Quotes about animal (3130 quotes, page 25)

“Man has injured every animal he has touched.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

11 February 1869, page 23
John of the Mountains, 1938

Animals

“Concretion signifies the material process of condensation, hardening, coagulating, thickening, growing together. Concretion designates the solidification of a mass. Concretion designates curdling, the curdling of the earth and the heavenly bodies. Concretion designates solidification, the mass of the stone, the plant, the animal, the man. Concretion is something that has grown. I want my work to find it.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Jean Arp (1931), as quoted in: Eric Robertson (2006) Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor, p. 108
1930s

Animals

“There was one artist who wrote as beautifully as he painted. That was Hokusai - He speaks for all artists, whether they are painters or not. [He wrote]: "I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy three I have at last caught every aspect of nature-birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further. And I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime, and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life."”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Love , Life , Secret , Age

“And when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains,—alas! too few.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Scorn not the Sonnet.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Soul , Animals

“Nooo! Leave that to George Lucas, he' s really mastered the CGI acting. That scares me! I hate it! Everybody is so pleased and excited by it. Animation is animation. Animation is great. But it's when you're now taking what should be films full of people, living thinking, breathing, flawed creatures and you're controlling every moment of that, it's just death to me. It's death to cinema, I can't watch those Star Wars films, they're dead things.”

Terry Gilliam (1940) American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe

About CGI, in IMDB profile http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000416/bio#quotes

Death , Hate , War , People

“I do not torture animals, and I do not support the torture of animals, such as that which goes on at rodeos: cowardly men in big hats abusing simple beasts in a fruitless search for manhood. In fact, I regularly pray for serious, life-threatening rodeo injuries. I wish for a cowboy to walk crooked, and with great pain, for the rest of his life.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Animal Instincts
Books, Brain Droppings (1997)

Life , Men , Pain , Search

“In all of nature, a male belongs to a female that he fancies and who fancies him. And so among the animals there are no idiots. But with us!… I'm a Jew, so I musn't love a Christian woman… He's a merchant, so he's got no right to a countess… And you who've got no money, you've no rights to any woman at all…”

Bolesław Prus book The Doll

The Doll

Love , Money , Nature , Animals

“Animals for the most part just need to be left alone.”

Wayne Pacelle (1965) American activist

"Wayne Pacelle works for the winged, finned and furry," 2008

Animals , Parting

“I read something one day: “If someone can’t actually kill animals themselves to eat meat …,” which really put me over the top. I can’t remember where I read that, but I wouldn’t. I think a lot of people live life through convenience. … I don’t think that I fully realized until I stopped eating [meat] how much it was a part of society and how much it was affecting me. … Like anything else, you’ve been indoctrinated from day one. … when you stop eating meat, you stop supporting slaughtering animals. … people need to be more responsible for everything around them, you know—animal rights.”

K-os (1972) Canadian rapper, singer, songwriter and record producer

"K-OS", interview with peta2 (20 July 2011) https://www.peta2.com/news/k-os/.

Life , People , Support , Thinking

“We don’t realize that in the sizzle of our steaks there is the suffering of animals, the mining of our topsoil, the slashing of our forests, the harming of our economy, and the eroding of our health. We don’t hear in the sizzle the cry of the hungry millions who might otherwise be fed. We don’t see the toxic poisons accumulating in the food chains, poisoning our children and our earth for generations to come. But once we become aware of the impact of our food choices, we can never really forget… All things are deeply connected, and so the choices we make in our daily lives have enormous influence, not only on our own health and vitality, but also on the lives of other beings, and indeed on the destiny of life on earth. Thankfully, we have cause to be grateful—what’s best for us personally is also best for other forms of life, and for the life support systems on which we all depend.”

