Quotes about animal (3130 quotes, page 20)

“I’m a member of the Pascua Yaqui Nation and as an indigenous person, the fur trade represents so much more to me than just animal abuse. It represents cultural genocide. They were the foot soldiers of an invasion and conquest in the “new world.” They were the ones who introduced disease. They were the ones who introduced alcoholism. They were the ones who introduced gunpowder and many, many things that led to our decimation.”

Rod Coronado (1966) Native American eco-anarchist and animal rights activist

A Voice for Liberation http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/msr/coronado.html

Alcohol , World , Disease , Animals

“I think that once you’ve seen the ways in which lots of these animals are killed and how brutal and grotesque and unnecessary it is, I think that people would automatically choose not to wear fur.”

Tamara Ecclestone (1984) British model, socialite and television personality

"Fur-Free Tamara Ecclestone Has the Winning Formula", Peta.org.uk (17 November 2008) https://www.peta.org.uk/blog/fur-free-tamara-ecclestone-winning-formula/.

People , Way , Thinking , Animals

“All the other animals in the forest naturally expect me to be brave, for the Lion is everywhere thought to be the King of Beasts. I learned that if I roared very loudly every living thing was frightened and got out of my way. Whenever I've met a man I've been awfully scared; but I just roared at him, and he has always run away as fast as he could go. If the elephants and the tigers and the bears had ever tried to fight me, I should have run myself — I'm such a coward; but just as soon as they hear me roar they all try to get away from me, and of course I let them go.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Way , Nature , Learning , Animals

“If we teach our kids in public schools that they are merely animals, then they will act like animals. We should not be surprised. If we teach kids in school that they are a creation of God, that God is their creator, and will some day be their judge, we can expect their behavior to be different because of their basic philosophy.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

God , School , Behavior , Animals

“I think of the whole of the city, the people who inhabit its halls, who sleep now and breathe its recycled air and whose activities by day animate this strip of land on the rim of the desert, and I remember — because this thought is always a memory — that they will all one day be gone, that everyone of them will be taken outside and pushed into the sand, that in a hundred years, or two hundred years, to be certain, every human being here, every lover and loser, every captain of industry and every hotel cleaner, every mother and father and every child will be no more and that these buildings will stand, not all of them, but enough will persevere without them. Its a thought that stills me, that brings a moment of calm. And I walk and walk, and amid the concrete, steel and glass, under lights burning brighter than the noonday sun, it is the knot of anxiety, always tightening and turning, for which, above all else, I resent her.”

Zia Haider Rahman British novelist

In The Light of what We Know (2014)

People , Lovers , Thinking , Sleep

“Four guys could get together and make their own movie, in a year, but nobody does it 'cause they got bills to pay. What I'm saying is, that's what I would do, if I was young. I wouldn't even get a job. I'd get a couple of computers and a bunch of guys, we'd eat crap for a year, millionaires the next year if we did a good film. It's so extraordinary. Instead of crying about getting a job at Disney or "things are falling apart", things the old animators were doing when I was a kid, "it's all crumbling!" It's not crumbling, you're crumbling! You got these computers that could do this stuff for nothing! What do you do with it? You try to get a job for some asshole studio. It's so dumb.”

Ralph Bakshi (1938) Animator, filmmaker

Guy , Animals , Cry

“I've seen three wolves successfully take on a seven-hundred- to eight-hundred-pound bear and remain in control throughout just by waiting until it was pitch dark for the final assault. Being nocturnal animals, the wolves could still see clearly, but the bear, which is fundamentally a daytime creature, was at a disadvantage.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

The Man who lives with Wolves (2010)

Waiting , Animals

“The materialist theory of knowledge amounts, then, to this statement, that the human organ of cognition radiates no metaphysical light, but is a piece of Nature which pictures other pieces of Nature whose essence is explained when we describe it and bring it in connection with the whole Universe as the one Reality and the real Unity. Such a description demands from the epistemologist or philosopher that he should treat his subject in the same precise way as the animal world is treated by the zoologist. Should I be reproached with not following this precept immediately, I would point to Rome which, too, was not built in one day.”

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) german philosopher

Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of Epistemology http://www.marxists.org/archive/dietzgen/1887/epistemology.htm (1887)

World , Way , Nature , Knowledge

“Not in looks, but in action, the model must resemble an animal. Therefore it must have these or some measure of these attributes: exploration, curiosity, free-will in the sense of unpredictability, goalseeking, self-regulation, avoidance of dilemmas, foresight, memory, learning, forgetting, association of ideas, form recognition, and the elements of social accommodation. Such is life.”

William Grey Walter (1910–1977) American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist

Source: The Living Brain (1953), p. 120–121.

Life , Idea , Sense , Learning

“Vegetarianism alone can give us the quality of compassion, which distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world.”

Morarji Desai (1896–1995) Former Indian Finance Minister, Freedom Fighters, Former prime minister

19th World Vegetarian Congress 1967

World , Animals

“Promoting veganism, I think it’s such an important message. … I remember as a child, my grandma instilling in us that no matter how little you think you have, there are always people and beings that are suffering on the planet and have even less than us. As I’ve grown older, the love just continues to grow for all living beings. It breaks my heart when I see animals being mistreated. As we all know, in agriculture, that’s like one of the biggest mistreatments that animals endure in our country. The more I educated myself about the subject, the more I was able to make wiser, more intelligent decisions in my life. … I’ve seen some tremendous positive changes in my health in the last six years when I switched to a plant-based diet … I live by the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. And to me, that includes animals as well. They should be loved. They are souls on this planet just like we are.”

Susie Castillo (1979) MTV VJ, Miss USA 2003

"In-Depth with Loving the Silent Tears MC: Susie Castillo (Vegan)", GodsDirectContact.org (2012) http://www.godsdirectcontact.org.tw/eng/news/211/sr_43.htm.

Love , Life , People , Health

“Animated the face might have been beautiful — any set of features can support beauty — but even a superb makeup job could not have made her pretty.”

Spider Robinson (1948) Canadian author

God Is An Iron (1977)

Beauty , Support , Animals

“I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having first learned to listen to my unwillingness to sell my hours, then to listen to the signals of my body, then to listen to the disease that has made my insides my home, and thus become a part of me. And I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having talked to other people courageous enough to validate my perception of an animate world. I talked to the writer Christoper Manes, who said, 'For most cultures through history--including our own in preliterate times--the entire world used to speak. Anthropologists call this animism, the most pervasive worldview in human history. Animistic cultures listen to the natural world. For them, birds have something to say. So do worms, wolves, and waterfalls.' Later the philosopher Thomas Berry told me, 'The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees--all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.”

