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Animals Quotes

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Animals Quotes

“Organization and mutual aid are essential aspects in many animal cultures, including elephants, gorillas, and chimpanzees. Zoos, however, are places wherein that culture is restricted, altered, or even destroyed. This is done, whether intentionally or not, through the removal of autonomy, the break up of the family unit, restrictions on corporeal movement, continuous transfer of animals from one facility to next, and in the alteration of other living patterns. Psychologists call this a process of alienation and institutionalization. Hence, within these species, what we tend to see in zoos is a much more individualistic-based community.”

CultureIntelligenceCooperationAnimalsZoosZooOrangutans
Book:Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
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“It may be well here to sum up, in the fewest possible words, the conclusions reached in this book: (I) That our present so called "Civilisation" is only a "manner of speaking," and is in fact quite a rude state as compared with what may already be foreseen. (2) That the basis of any real morality must be the sense of Kinship between all living beings. (3) That there can be no abiding national welfare until the extremes of Wealth and Poverty are abolished. (4) That Warfare will not be discontinued until we have ceased to honour soldiering as heroic. (5) That the Rights of Animals have henceforth to be considered; and that such practices as cruel sports, vivisection, and flesh eating are not compatible with civilised life. (6) That Free Thought is essential to progress, and that the religion of the future will be a belief in a Creed of Kinship, a charter of human and sub-human relationships.”

PhilosophyEthicsAnimalsKinshipPacifismConscientious ObjectionAnthropozentrism
Book:The Creed of Kinship
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“With my new habit of carrying binoculars everywhere, I feel imbued with a readiness to see, an attitude that my life itself is a kind of field trip. The urban naturalist has the terrific luxury of stepping out her door and into "the field," without long rides or carpools, or putting money in for gas and Dairy Queen. When does the field trip being? Whenever we start paying attention.”

WorldNatureObservationAnimalsNaturalistEyes OpenSuburban Life Urban
Book:Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness
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“These Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: they had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech. Other mammals have no contact between their air passages and oesophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months - curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot.”

LanguageAnimalsMammalsMother TongueBill BrysonCro Magnon
Book:The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way
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“I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done.”

TimeWorkFoodRevolutionLivingSimplicityPrioritiesAnimalsLeisureFarmingSimple LivingLiving WellNapping
Book:The One-Straw Revolution
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“In my time on earth I've seen death, cruelty & greed among men. Petty ideals, the belligerent & small. The false worshippers and the scum of the earth bottom feeders. Racists, thieves and even murder. But nothing upon this earth makes me realize that mankind is an evil thing more than the mindless killing and abuse of animals for it shows the base instinct of what a lesser creature, a lesser predator truly is. A creature that kills merely for self enjoyment rather than self preservation.”

MurderKillingAnimalsLess Than Human
Book:NO KINGS: POEMS BY R.M. ENGELHARDT
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“For the dog, colour doesn't matter, reputation doesn't matter, wealth doesn't matter. Dogs see us all as equals. They live in the present in a world of emotion. They know if you are true and trustworthy, and what they care about most is the love you have in your heart and the kindness you show them.”

InspirationalLife QuotesAnimal RightsAnimalsDogsDogs And HumansAnimal LoverDog LoversDog QuotesDogs And Cats
Book:Listening to the Animals Becoming The Supervet / How Animals Saved My Life Being the Supervet
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“The largest sources of CO2 from animal agriculture come not from the animals themselves (through respiration and waste), but from the inputs and land-use changes necessary to maintain and feed them, including: burning fossil fuels to produce fertilisers used in feed production; maintaining intensive animal production facilities; growing the associated animal feed; transporting the animal feed; and processing and transporting the animal products. Furthermore, clearing land to graze livestock and grow feed is the largest single cause of deforestation and among the major causes of land degradation and desertification.”

Climate ChangeMeatAnimalsSustainabilityAgricultureGreenhouse GasesLivestockAnimal AgricultureMeat LobbyPolution
Book:Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial
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“The little Otak was hiding in the rafters of the house, as it did when strangers entered. There it stayed while the rain beat on the walls and the fire sank down and the night wearing slowly along left the old woman nodding by the hearthpit. Then the otak crept down and came to Ged where he lay stretched stiff and still upon the bed. It began to lick his hands and wrists, long and patiently, with its dry leaf-brown tongue. Crouching beside his head it licked his temple, his scarred cheek, and softly his closed eyes. And very slowly under that soft touch Ged roused. He woke, not knowing where he had been or where he was or what was the faint grey light in the air about him, which was the light of dawn coming to the world. Then the otak curled up near his shoulder as usual, and went to sleep. Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees”

