. 79, 2013). Oddly enough, as Simon points out, two-thirds of these subsidies go to the very foods the USDA recommends we limit in our diets while only two percent of them support the production of fruit and vegetables, which the USDA recommends we eat more of. Simon estimates that the U.S. gives 38.4 billion dollars a year to the growers of crops (soy and corn) that ultimately go towards animal feed for meat and dairy production.”