Derrick Jensen book A Language Older Than Words

Source: A Language Older Than Words (2000), p. 361

People , World , Disease , Home

“So much of political philosophy throughout history has consisted of concocting reasons why people have a duty to be tame animals in politicians’ cages.”

James Bovard (1956) American journalist

From Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin's Press, 1999) http://www.jimbovard.com/Epigram%20page%20Freedom%20in%20Chains.htm

People , History , Animals

“The generally accepted computation is that 2½ acres of land are required to provide a minimum adequate diet for each person, by Western standards anyhow. On a vegetarian diet it has been estimated that 1½ acres per head may provide enough. The reason for this difference is that animals grazed for meat-eating purposes require about 15 times more land than is necessary to raise an equivalent amount of nutrition in the form of grains, vegetables and fruit for human consumption. This means that India, on a vegetarian diet, is living far more wisely within its own land resources than are the meat-eating peoples.”

Richard Gregg (social philosopher)

Which Way Lies Hope? An Examination of Capitalism, Communism, Socialism and Gandhiji's Programme (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1952), p. 8 https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.54786/2015.54786.Which-Way-Lies-Hope#page/n15/mode/2up.

People , Time , Animals , Personality

“When it was assumed that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, it was correspondingly presumed that their flight evolved among climbers that first glided and then developed powered flight. This has the advantage that we know that arboreal animals can evolve powered flight with the aid of gravity, as per bats. When it was realized that birds descended from deinonychosaurs, many researchers switched to the hypothesis that running dinosaurs learned to fly from the ground up. This has the disadvantage that it is not certain whether it is practical for tetrapod flight to evolve among ground runners working against gravity.
The characteristics of birds indicate that they evolved from dinosaurs that had first evolved as bipedal runners, and then evolved into long armed climbers. If the ancestors of birds had been entirely arboreal, then they should be semiquadrupedal forms whose sprawling legs were integrated into the main airfoil, like bats. That birds are bipeds whose erect legs are separate from the wings indicates that their ancestors evolved to run.”

Gregory Scott Paul book The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

Gregory S. Paul (2010) The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, Princeton University Press, p. 52
The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

Bird , Learning , Animals , Flying

“But understanding and explaining motives does not compromise freedom; nor does even predicting acts necessarily do so. A person committed to a political cause may vote predictably, and intelligibly in an election. He does not vote less freely than someone that flips a coin at the last minute. So if we find comparison with animals any help in understanding motives, it will not mean that conduct is not free. And since animals are not (as Descartes supposed) automata, the issue of freedom does not make comparing man with any other species and downgrading irrelevance.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).

Intelligence , Motivation , Understanding , Freedom

“Marx… Lenin… Mao Tse-Tung… These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.”

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist

"The Incompatibility of Love and Violence," Catholic Worker (May 1951)

Love , Men , Animals

“The very port and gait of a swan, or turkey, or peacock show the high idea he has entertain'd of himself; and his contempt of all others. This is the more remarkable, that in the two last species of animals, the pride always attends the beauty, and is discover'd in the male only. The vanity and emulation of nightingales in singing have been commonly remark'd […] All these are evident proofs, that pride and humility are not merely human passions, but extend themselves over the whole animal creation.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 1, Section 12
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 2: Of the passions

Beauty , Idea , Passion , Singing

“Language, intelligence, and humor, along with art, generosity, and musical ability, are often described as human equivalents of the peacock’s tail. However, peacocks afford a poor analogy for the role of courtship displays in humans. Other animal models offer a better fit. In a number of nonhuman species — species as diverse as sea dragons and grebes — males and females engage in a mutual courtship “dance,” in which the two partners mirror one another’s movements. In Clark’s grebes and Western grebes, for instance, the pair bond ritual culminates in the famous courtship rush: The male and female swim side by side along the top of the water, with their wings back and their heads and necks in a stereotyped posture. If we want a nonhuman analogue for the role of creative intelligence or humor in human courtship, we should think not of ornamented peacocks displaying while drab females evaluate them. We should think instead of grebes engaged in their mating rush or sea dragons engaged in their synchronized mirror dance. Once we have one of these alternative images fixed in our minds, we can then add the proviso that there is a slight skew such that, in the early stages of courtship, men tend to display more vigorously and women tend to be choosier. However, this should be seen as a qualification to the primary message that intelligence, humor, and other forms of sexual display are part of the mutual courtship process in our species.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 160

Women , Men , Art , Music

“Only now, as we feel the onslaught behind us, do we begin dimly to apprehend why the animals fought, begot, and died; and behind them the plants; and behind these the huge reserve of inorganic forces.
We are moved by pity, gratitude, and esteem for our old comrades-in-arms. They toiled, loved, and died to open a road for our coming.
We also toil with the same delight, agony, and exaltation for the sake of Someone Else who with every courageous deed of ours proceeds one step farther.
All our struggle once more will have a purpose much greater than we, wherein our toils, our miseries, and our crimes will have become useful and holy.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

Love , Feeling , Courage , Animals

“We can assume that in a relatively short time — perhaps within 100 million years — the one celled organism evolved into a colony of cells. With the further passage of time, groups of cells within those colonies assumed specialized functions of food-gathering, digestion, the structural features of an outer skin, and so on; thus began the stage of evolution leading to the complex, many-celled creatures which dominate life today.
The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms. The first clues to the existence of relatively advanced forms of life consist of a few barely discernible tracks, presumably made in the primeval slime by soft, wriggling wormlike animals. These are found in rocks about one billion years old. These meager remains are the earliest traces of many-celled animal life on the planet.”

Robert Jastrow (1925–2008) American astronomer

Red Giants and White Dwarfs : Man's Descent from the Stars (1971), p. 249.