WisdomLoyaltyAnimalsPetsOtakCompanionshipshipHoeg
Book:A Wizard of Earthsea
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“….In time, the Europeans brought in pigs and horses, both of which were allowed to run wild and multiply. Pigs in the wild soon became aggressive feral boars with tusks, eating everything in sight. Corn, which the Indians depended upon, was attacked and uprooted by the pigs before maturing, thus leaving the Indians without an important source of nourishment. Although pigs provided a necessary source of protein, they were also known to host worms and parasites, and spread viruses such as influenza. If undercooked, the meat could cause trichinosis infections that, depending upon the severity, could result in death in four to six weeks. The sailors returning to Europe brought with them tobacco and syphilis, both of which could be fatal. Syphilis is the gift that keeps on giving and soon spread throughout Europe and England. Unknown prior to the discovery of America, it became another blight on the European continent. Because of their close connection, many people were convinced that pigs were the carriers of Syphilis. Perhaps they were right…. .”

AnimalsCuban HistoryColonial AmericaCaribbean History
Book:Suppressed I Rise
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“Know your load. That’s rule numero uno in this business, which is why I make them count the penguins out in front of me one at a time. I’m not going to be the schmuck who shows up in Orlando two birds short of a dinner party....I know I’m pulling out of Houston with exactly forty-two Gentoo penguins, seventeen Jamaican land iguanas, four tuataras from New Zealand, and a pair of rare, civet-like mammals called linsangs. No more, no less.”

HumorAnimalsPenguinsZooTruck Drivers
Book:Scouting for the Reaper
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“Animal? Ao pensar nesse termo sentiu um leve embaraço. Era um animal, Luisito? Ou era algo diferente? O que era afinal um animal? No desdém do uso comum, as pessoas esqueciam-se muito facilmente da essência dessa palavra. Anima, o termo latina para alma. Sim, o animal era alguém que possuía alma. Por outro lado, não estava muito certa de que se pudesse dizer a mesma coisa da maior parte dos seres humanos." In "Um companheiro inesquecível", página 34”

AnimalsAnimals RightsAnimais
Author:Susana Tamaro
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“Taken together, the narratives of how the animals ended up at Lowry Park revealed as much about Homo sapiens as they revealed about the animals themselves. The precise details—how and where each was born, how they were separated from their mothers and taken into custody, all they had witnessed and experienced on their way to becoming the property of this particular zoo—could have filled an encyclopedia with insights into human behavior and psychology, human geopolitics and history and commerce. Lowry Park’s very existence declared our presumption of supremacy, the ancient belief that we have been granted dominion over other creatures and have the right to do with them as we please. The zoo was a living catalogue of our fears and obsessions, the ways we see animals and see ourselves, all the things we prefer not to see at all. Every corner of the grounds revealed our appetite for amusement and diversion, no matter what the cost. Our longing for the wildness we have lost inside ourselves. Our instinct to both exalt nature and control it. Our deepest wish to love and protect other species even as we scorch their forests and poison their rivers and shove them toward oblivion. All of it was on display in the garden of captives.”

AnimalsWildCaptivesWildnessZooLowry Park
Book:Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives
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“The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips...I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing.”

ScienceAnimals
Book:Life of Pi
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“Wesley went everywhere with me from then on. I even wrapped him in baby blankets and held him in my arms while grocery shopping, to keep him warm during the first cold winter. Occasionally someone would ask to see "the baby," and when I opened the blanket, would leap back shrieking, "What is that?! A dinosaur?" Apparently, the world is full of educated adults with mortgages and stock portfolios who think people are walking around grocery stores with dinosaurs in their arms.”

HumorScienceAnimalsOwls
Book:Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl
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“I dislike this whole business of experimentation on animals, unless there's some very good and altogether exceptional reason to this very case. The thing that gets me is that it's not possible for the animals to understand why they are being called upon to suffer. They don't suffer for their own good or benefit at all, and I often wonder how far it's for anyone's. They're given no choice, and there is no central authority responsible for deciding whether what's done is morally justifiable. These experiment animals are just sentient objects; they're useful because they are able to react; sometimes precisely because they're able to feel fear and pain. And they're used as if they were electric light bulbs or boots. What it comes to is that whereas there used to be human and animal slaves, now there are just animal slaves. They have no legal rights or choices in the matter.”

ScienceAnimalsDogsCatsLab TestingPlague Dogs
Author:Richard Adams
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“The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data...which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.”

