“My Impossible Five would be: Cape mountain leopard, aardvark, pangolin, riverine rabbit and (naturally occurring) white lion. These animals had survived into our modern age largely due to their elusiveness. Their ‘impossibility’ was their tenuous insurance against extinction. They were still wild and free, most of them living outside national parks, still occupying the same territories they had for millennia. As such, they were symbols of wilderness – that wildness once everywhere, and which is now drastically curtailed and shrinking by the day.
Their continued presence, even if never seen, was a comfort, a kind of ecological money in the bank. If they disappeared or were driven into contained environments, our human species would be far poorer for it. I began to think of my creatures’ impossibility as their saving grace – our saving grace. In this light, it didn’t matter if I found none of them, and my mission was a complete failure. As long as I knew – we knew – they were still out there, that would be enough.”

" Inversnaid http://www.bartleby.com/122/33.html, lines 13-16
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Complete Poems

1900 - 1920

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God. Vol 1 Translated from the 2d German ed. 1895 Ebenezer Brown Speirs 1854-1900, and J Burdon Sanderson P. 297
Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Volume 1 (1827)
Context: These are the Galla and Gaga tribes, which, as the most savage and most barbarous of conquerors, have repeatedly descended upon the coasts since the year 1542, pouring forth from the interior and inundating the whole country. These look upon man in the strength of his consciousness as too exalted to be capable of being killed by anything so obscure as the power of nature. What therefore takes place is, that sick people, in whose case magic has proved ineffectual, are put to death by their friends. In the same way the wild tribes of North America too killed their aged who had reached decrepitude, the meaning of which is unmistakable, namely, that man is not to perish by means of nature, but is to have due honour rendered to him at human hands. There is another people again who have the belief that everything would go to ruin if their high-priest were to die a natural death. He is therefore executed as soon as ever he becomes ill and weak; if a high-priest should notwithstanding die of some disease, they believe that some other person killed him by means of magic, and the magicians have to ascertain who the murderer was, when he is at once made away with. On the death of a king in particular, many persons are killed: according to a missionary of older days, it is the devil of the king who is slain. Such, then, is the very first form of religion, which cannot indeed as yet be properly called religion.

Source: Out of Africa

1850s, Autobiographical Sketch Written for Jesse W. Fell (1859)
Context: My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age, and he grew up literally without education. He removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.<!--p.33

Own Goals, p. 315
The Joke's Over (2006)

As quoted in "Saroyan's Literary Quarantine" http://www.cilicia.com/armo22_william_saroyan_2.html by Peter H. King, in The Los Angeles Times (26 March 1997).

Source: The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), Chapter Three: "Natural, Nonlethal, and Lethal Weapons", p. 93.

Source: Pretties