Life , Food , Time , Animals

“People kill nonhuman animals for food, for their skins, and sometimes just for fun. We enslave animals and force them to work for us. We experiment on them and justify their suffering in terms of our advantage. Because most of us want to be able to view ourselves as good people (and, perhaps more importantly, because we want others to view us as good people), we may be motivated to view nonhumans in such a way that these activities are rendered morally unproblematic. One way to do this is to view other animals as utterly different from us.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 111

People , Food , Way , Motivation

“But what you’re talking about means giving up all that—just the noble primitive, simple and self-sufficient. He’s going to chop down a tree—who sold him the ax? He wants to shoot a deer—who made his gun?…There never was and there never could be a noble simple creature such as you described. He’d be an ignorant savage, with dirt on his skin and lice in his hair. He would work sixteen hours a day to stay alive at all. He’d sleep in a filthy hut on a dirt floor. And his point of view and his mental processes would be just two jumps above an animal.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Beyond This Horizon

Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 6, “We don’t speak the same lingo”, pp. 73-74

Sleep , Tree , Animals

“[As a vegan] I feel sexy. I feel confident. I’m healthier than ever. And my body is better than ever. … What upsets me the most is the way animals are treated. There’s no difference between a cat and a dog and a pig and a cow. They’re all individuals that have their own fears and desires and personalities.”

Sofía Sisniega (1989) Mexican actress

“Sofía Sisniega Gets Naked for Animals,” interview with PETA Latino (August 2017) https://www.petalatino.com/en/features/sofia-sisniega-gets-naked-animals/.

Fear , Dogs , Way , Feeling

“Criminal history shows us how many torturers of men, and murderers, have first been torturers of animals. The manner in which a nation in the aggregate treats animals, is one chief measure of its real civilization. The Latin races, as we know, come forth badly from this examination; we Germans, not half well enough. Buddhism has done more in this direction than Christianity, and Schopenhauer more than all ancient and modern philosophers together. The warm sympathy with sentient Nature which pervades all the writings of Schopenhauer, is one of the most pleasing aspects of his thoroughly intellectual, yet often unhealthy and unprofitable philosophy.”

David Strauss (1808–1874) German theologian

The Old Faith and the New (Der alte und der neue Glaube, 1872, translated from the 6th edition by M. Blind, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1873), vol. II, part IV, ch. 71, pp. 59 https://archive.org/stream/oldfaithnewconfe01stra#page/59/mode/2up-60.

Men , History , Nature , Animals

“If you look into living process closely, you will find cruelty everywhere, for life feeds on life. This is a fact, but it does not make you feel guilty of being alive. (…) From the animal point of view, being killed is not the worst form of dying; surely preferable to sickness and senile decay. The cruelty lies in the motive, not in the fact. Killing hurts the killer, not the killed.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Killing
Source: I am That, P.158.

Life , Feeling , Motivation , Animals

“Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining its claims to legitimacy, by discovering a victim for every form of success. The striving for equality is, in other words, based in ressentiment in Nietzsche’s sense, the state of mind that Max Scheler identified as the principal motive behind the socialist orthodoxy of his day. It is one of the major problems of modern politics, which no classical liberal could possibly solve, how to govern a society in which resentment has acquired the kind of privileged social, intellectual, and political position that we witness today.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

Hostility , Way , Motivation , Problem

“This is a message to all those out there who think that you need animal products to be fit and strong. Almost two years after becoming vegan I am stronger than ever before and I am still improving day by day. Don't listen to those self proclaimed nutrition gurus and the supplement-industry trying to tell you that you need meat, eggs and dairy to get enough protein. There are plenty plant-based protein-sources and your body is going to thank you for stopping to feed it with dead-food. Go vegan and feel the power!”

Patrik Baboumian (1979) German strength-athlete

Message attached to his YouTube video “555kg yoke-carry for 10m in the middle of Berlin” (1 September 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vUQISAuFiI.

Food , Feeling , Thinking , Strong

“When I went vegetarian at age eleven, it was a remarkably easy transition. A boy at my school was attempting to kill creatures in the pond. When I tried to stop him, he said, “You eat animals,” like that meant I had no right to try and save something that could end up on my plate later. The hypocrisy of my actions became crystal clear in that moment. I decided, no more meat. … When I first started working for two organizations supporting anti-factory farming, vegan outreach and humane education, my choice to go vegan became that much clearer. I realized veganism is the only diet that can change the world. … You can expect a healthier body, and the feeling of pride that goes hand-in-hand with living according to your values. That’s something that many people aspire to, but few people achieve.”

Alicia Silverstone (1976) American actress

"How to Transition from Vegetarianism to Veganism", in The Kind Life (9 April 2013) http://thekindlife.com/blog/2013/04/how-to-transition-from-vegetarian-to-vegan/

People , Age , World , Education

“The second factor, equally important, is that of good continuation and good shape. The things which we see have a better shape, are bounded by better contours, than the holes which we might see but do not. Therefore, when in exceptional circumstances these conditions are reversed, we see the hole and not the things, as the shape of a gap between two projecting rocks with sharp profiles, which may look like a face, an animal, or some other object, while the shape of the rock disappears.”

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 209

Animals

“I’m not sure who’s in charge of “The Stone,” the New York Times‘s philosophy column, but that person is not doing their job. Imagine if some of our greatest living philosophers would post there about matters diverse: ethics, animal rights, abortion, drone strikes, and so on. But all too often the column is about God; that is, we have Great Minds lucubrating about nonexistent beings. Among all species of philosophy, the philosophy of religion is the most intellectually depauperate. It’s a waste of time.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Didn’t you know: God’s a question, not an answer! https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/04/10/didnt-you-know-gods-a-question-not-an-answer/" April 10, 2016

God , Religion , Imagination , Time

“The most likely reason for the adoption of a relatively small number of discrete intervals as the tonal material for music is that discretization or categorization is a typical, if not universal, strategy used by animals in order to reduce information overload and facilitate processing when subjected to the high-information-conetent signals and/or high information rates from a highly developed sensory system (e. g., Estes, 1972; Terhardt, 1991). An obvious example is the processing of speech information by humans, wherein each language selects a relatively small portion of the available timbral-differences that can be produced by the vocal tract as information-carrying units (phonemes) in the language. A related reason for discrete scales, and another obvious analogy with speech perception, lies in the social aspect of music. Music first developed as, and still largely remains, a social phenomenon associated with religious or other rituals that, like language, necessitated an easily remembered common framework.”

Edward Burns (1968) American actor and director

Burns, Edward M. (1999). "Intervals, Scales, and Tuning", 'The Psychology of Music second edition, p. 218. Deutsch, Diana, ed. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0122135644

Music , Universe , Animals

“Palissy, a French writer on 'the Origin of Springs from Rain-water' and of other scientific works, undertook, in 1580, to combat the notions of many of his contemporaries in Italy, that petrified shells had all been deposited by the universal deluge. 'He was the first,' said Fontenelle, when, in the French Academy, he pronounced his eulogy nearly a century and a half later, 'who dared assert' in Paris, that fossil remains of testacea and fish had once belonged to marine animals.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 31
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Spring , Fish , Universe , Water

“When people are eating meat, I think of it as a bit like smoking. It’s sort of Russian roulette. You may not get diabetes, but your chances of getting diabetes, about 1 in 3. You may not get cancer, but, your chances, if you’re a man, about 1 in 2. A woman, 1 in 3. Your chances of gaining weight, 2 out of 3. It’s not all diet, but, most of it is. The best thing that you can do to make sure that you empty all those bullets out of the chamber and not taking a risk with your health is to get the animal products out of your diet and eat healthy foods.”