John Robbins book Diet for a New America

Source: Diet for a New America (1987), Ch. 12: All Things Are Connected

Life , Children , Health , Food

“If I hadn't an absolute faith in the harmony of creation, I wouldn't have tried for thirty years to express it in a mathematical formula. It is only man's consciousness of what he does with his mind that elevates him above the animals, and enables him to become aware of himself and his relationship to the universe.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 61

Faith , Mathematics , Universe , Animals

“As animals, we walk the earth. As bearers of divine essence, we are among the stars. As human beings, we are caught in the middle, seeking to reconcile the paradox of how to make our way upon earth while striving for something more permanent and more profound.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xiii

Way , Star , Animals

“[E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"The Ghost of Protagoras", p. 64
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

Science , Animals

“Fine thoughts and moral dissertations from men who have not worked and suffered may be read, but they will be forgotten. No religion, no Ethical philosophy is worth anything, if the teacher has not lived the "life of an apostle," and been ready to die "the death of a martyr." "Not in passivity [the passive affects], but in activity, lie the evil and the good of the rational social animal, just as his virtue and his vice lie not in passivity, but in activity"”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

IX. 16
The Philosophy of Antoninus

Life , Death , Men , Lie

“It is obvious that teaching is a very special art, sharing with only two other arts, agriculture and medicine, an exceptionally important characteristic A doctor may do many things for his patient, but in the final analysis, it is the patient himself who must get well, grow in health. The farmer does many things for his plants or animals, but in the final analysis, it is they that must grow in size and excellence. Similarly, although the teacher may help his student in many ways, it is the student himself who must do the learning. Knowledge must grow in his mind if learning is to take place.”

Mortimer J. Adler book How to Read a Book

Source: How to Read a Book (1940, 1972), p. 12

Health , Art , Way , Knowledge

“The sheer decibel level of unreason surrounding the issue of abortion in academic writing about animal rights tells us something interesting. It suggests that, contrary to what the utilitarians and feminists working this terrain wish, the dots between sympathy for animals and sympathy for unborn humans are in fact quite easy to connect—so easy, you might say, that a child could do it. … Since ethical vegetarianism as a practice appears commonly rooted in an a priori aversion to violence against living creatures, so does it often appear to begin in the young. … A sudden insight, igniting empathy on a scale that did not exist before and perhaps even a life-transforming realization—this reaction should indeed be thought through with care. It is not only the most commonly cited feature of the decision to become a vegetarian. It is also the most commonly cited denominator of what brings people to their convictions about the desperate need to protect unborn, innocent human life. … Despite those who act and write in their name, actual vegetarians and vegans are far more likely to be motivated by positive feelings for animals than by negative feelings for human beings. As a matter of theory, the line connecting the dots between “we should respect animal life” and “we should respect human life” is far straighter than the line connecting vegetarianism to antilife feminism or antihumanist utilitarianism.”

Mary Eberstadt American writer

"Pro-Animal, Pro-Life" https://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/06/pro-animal-pro-life, in First Things (June 2009).

Life , People , Feeling , Motivation

“Plants and plant-eaters co-evolved. And plants aren't the passive partners in the chain of terrestrial life. Hence today's Pop Ecology movement is quite wrong in believing that plants are happy to fill their role as fodder for herbivores in a harmonious and perfectly balanced ecosystem. A birch tree doesn't feel cosmic fulfillment when a moose munches its leaves; the tree species, in fact, evolves to fight the moose, to keep the animal's munching lips away from vulnerable young leaves and twigs. In the final analysis, the merciless hand of natural selection will favor the birch genes that make the tree less and less palatable to the moose in generation after generation. No plant species could survive for long by offering itself as unprotected fodder.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 179
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life , Feeling , Nature , Tree

“In the Spring of 1926 I made some toy animals of curtain rods, broom handles, etc., and wire. Later, a few dolls, which I animated…. in the winter of 1927–1928 I made some more toys for a friend to take home as gifts, and having shown them to De Creeft a Spanish sculptor with a very acute sense of humor, I was urged by him to make some more toys and to expose them at the ] of which animation is one of the chief characteristics.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

1920s, Statement on Wire Sculpture' (1929)

Home , Spring , Sense , Winter

“The projected form does make some impression upon the physical system. It is possible for it to be detected. It is a kind of pseudo-image, materialistically speaking, but it has definite electromagnetic reality and chemical properties. Animals have sensed such apparitions. They react to the chemical properties and build up [the perception] from these. These chemical properties are more diffused in such an apparition than in a physical form, however.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 338 quoting from Session 269

Reality , Sense , Animals

“Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to the desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Unsaved: The Mirror of Solitude (p. 150-1)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World , Animals