NatureWonderInformationDataBiologyAnimalsDnaPlantsBiodiversityGenomeBiosphereSequencingDna Sequencing
Author:Freeman Dyson
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“The form of unique intelligence is one of the reasons some people think that animals don't think. Because they can't express joy or fear, animals must not be able to feel them. They think in sounds, places, smells, memory association kind of like temple (a girl with autism) does. Except that temple learned to express herself with words. She can serve as a link between big business and activists. The link between both worlds”

ScienceLanguageAnimalsAutism
Book:Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World
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“Like most mammals, dogs only have 2 colour detecting cells or cones. This is in contrast to humans, who have 3. Dogs, therefore see a restricted colour spectrum. However, they are not colourblind, instead they see the world in yellow, blue and grey. For dogs, green, yellow and orange are perceived as yellowish, while purple and blue are perceived as blue, and blue-green as grey. As a result, dogs have a hard time recognising a red ball in a green field.”

ScienceDogAnimalsDogsColour Perception
Book:The Dog and his Philosopher: A Call for Autonomy and Animal Rights
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“Just as knights confront battles and strive for glory, these actinide elements undergo transformations through processes like radioactive decay, evolving into different forms over time, much like a knight becomes wiser after trials.”

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Book:Magical Elements of the Periodic Table Presented By The Actinide Knights
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“Not only this- the mirror test also presupposes that the tested animals care about their appearance in one way or another, for something like this is necessary for them to have the motivation to interact with the mark that has been placed on them. However, it’s not immediately clear that other animals are vain enough to care about their own looks.”

FunnyScienceNatureAnimals
Book:Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death
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“Why is it that the difference between humans and animals is so insisted on? If this were a simple division as between different subjects then why is there so much impassioned writing about it? Why need humans insist on their wearisome catalogue of language, writing, works of the imagination, conceptual analysis and so forth, as differing them from other animals? Why do people angrily dispute any suggestion that, for example, ants build cities or that chimpanzees love their young, rather than that they follow instincts which do not include human feelings? Why the grudging admission by scientists, only within this century, that animals feel pain? Why do our modern languages slip so easily into animalistic words like bestial or feral to indicate a moral distinction between us and them? Why are internalised thoughts so embedded that set animal and spiritual at different ends of a spectrum? The answer is easily given. It is because of the still inescapably present inheritance of religious thought. ~ Peter Ellis”

HumansScienceReligionHumanismTheologyAnimalsHumanitiesAnimal Behaviour
Book:Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals
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“Even before vibrations are detected by its lyriform organs, the web determines which vibrations will arrive at the leg. The spider will eat whatever it's aware of, and it sets the bounds of its awareness--the extent of its Umwelt--by spinning different kinds of webs. The web, then, is not just an extension of a spider's senses but an extension of its cognition. In a very real way, the spider thinks with its web. Tuning the silk is like tuning its own mind.”

ScienceAnimals
Book:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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“...when [a black widow spider] is hungry, it can also draw its legs into a "crouch"--a sensory power pose that retunes its joints to higher frequencies...this stance might shift the spider's Umwelt toward the movements of smaller prey. It might also help it to ignore the low frequencies of wind. It's like a postural squint, which allows the spider to focus its attention. The analogy isn't exact, though, since squinting helps us to focus on particular parts of space. Here, the black widow's posture focuses on different parts of information space. It's as if a human could emphasize the red parts of our vision by squatting, or single out high-pitched sounds by going into downward dog.”

ScienceAnimals
Book:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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“Plants are more courageous than almost all human beings: an orange tree would rather die than produce lemons, whereas instead of dying the average person would rather be someone they are not.”

PeopleInspirationalHumansPersonsSelfHumorInspirationMotivationalDeathQuotesActorsFearHuman BeingsAnimalActingCourageTreeProduceInspireHumourHumanBallsMurderBraveryQuoteBravePlantProfoundFruitInspiredOneselfMotiveThoughtfulGutsSatireCourageousThought ProvokingConformityDeepBe YourselfMotivatedInsightfulPretendingAnimalsFearfulDaringAphorismDeadHeroismDieQuotationsConformStanding OutOrangeTreesPersonMaximsSayingsYourselfBoldnessAdagesActProverbsKillAphorismsMake You ThinkGritFearlessnessLemonsAxiomsWords To Live ByAdagePlantsNonconformityPluckProverbSatiricalSayingEpigramsHuman BeingFacadeAudacityPretendActorQuotationGnomeFruitsMaximFitting InEpigramGnomesProvoke ThoughtMade Me ThinkAxiomDictumDictumsValourKilledPretenderGallantryTrue GritNerveLemonHimselfThemselvesFacadesMoxiePretendersSpunkFit InPeoplesStandoutConformingMurderedHerselfCojonesCourageousnessIntrepidityHardihoodPluckiness
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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