Neal D. Barnard (1953) American physician, author, and clinical researcher

Interview in the documentary-film What the Health by Kip Andersen (2017).

People , Health , Food , Thinking

“Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life…. Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher

Introduction, sect. 6
La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie) (1960)

Life , World , Help , Animals

“As an animal, Matilda was all right, full of life, vigour, and activity; as an intelligent being, she was barbarously ignorant, indocile, careless, and irrational; and consequently, very distressing to one who had the task of cultivating her understanding, reforming her manners, and aiding her to acquire those ornamental attainments which, unlike her sister, she despised as much as the rest…”

Anne Brontë book Agnes Grey

Source: Agnes Grey (1847), Ch. VII : Horton Lodge

Life , Intelligence , Understanding , Sister

“Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You'll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It's not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up.”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success.

Lie , Literature , Idea , Birth

“The amazing number of species; their curious forms, so infinitely varied, and yet so nearly and gradually approximating through an endless series of transitions from one species to another; the diversity of structure observable in those parts which afford generic characters, added to the wonderful changes in form which they undergo, with their surprising economy - are circumstances which contribute to render them objects of most curious speculation to the philosopher. And although the study of every class of animals is most indisputably attended with peculiar advantages, yet we shall venture to affirm, that is from a knowledge of the characters, metamorphoses, and various modes of life, this little animals are destined to pursue, that [the natural philosopher] will obtain a more intimate acquaintance with the great laws of nature, and veneration for the Great Creator of all, that can be derived from the contemplation of any other class in nature.”

William Elford Leach (1790–1836) English zoologist and marine biologist

As quoted in Entomology https://archive.org/stream/CUbiodiversity1121039#page/646/mode/2up/search/creator (1816), Volume 8 of the first American edition of Sir David Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, p. 646.

Life , Law , Nature , Knowledge

“Man only is endowed with wisdom so as to understand religion, and this is the principal if not the only difference betwixt him and dumb animals; for other things that seem peculiar to him, though they are not the same in them, yet they appear to be alike … What is there more peculiar to man than reason, and foresight? Yet there are animals which make several different ways of retiring from their dens; that when in danger they may escape; which without understanding and forethought they could not do. Others make provision for the future.”
Solus (homo) sapientia instructus est ut religionem solus intellegat, et haec est hominis atque mutorum vel praecipua, vel sola distantia; nam caetera quae videntur hominis esse propria, etsi non sint talia in mutis, tamen similia videri possunt … Quid tam proprium homini quam ratio, et providentia futuri? Atqui sunt animalia, quae latibulis suis diversos, et plures exitus pandant; ut si quod periculum inciderit, fuga pateat obsessis; quod non facerent, nisi inesset illis intelligentia, et cogitatio. Alia provident in futurum.

Lactantius (250–325) Early Christian author

De Ira Dei (c. 313), Chap. VII; as quoted in Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), London, 1737, Vol. 4, Chap. Rorarius, p. 903 https://books.google.it/books?id=JmtXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA903.

Wisdom , Religion , Way , Understanding

“I have called these animals destriers, borrowing an old word for war-horses. I've given them clawed feet instead of hoofs because I think the genetic engineers will give them claws too. The horse's hoofs seem to be an evolutionary mistake. To speak in Lamarckian terms, the horse has lengthened its legs by standing on its toes until it has ended up standing on one toenail. […] Cheetahs, wolves, and greyhounds all have nonretractile claws that serve them as their spikes serve runners and baseball players. Racehorses could not run as fast as they do if they did not wear aluminum or magnesium shoes.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"Cavalry in the Age of the Autarch", in Castle of the Otter (1982), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

War , Shoe , Thinking , Animals

“(Eating meat) is really on the same moral level as child abuse. It’s the same thing. Animals are like children, they look to us for protection. We should protect them. I really feel quite smug about mad cow disease and foot and mouth and so forth, and I just think ‘Well, what do you expect? People have been saying it for years.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From the TV documentary The Importance of Being Morrissey (2003)
In interviews etc., About vegetarianism and animals

Children , People , Disease , Feeling

“It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity – by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal – has been the chief formative factor in the life-history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups, and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own.”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s 1930 Presidential Address to the 25th Session of the All-India Muslim League, Allahabad, 29 December 1930 (from University of Columbia website http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_iqbal_1930.html)

Life , People , History , Animals

“Creating everlasting works is possible only being ducked in Verity; and gaining verity is possible only from the god. The one who given the ability for creation to, it is given the ability for immortality to. This ability is the substance not only of the human beings, but it can be seen in animals; birds and insects.”

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853–1919) painter from Hungary

The Authority

God , Bird , Animals

“The naturalists, you know, distribute the history of nature into three kingdoms or departments: zoology, botany, mineralogy. Ideology, or mind, however, occupies so much space in the field of science, that we might perhaps erect it into a fourth kingdom or department. But inasmuch as it makes a part of the animal construction only, it would be more proper to subdivide zoology into physical and moral.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Thomas Jefferson, Letter (24 Mar 1824) to Mr. Woodward. Collected in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence (1854), 339.
Posthumous publications, On botany

History , Nature , Science , Animals

“I am a man who is basically opposed to atrocities or ungentlemanly actions. In 1934, I promulgated a law against vivisection. You can see, therefore, that if I disapprove of the experimentation on animals, how could I possibly be in favor of torturing humans? The prosecution says that I had something to do with the freezing experiments which were performed in the concentration camps under the auspices of the air force. That is pure nonsense! I was much too busy to know about these medical experiments, and if anybody had asked me, I would have disapproved violently. It must have been Himmler who thought up these stupid experiments, although I think he shirked his responsibility by committing suicide. I am not too unhappy about it because I would not particularly enjoy sitting on the same bench with him. The same is true of that drunken Robert Ley, who did us a favor by hanging himself before the trial started. He was not going to be any advantage for us defendants when he took the stand.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

To Leon Goldensohn (24 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

Stupidity , Law , Business , Thinking

“That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone.”

