Animal Quotes

Man is a wanting animal - as soon as one of his needs is satisfied, another appears in its place. This process is unending. It continues from birth to death.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly "” but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.

If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times.

The cat is above all things, a dramatist

The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.

My cat speaks sign language with her tail.

You can keep a dog: but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.

The real world is simply too terrible to admit. it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all of this,makes man seem important,vital to the universe. immortal in some ways

Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.

Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike, and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself.

Man is by nature a political animal.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.

The soul is the ancestral animals. The body is their knowledge.

The American Medical Association says the humane way is to let people starve and thirst to death. If you did that to an animal, youd be put in jail immediately ... In the face of such insanity masquerading as authority, who wouldnt be strident?

Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant: Animals have instincts, we have taxes.

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

We must never allow the voice of humanity within us to be silenced. It is humanity's sympathy with all creatures that first makes us truly human.

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures.

Lions, wolves, and vultures don't live together in herds, droves or flocks. Of all animals of prey, man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his neighbor, and yet we herd together.

A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights.

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

Do the gods of different nations talk to each other?...Is there some annual get-together where they compare each other's worshippers? Mine will bow their faces to the floor and trace woodgrain lines for me, says one. Mine will sacrifice animals, says another. Mine will kill anyone who insults me, says a third. Here is the question I think of most often: "Are there any who can honestly boast, My worshippers obey my good laws, and treat each other kindly, and live simple generous lives?

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Prowling his own quiet backyard or asleep by the fire, he is still only a whisker away from the wilds.

If we knew exactly what animal life was like before the fall into sin and knew what nature was like before the law of entropy invaded it, we would already be living in heaven.

It's important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don't necessarily nurture soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and any animal's rhythm of rest and activity.

When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.

Old age means realizing you will never own all the dogs you wanted to.

Soon or late, every dog's master's memory becomes a graveyard; peopled by wistful little furry ghosts that creep back unbidden, at times, to a semblance of their olden lives.

Delaying a meal brings about symptoms most people call "hunger." These symptoms include abdominal cramping, weakness, and feeling ill-the same as during drug withdrawal. This is not hunger. Our dietary habits, especially eating animal-protein-rich foods three times a day, are so stressful to the detoxification system in our liver and kidneys that we start to get withdrawal, or detoxification, symptoms the minute we aren't busy processing such food. Real hunger is not that uncomfortable.

The key isn't winning — or losing, it's making the attempt. I may never be what I ought to be, want to be — but how will I know unless I try? Sure, it's scary, but what's the alternative? Stagnation - A safer, more terrible form of death. Not of the body, but of the spirit. An animal knows what it is, and accepts it. A man may know what he is — but he questions. He dreams. He strives. Changes. Grows.

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.

The phytochemicals, antioxidants, and fiber- all of the healthful components of plant foods- originate in plants, not animals. If they are present, it is because the animal ate plants. And why should we go through an animal to get the benefits of the plants themselves? To consume unnecessary, unseemly, and unhealthy substances, such as saturated fat, animal protein, lactose, and dietary cholesterol, is to negate the benefits of the fiber, phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants that are prevalent and inherent in plants.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consiousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would crate such a complex and fancy worm food?

If modern civilization man had to kill the animals he eats, the number of vegetarians would rise astronomically.

I am in the process of starting a nonprofit organization that gives rescued animals a home in a simulated wild environment and, for those who have been tested on, who are disabled, aggressive, etc., their own space to live out their days.

Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit. And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.

Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure, in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.

Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.

Animals speak with pure affection. It's important to me to get something going in NY so we can get to be a no-kill city, and give the animals homes and more attention and love.

Way down deep, we're all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.

A kitten is in the animal world what a rosebud is in the garden.

If you build a better mousetrap, you will catch better mice.

...In little more than a single century from 1820 to 19450, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another.... We describe these killings as men behaving "like animals," but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.

Nothing can be more obvious than that all animals were created solely and exclusively for the use of man.

All persons who are enthusiastic that they should transcend the other animals ought to strive with the utmost effort not to pass through a life of silence, like cattle, which nature has fashioned to be prone and obedient to their stomachs.

I have had strange animals as pets all my life. I was shy growing up, and shy people tend to interact better with animals than people. Animals are direct, not duplicitous.

Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.

I love a dog. He does nothing for political reasons.

What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our wonder and admiration be encreased when we consider the prodigious distance and multitude of the Stars?

Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.

Courage and conviction are powerful weapons against an enemy who depends only on fists or guns. Animals know when you are afraid; a coward knows when you are not.

Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.

Man is the only animal that can be skinned more than once.

I was so lucky. I was very broke and I was taking classes at Lee Strasberg's Institute and I saw a 3 X 5 index card on the bulletin board advertising for college-aged girls for a film. That was Animal House.

Most of the pollution in the water already is dead animal and plant matter and building debris, ... good stagnant nursery for mosquitoes.

Let those who desire a secure homeland conquer it. Let those who do not conquer it live under the whip and in exile, watched over like wild animals, cast from one country to another, concealing the death of their souls with a beggar's smile from the scorn of free men.

You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

When I see professional clowns, mimes, or people who makes ballon animals, I think of their relatives and how disappointed they must be.

You can't look at a sleeping cat and be tense.

Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.

This is an age of intellectual sauces, of essence, of distillation. We have conclusions without deductions, abridgments of history and abridgments of science without leading facts. We have animals for literature, Cabinet Encyclopaedias, Family Libraries, Diffusion Societies, and heaven knows what else! What is all this for? Not to add knowledge to the learned, but to tell points to the ignorant, without giving them the trouble to acquire the links. Oh! it is sad work. And the result will be injurious to all classes.

Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.

What struck me whenever I visited a farm was how much more sophisticated was the life the animals were capable of living than was assumed by those exploiting them. The more we are willing to see about their lives, the more we will see. Humans seem to take perverse pleasure in attributing stupidity to animals when it is almost always entirely a question of human ignorance.

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.

I can't remember when I wasn't an animal rights activist.

Purring would seem to be, in her case, an automatic safety-valve device for dealing with happiness overflow.

Even among the married, sexual satisfaction must not be sought in a way which disregards man's character as a person and degrades him to the animal level.

Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.

The wild, cruel beast is not behind the bars of the cage. He is in front of it.

Always the cat remains a little beyond the limits we try to set for him in our blind folly.

Man may be considered as a superior species of animal that produces philosophies and poems in about the same way a silkworm produces their cocoons and bees their hives.

Politics is still crucially important. Our choices are vital, and we've got to make them, and not just say, 'Oh, they're all the same.' They are all the same in certain ways, alas - a political animal is such an animal. But lurking somewhere behind their rhetoric and their spittle are important choices that we should make.

Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.

The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is, and always will be, a wild animal.

In my movies, there has been little to do in the way of animal rights. I have never worked in a movie with animals. No horse-riding, no trained dogs, lions, bears. A few actors, but what could I do? We had to have them.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

You need eyes that tell the dog who watches them what you are feeling toward it, even though the message may be hidden from the outside world. Above all, you nee telepathy so that the dog thinks with you. These things are not always born in people. They can be developed as any sense or gift can be developed. That is, providing the person wishes to develop them is honest in mind, because with animals you cannot cheat...

I'm very touched on a deep level by cruelty to animals.

The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals

Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance.

The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to! . It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.

People should try eating no animal products for just ONE DAY a week.

In a period of such obsessing political controversy as the present, I believe that I am that strange animal, the individual without any politics at all.

Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals.

I really love `Serenity.' I'm really proud of it and excited to see it my guys on the big screen, bringing something new to it, ... But `Firefly' was a different animal, something I will regret losing until the day they put me in a box, because I did have a lot of good stories I wanted to tell.

The holidays are also a time when people freak out about their finances. If you don't want to spend the money, why not try some of the other options instead of killing a bunch of animals?

If you don't own a dog, at least one, there is not necessarily anything wrong with you, but there may be something wrong with your life.

Animals on factory farms and slaughter houses are mutilated, drugged and abused in ways that would be illegal if dogs or cats were treated similarly. The problem is that farm animals are exempted from the Animal Welfare Act. Therefore, companies often act with impunity.

anyone who has no feelings for animals has a dead heart.

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.

I just think you would never kill and cut up a human to wear so why do it to animals? I just think it's horrible, I would never wear fur, although I guess if it was a really vintage piece you might just get away with it.

Cruelty to dumb animals is one of the distinguishing vices of low and base minds. Wherever it is found, it is a certain mark of ignorance and meanness; a mark which all the external advantages of wealth, splendour, and nobility, cannot obliterate. It is consistent neither with learning nor true civility.

Dogs have given us their absolute all. We are the center of their universe. We are the focus of their love and faith and trust. They serve us in return for scraps. It is without a doubt the best deal man has ever made.

The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.

I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.

An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.

When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

It's not a beard, it's an animal I've trained to sit very still

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem.

The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for its shape and comfort.