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) American poet

"The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-heavy-bear-who-goes-with-me/
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

Life , Secret , Stupidity , Motivation

“Had the God of the Quran been the Lord of all creatures, and been Merciful and kind to all, he would never have commanded the Mohammedans to slaughter men of other faiths, and animals, etc. If he is Merciful, will he show mercy even to the sinners? If the answer be given in the affirmative, it cannot be true, because further on it is said in the Quran "Put infidels to sword," in other words, he that does not believe in the Quran and the Prophet Mohammad is an infidel (he should, therefore, be put to death). (Since the Quran sanctions such cruelty to non-Mohammedans and innocent creatures such as cows) it can never be the Word of God.”

Dayanand Saraswati (1824–1883) founder of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement

"Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, Volume 19, Issue 1", p. 73

Death , Men , God , Faith

“But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.”

Thomas Browne book Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial

Source: Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658), Chapter V

Life , Death , Nature , Sun

“Jivamukti Yoga is a path to enlightenment through compassion for all beings. Jivamukti is a Sanskrit word that means to live liberated in joyful, musical harmony with the Earth. The Earth does not belong to us—we belong to the Earth. Let us celebrate our connection to life by not enslaving animals and exploiting the Earth, and attain freedom and happiness for ourselves in the process. For surely, the best way to uplift our own lives is to do all we can to uplift the lives of others. Go vegan!”

Sharon Gannon (1951) American yoga teacher

Simple Recipes for Joy (2014)

Life , Music , Way , Freedom

“Every animal has his or her story, his or her thoughts, daydreams, and interests. All feel joy and love, pain and fear, as we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt. All deserve that the human animal afford them the respect of being cared for with great consideration for those interests or left in peace.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

"Every Week There is More Reason to Feel Empathy for Animals" https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ingrid-newkirk/every-week-there-is-more_b_216409.html, Huffington Post, 17 July 2009.
2009

Love , Pain , Fear , Peace

“There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour..”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Animals

“Society… directly penetrates the organism in its functioning, most importantly in respect to sexuality and nutrition. While both sexuality and nutrition are grounded in biological drives, these drives are extremely plastic in the human animal. Man is driven by his biological constitution to seek sexual release and nourishment. But his biological constitution does not tell him where he should seek sexual release and what he should eat.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

(1991, p. 202)
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

Animals

“The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there Millet read suffering and resignation.
Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where, then, can you find a more religious man?
Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Art, 1912, Ch. Mystery in Art

Men , Soul , Communication , Reality

“A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

2010s
Source: Jonah Lehredec. " A Physicist Solves the City http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?pagewanted=5&_r=1," in www.nytimes.com. Dec 17, 2010.

Lie , Food , Animals

“I've got a lot of experience with eating and with fasting. Part of the reason people fast, especially in a spiritual and religious context, is to understand that you don't need food as much as you think you do. … The main source of energy is the sun. … the energy we get from food is energy plants have metabolized through photosynthesis and then some animal eats it and it goes into the animal's tissue and then we eat their tissue. There are other ways to access energy. … The religions are many, but God is one. I believe based on what I've studied, all religions say the same thing but in different ways.”

Ricky Williams (1977) All-American college football players, professional football players, running back

"Ricky Williams on fasting, energy, religion" by Tim Graham, ESPN.com (17 September 2010) http://www.espn.com/blog/afceast/post/_/id/18355/ricky-williams-on-fasting-and-religion.

God , People , Religion , Food

“Not only can logos be seen in absolutely all animals, but in many of them it has the groundwork for being perfected.”

Porphyry (philosopher) (233–301) Neoplatonist philosopher

3, 2, 4
On Abstinence from Killing Animals

Animals , Perfection

“Roecker seems to have been as inspired by Todd Haynes's legendary underground film "Superstar" -- in which he told Karen Carpenter's life story with surprising tenderness using Barbie dolls and a bootlegged soundtrack -- as by the stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen and the "Frosty the Snowman" cartoon.”

John Roecker (1966) American film director

Ann Hornaday — quoted in The Washington Post, The Washington Post Company, One Forgettable 'Freak' Show, January 27, 2006, Ann, Hornaday http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012600739.html,
About

Life , Animals

“I don’t love animals or think they are cute.”

Wayne Pacelle (1965) American activist

"Sabotaging Animal Rights for Deer Hunt," 1986

Love , Thinking , Animals

“Man is a social and gregarious animal, and all such animals hold property in each other. Nature imposes upon them slavery as a law and necessity of their existence… The husband has a legally recognized property in his wife’s services, and may legally control, in some measure, her personal liberty. She is his property and his slave.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), p. 341

Law , Nature , Animals , Personality

“Ten percent of all the boys in schools are now threatened or injured with a weapon at school. One out of ten. The number of students caught with a firearm increased 29 percent in one year. "Natural selection"? If the strongest survive, well then if that guy's bigger than me, I better bring a gun to even the odds. This evolution theory is not just dumb, folks, it's dangerous. It removes all morality. There's no such thing as right and wrong. Might becomes right. Textbooks say you're an animal and share a common heritage with earthworms. Could it possibly be that what we are teaching kids is causing this problem in our schools?”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

School , Guy , Boy , Nature

“I think there is at least one moral theory of respectable lineage and good independent credentials that can accommodate such fairly minimal intuitions about us and animals. This is the theory Hume offers us. I do not consider Hume a forerunner of utilitarianism, and therefore what I shall go on to say in defense of Hume is not intended as a defense of any version of utilitarianism. I see Hume to be much closer to Aristotle than to Mill, to be offering us a theory about human virtues, not a theory about utility maximization and the duties that might involve.”

Annette Baier (1929–2012) New Zealand philosopher

Source: Knowing Our Place in the Animal World, p. 68

Thinking , Animals

“O, for a voice of power to arouse the human spirit from its death in life of animality, to quicken it with a fit consciousness of its own nature, to lift it to an adequate comprehension of the purposes for which the sublime thoughts of God, of duty, of disinterested love, of heaven are opened within!”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 317

Love , Life , Death , God

“To analyse graphic representation precisely, it is helpful to distinguish it from musical, verbal and mathematical notations, all of which are perceived in a linear or temporal sequence. The graphic image also differs from figurative representation essentially polysemic, and from the animated image, governed by the laws of cinematographic time. Within the boundaries of graphics fall the fields of networks, diagrams and maps. The domain of graphic imagery ranges from the depiction of atomic structures to the representation of galaxies and extends into the spheres of topography and cartography.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 2

Law , Music , Mathematics , Time

“Hey folks, tonight I wanna talk about global warming. Now, The World is Hot and Flat Society is growing increasingly hysterical and that indeed is causing me to sweat a little. In the last month or so, I've heard suggestions that those skeptical of Al Gore's spiritual crisis are deniers and one good way to serve the planet would be to have one less kid and I've also read that mankind is 'a virus' and human beings are 'the AIDS of the earth.' Global warming is officially becoming creepy and I can't tell yet if it's facisitc or fetishistic but it's kinda like piercing or tattoos, I don't even wanna get one, because I see how hooked people are and it spooks me. I just find it odd that we've come to a point in history where if I don't concede that if Manhattan will be completely submerged in 2057 I'm thought to be a delusional contrarian by some of my more zealous fellow citizens. I'm sorry Angst Squad, but if we commissioned a public works project (let's call it 'The Manhattan Project') and tried our hardest to submerge Manhattan in the next 50 years, we couldn't pull it off, mainly because it wouldn't be environmentally sound and you guys would hang it up in the permitting process. Simply put, I can't worry about the earth right now because I'm too worried about the world. Why can't I take terrorism as seriously as Al Gore takes global warming? There are times that you think that liberals only fear car bombs if they have leaky exhaust systems. And why am I constantly beaten over the head with 'the delicate balance of nature'? Am I the only one who watches Animal Planet? Every time I turn it on, I see some demented harp seal chucking peguins down his gullet like they were maitre d'Tic-Tacs. To me, nature always appears more unbalanced than Gary Busey with a clogged eustachian tube. Listen, the weather is just like Hilary's explanation for her war vote: we just don't know, do we? We're here to miss our next Tuesday's weather much less the year 2057. Relax, we'll replace oil when we need to. American ingenuity will kick in and the next great fortune will be made. It's not pretty, but it is historically accurate. We need to run out of oil first. That's why I drive an SUV: so we run out of it more quickly. I consider myself at the vanguard of the environmental movement and I think the individuals who insist on driving hybrids are just prolonging our dillemma and I think that's just selfish. Come on, don't you care about our Mother Earth? Don'tcha?”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

6/17 The Half Hour News Hour
The Buck Starts Here

War , People , World , Fear

“And suddenly the circle came together for me. We were as a civilization making one big mistake, a mistake that was understandable because we had been raised to make it. We had been culturally indoctrinated to believe it to be not a mistake at all, but rather a normal and healthy habit. But this mistake was killing us as individuals just as it was destroying our land and our forests and our rivers. We were eating dead animals, and it wasn't working. If those animals had set out to take their revenge on us, they couldn't have done a better job.”

Howard F. Lyman (1938) American activist

Source: Mad Cowboy (1998), Ch. 4: From the Farm to the Capital, pp. 80-81

Understanding , Revenge , Animals , Dead

“Quite often the young person is horrified at innocent animals being driven to the slaughterhouse to satisfy the appetites of the human species which could easily feed itself in other ways.”

Jean Mayer (1920–1993) French-American scientist, university administrator

"Introductory Remarks on Vegetarianism", in Vegetarianism and the Jewish Tradition by Louis A. Berman (KTAV Publishing House, 1982), p. xx https://books.google.it/books?id=AIvnwmu5DlUC&pg=PR20.

Way , Animals , Personality

“And then there are unthinking, animal types who seem to be satisfied with a purely physical sense of power (the good combat soldier, who gets his sense of power by developing fighting skills that he is quite content to use in blind obedience to his superiors).”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

"Autonomy", item 43
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

Sense , Animals , Fight

“No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50 thousand years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward — and so will space.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1962, Rice University speech

History , Star , Problem , Light

“If people want to eat meat, they should kill the animals for themselves… Nor should they say that if they did not do it the slaughter would still go on… Every person who eats meat takes a share in that degradation of his fellow-men; on him and on her personally lies the share, and personally lies the responsibility.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Vegetarianism in the Light of Theosophy(1913), p. 18-20

Men , People , Animals , Personality

“The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, &c., when playing together, like our own children. Even insects play together, as has been described by that excellent observer, P. Huber, who saw ants chasing and pretending to bite each other, like so many puppies.
The fact that the lower animals are excited by the same emotions as ourselves is so well established, that it will not be necessary to weary the reader by many details. Terror acts in the same manner on them as on us, causing the muscles to tremble, the heart to palpitate, the sphincters to be relaxed, and the hair to stand on end. Suspicion, the offspring of fear, is eminently characteristic of most wild animals. Courage and timidity are extremely variable qualities in the individuals of the same species, as is plainly seen in our dogs. Some dogs and horses are ill-tempered and easily turn sulky; others are good-tempered; and these qualities are certainly inherited.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter II: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals", pages 39-40 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=52&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Pain , Children , Pleasure , Fear

“Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole – a creature of ecclesiastical law – is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases…. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes – fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972)
Judicial opinions

Life , Law , Feeling , Fish

“I think most directors and people who make anime would agree that their latest film is probably the one they feel the most confident in, that they have done their best and put everything into.”

Makoto Shinkai (1973) Japanese anime director and former graphic designer

Interviewed on Anime News Network https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interview/2013-05-01/makoto-shinkai-the-garden-of-words-interview
About The Garden of Words

People , Feeling , Confidence , Thinking

“Life cycles that incorporate discrete, morphologically distnct phases predominate among animals.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Adaptation and Constraint in the Complex Life Cycles of Animals, 25, 573–600, November 1994, 10.1146/annurev.es.25.110194.003041]

Life , Animals

“Animals deserve to be treated with kindness. I love animals, and I don't believe humans can treat them as commodities and cause them harm. … I officially became a vegan on June 1, 2009. Even though it's quite a change in terms of nutrition, I have never felt better or so healthy in my life. Considering that I'm a professional athlete, that's quite important … I understand the impact I have in joining many groups like PETA. I don't do it to force people to be vegetarian or vegan. I just want to educate people on the subject to make this world a better place. … Many people … refuse to get educated on the matter because just like me, they're sensitive and afraid to make a change. But my friends, that change is not bad at all. … Millions of people around the globe are going vegetarian for the sake of animals, their health and the environment. I encourage you to give it a try too!”

Georges Laraque (1976) Canadian ice hockey player

“A Vegan Life”, in georgeslaraque.com (August 2009) https://georgeslaraque.com/vg-vegan.php.

Love , Life , People , Health

“It was a biologist — Ludwig von Bertalanffy — who long ago perceived the essential unity of system concepts and techniques in the various fields of science and who in writings and lectures sought to attain recognition for “general systems theory” as a distinct scientific discipline. It is pertinent to note, however, that the work of Bertalannfy and his school, being motivated primarily by problems arising in the study of biological systems, is much more empirical and qualitative in spirit than the work of those system theorists who received their training in exact sciences.
In fact, there is a fairly wide gap between what might be regarded as “animate” system theorists and “inanimate” system theorists at the present time, and it is not at all certain that this gap will be narrowed, much less closed, in the near future.
There are some who feel this gap reflects the fundamental inadequacy of the conventional mathematics—the mathematics of precisely defined points, functions, sets, probability measures, etc.—for coping with the analysis of biological systems, and that to deal effectively with such systems, we need a radically different kind of mathematics, the mathematics of fuzzy or cloudy quantities which are not describable in terms of probability distributions. Indeed the need for such mathematics is becoming increasingly apparent even in the realms of inanimate systems”

Lotfi A. Zadeh (1921–2017) Electrical engineer and computer scientist

Zadeh (1962) "From circuit theory to system theory", Proceedings I.R.E., 1962, 50, 856-865. cited in: Brian R. Gaines (1979) " General systems research: quo vadis? http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~gaines/reports/SYS/GS79/GS79.pdf", General Systems, Vol. 24 (1979), p. 12
1960s

School , Feeling , Mathematics , Motivation

“Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake (2003)

Animals , Dead

“I can't pretend that I got involved with filming the natural world fifty years ago because I had some great banner to carry about conservation - not at all, I always had a huge pleasure in just watching the natural world and seeing what happens. - I made those films because it was a hugely enjoyable thing to do. But as I went on making them it became more and more apparent that the creatures that were giving me so much joy were under threat. The fun is in delighting in the animals but if you do that you owe them something so you have an obligation to speak out and to do what you can to protect them. m3s08-m4s05”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Pleasure , World , Nature , Animals

“Little by little his conversation, always instructive and animated, gave a special direction to my tastes, which would have led me by preference towards letters. I resolved to complete my scientific studies and followed the courses in advanced mathematics given by M. [Jean Guillaume] Gamier. It was at the same time agreed by us that, in order to relieve him in his work, I should give some of the other courses with which he was charged. I thus found myself his pupil and his colleague.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

"Notice sur J.G. Garnier," Annuaire de l'acad. roy. de Brux. (1841) Vol. vii pp. 200-201 as quoted in Adolphe Quetelet as Statistician by Frank Hamilton Hankins

Mathematics , Study , Time , Animals

“The child most at risk [to be accessed by a predatory pedophile] is the child not bonded deeply to anything or anybody. Children who are most deeply bonded with parents, parents who are protective, it's almost like, I don't know if you've seen predatory animals that put a kind of smell on their young to protect them? Okay? I think your 'luck' was much more likely due to your parent[s] than it was to any blind confluence of the planets.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Spence Abbott in a two–part interview, published on IGN.com in November 2000

Children , Thinking , Parent , Animals

“[There will be] a time when societies around the world are crying out for more and better leadership, when our current leaders (especially in business, but also in government and other spheres of public life) have lost legitimacy, questions are being asked, sometimes angrily, of the institutions that school these leaders: What kinds of leaders are these institutions developing that have caused so much hardship for so many?… What is the vision or model of leadership that animates the curriculum and developmental models [of current leadership approaches taught in institutions]? If there is such a model, does it need to be revisited, reexamined, and revised in light of the widespread failures of leadership? Do we really understand what it takes to develop better leaders?”

Rakesh Khurana (1967) American business academic

N. Nohria & Rakesh Khurana (2010). "Advancing leadership theory and practice." In N. Nohria & R. Khurana (Eds.), Handbook of leadership theory and practice. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. p. 3

Life , World , School , Failure

“"Sheep" (paraphrasing Psalm 23) on Animals (Pink Floyd, 1977)”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Animals

“My favorite animal is the mule. He has more sense than a horse. He knows when to stop eating — and when to stop working.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Mr. Citizen, Harry Truman (1960)

Sense , Animals , Horse

“I think being ‘alternative,’ which most people think holds me back, actually helps [in the music industry]. If I'd been an ordinary singer, I'd still be trying to get noticed in Canada. I'm an alternative in every way. I'm a country singer who's a vegetarian for health reasons and because of compassion for animals. I'm also alternative because of Canada — there's something romantic about being Canadian. I always push the fact that I'm Canadian. I'm not self-righteous enough to think I'm unique and I'm not being overly rebellious. But I've learned that to go your own way and be yourself, which is what I'm trying to do, is alternative to a lot of people.”

K.d. lang (1961) Canadian singer-songwriter

In 1988, upon becoming Miss Chatelaine (Chatelaine magazine's woman of the year); as quoted in Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance 1985-1995 by Michael Barclay, Ian A.D. Jack, Jason Schneider (Toronto: ECW Press, 2011 ebook edition), p. 539 https://books.google.it/books?id=xLIiOE_jCpAC&pg=PT539.

People , Health , Music , Way

“Man is naturally a proud Animal, and is fond of nothing more than the Breath of Fame to sooth his Vanity, and flatter his Self-Admiration.”

Richard Blackmore (1654–1729) English poet and physician

"An Essay upon False Vertue", p. 263
Essays Upon Several Subjects (1716)

Nature , Animals

“Cybernetics was defined by Wiener as “the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine” — in a word, as the art of steermanship, and it is to this aspect that the book will be addressed. Co-ordination, regulation and control will be its themes, for these are of the greatest biological and practical interest.
We must, therefore, make a study of mechanism; but some introduction is advisable, for cybernetics treats the subject from a new, and therefore unusual, angle… The new point of view should be clearly understood, for any unconscious vacillation between the old and the new is apt to lead to confusion.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part I: Mechanism, p. 1: Lead paragraph

Books , Art , Communication , Study

“Nothing fills us with deep and lasting joy the way that doing a good turn for someone else does. Saving somebody's life, human or animal, is that “good turn” in spades.”

Victoria Moran (1950) American writer

Introduction
The Good Karma Diet (2015)

Life , Way , Animals , Joy

“Everything in nature lives according to some order so it seems unlikely that humans live outside this system, even if they try to resist their instincts. That's how we can be sure we're not animals, this refusal to abide by what we know is good for us. If an animal's instinct tells him to avoid something he has no trouble keeping a wide berth. We, on the other hand, run in the direction of danger if it offers a thrill or satisfies a curiosity.”

Chrissie Hynde (1951) Rock singer-songwriter and founder of Pretenders

Reckless (2015)

Nature , Animals

“My mother took me to town with her, and made me pass, as if by accident, through the yard of a slaughter-house. I saw some men, their arms naked and besmeared with blood, knocking a bull in the head; others cutting the throats of calves and sheep, and separating their still heaving limbs. Streams of smoking gore ran along the pavement. An intense feeling of pity, mingled with horror, seized upon me. I asked to be led away quickly. The thought of these scenes, the necessary preliminaries of one of those dishes of meat which I had so often seen on the table, made me take a disgust to animal food and inspired me with a horror for butchers.”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book IV, Note VIII, p. 61
Les confidences (1849)

Men , Food , Feeling , Animals

“Contrary to the cartoon history of ideas that prevails today, Darwinism’s threat to religion did not come principally from challenging the biblical account of creation. Until a few centuries ago the Genesis story was known to be a myth – a poetic way of rendering truths that would otherwise be inaccessible. At the beginning of the Christian religion, Augustine warned against the dangers of literalism. The Jewish scholars who preceded him always viewed the Genesis story as a metaphor for truths that could not be accessed in any other way. It was only with the rise of modern science that the Genesis myth came to be misunderstood as an explanatory theory. Yet Darwinism was still a major threat to religion, for it confronted Victorians with the prospect of their final mortality. Darwin forced them to ask why their lives should not end like those of other animals, in nothingness. If this was so, how could human existence have meaning? How could human values be maintained if human personality was destroyed at death?”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Cross-correspondences (pp. 21-22)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Death , Truth , Religion , Way

“Man prides himself on being the only animal who can modify his nature, yet when he chooses to do so he is called a phony.”

Anton LaVey book The Devil's Notebook

The Devil's Notebook (1992)

Nature , Animals

“The destruction of animals for food, in its details and tendencies, involves so much of cruelty as to cause every reflecting individual — not destitute of the ordinary sensibilities of our nature — to shudder.”

William Alcott (1798–1859) American physician and author

Source: Vegetable Diet (1838), p. 267

Food , Nature , Animals

“Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal…. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter VIII
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

World , Time , Animals

““Why?” Hamilton lashed out suddenly and loudly. “Why the hell did God answer that prayer? Why not some of the others? Why not Bill Laws’s?”
“God approved of your prayer,” Silky said. “After all, it’s up to Him; He has to decide how He feels about it.”
“That’s terrible.”
Silky shrugged. “Maybe so.”
“How can you live with that? You never know what’s going to happen—there’s no order, no logic.” It infuriated him that she did not object, that it seemed natural to her. “We’re helpless; we have to depend on whim. It keeps us from being people—we’re like animals waiting to be fed. Rewarded or punished.””

Philip K. Dick book Eye in the Sky

Source: Eye in the Sky (1957), Chapter 6 (p. 77)

God , People , Law , Feeling

“The answer is what the answer always is, that we are animals, that at the end we turn on each other, tearing each other apart. To survive. Throw Lubov to the men in the guard shack like a scrap of meat to a pack of wolves… why not, it is for survival. Fight, kill each other, over the warmth of the stove? Of course - it is survival. I refuse to survive. But I will live.”

Arthur M. Jolly (1969) American writer

Anastasia, Act II, Scene 1
A Gulag Mouse (2010)

Men , Tear , Animals , Fight

“However absurd it may seem, I do in all seriousness hereby declare that I am animated mainly by philanthropic motives. I desire to do good to my fellow creatures, even to the Cui bonos.”

Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925) electrical engineer, mathematician and physicist

Electrical Papers (1882), Vol. I; Preface, p. vii; Maxmillan and Co., London and New York. Full Text http://www.archive.org/details/electricalpaper00heavgoog.

Motivation , Animals

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

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

De toutes les définitions de l'homme, la plus mauvaise me paraît celle qui en fait un animal raisonnable.
Le Petit Pierre (1918), ch. XXXIII

Way , Animals

“Many humans look at nature from an aesthetic perspective and think in terms of biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, but forget that the animals that inhabit these ecosystems are individuals and have their own needs. Disease, starvation, predation, ostracism, and sexual frustration are endemic in so-called healthy ecosystems. The great taboo in the animal rights movement is that most suffering is due to natural causes. Any proposal for remedying this situation is bound to sound utopian, but my dream is that one day the sun will rise on Earth and all sentient creatures will greet the new day with joy.”

Nick Bostrom (1973) Swedish philosopher

Albert, a fictional dog in Golden https://nickbostrom.com/fable/retriever.html (2004)

Health , Disease , Dreams , Nature

“Although what is called ‘philosophical speculation’ is undoubtedly on the decline, many of the practically minded have not yet freed themselves from a method of reasoning, which, in the last analysis, has its roots in theology and metaphysics. No science which pretends to be exact can accept an untested theory or doctrine; yet even in an exact science there is often an admixture of magic, theology, and philosophy. It is one of the tasks of our time to aid scientific reasoning to attain its goal without hindrance. Whoever undertakes this is concerned not so much with ‘philosophy,’ properly speaking, as with ‘anti-philosophy.’ For him there is but one science with subdivisions — a unified science of sciences. We have a science that deals with rocks, another that deals with plants, a third that deals with animals, but we need a science that unites them all.”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

Otto Neurath (1931) "Physicalism: The Philosophy of the Viennese Circle," in: The Monist, Vol. 41, No. 4 (October, 1931), pp. 618-623; Lead paragraph
1930s

Science , Time , Animals

“Bill [=Willem de Kooning ] was working on a huge canvas. It was black and white. And I said to him, 'It's very curious.' You know, I came into the studio. I had my separate studio and I walked in and I said, 'It's very curious. There are no treelike shapes in that painting. The forms are all like animals more or less and organic shapes that don't resemble the forest at all, but I get the feeling of Faulkner forest from that painting.' Bill said, 'That's extraordinary.' And he went over and lifted up a pile of papers and underneath was a book by Faulkner and later he named a painting 'Light in August”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

he painted in 1946
1972 - 1989
Source: an tape-recorded interview with Elaine de Kooning on August 27, 1981 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-elaine-de-kooning-11999; conducted by Phyllis Tuchman, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Oral Histories.

Books , Feeling , Light , Animals

Quotes about animal page 20

Quotes about animal
page 20