“In spite of Darwin's hopes, the acceptance of his views has led to no real improvement — scarcely indeed to any change at all in either the practice or aims of systematists. In a famous passage in the Origin he confidently declares that when his interpretation is generally adopted "Systematists will be able to pursue their labours as at present; but they will not be incessantly haunted by the shadowy doubt whether this or that form be a true species. This, I feel sure, and I speak after experience, will be no slight relief. The endless disputes whether or not some fifty species of British brambles are good species will cease." Those disputes nevertheless proceed almost exactly as before. It is true that biologists in general do not, as formerly, participate in these discussions because they have abandoned systematics altogether; but those who are engaged in the actual work of naming and cataloguing animals and plants usually debate the old questions in the old way. There is still the same divergence of opinion and of practice, some inclining to make much of small differences, others to neglect them. Not only does the work of the sytematists as a whole proceed as if Darwin had never written but their attitude towards these problems is but little changed.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Source: Problems In Genetics (1913), p. 10

Hope , Way , Feeling , Confidence

“People may choose to ignore their animal heritage by interpreting their behavior as divinely inspired, socially purposeful, or even self-serving, all of which they attribute to being human, but they masticate, fornicate, and procreate, much as chimps and apes do, so they should have little cause to get upset if they learn that they act like other primates when they politically agitate, debate, abdicate, placate, and administrate, too.”

Arnold M. Ludwig

King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (2002)

People , Behavior , Learning , Animals

“Not til the late nineteenth century was the doctrine of the subordination of time and change seriously challenged. Bergson and William James, animated by different motives and proceeding by different methods, then installed change at the very heart of things. Bergson took his stand on the primacy of life and consciousness, which are notoriously in a state of flux. He assimilated that which is completely real in the natural world to them, conceiving the static as that which life leaves behind as a deposit as it moves on. From this point of view he criticized mechanistic and teleological theories on the ground that both are guilty of the same error, although from opposite points. Fixed laws which govern change and fixed ends toward which changes tend are both the products of a backward look, one that ignores the forward movement of life. They apply only to that which life has produced and has then left behind in its ongoing vital creative course, a course whose behavior and outcome are unpredictable both mechanistically and from the standpoint of ends.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Life , World , Law , Behavior

“Well, we haven’t learnt yet to live together peacefully… But I don’t know what progress really means. Anyway, I think we need to have faith in the fact that there is more out there to be explained. Even the paradigms that we now have, including subjective value theory, for example, are only provisional. Some physicist might believe that ultimately, we will be able to explain everything. To me, that is utterly stupid, just like saying that an atheist is equally dogmatic as a Texas Baptist. It seems to me that, if you accept evolution, you can still not expect your dog to get up and start talking German. And that’s because your dog is not genetically programmed to do that. We are human animals, and we are equally bound. There are whole realms of discourse out there that we cannot reach, by definition. There are always going to be limits beyond which we cannot go. Knowing that they are there, you can always hope to move a little closer – but that’s all.”

James M. Buchanan (1919–2013) American economist

Source: Karen Ilse Horn (ed.) Roads to Wisdom, Conversations With Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (2009)

Stupidity , Faith , Dogs , Hope

“Evolution in… cases has clearly been a very slow and almost (if not quite) continuous process, exactly as Darwin had predicted.
We must remember, however, that the organisms studied in this way are far from representative. They are in general the most successful members of animal associations living in very constant marine or lacustrine environments. We have not got similar data for land species… Nor do we possess them for the rarer forms. We shall see… that perhaps dominant species in a uniform environment are the least likely to undergo sudden change to a new type.”

J. B. S. Haldane book The Causes of Evolution

Introduction, p. 22.
The Causes of Evolution (1932)

Way , Study , Change , Success

“During OTA’s I was up there in weight even though I felt like I was eating ok. Just going vegan, I just got just the history of being a vegan, how to fix your body and everything like that, so I fell in love with it. I lost 12 pounds, a good 12 pounds coming into training camp so I feel good, I’ve got to keep building on it. … You know, it wasn’t tough at all because everything that I love, you can have something that tastes just like it. It’s what I had to figure out. You don’t just cut out the taste of having a hamburger. They have vegan hamburgers that taste like hamburgers, you know, so why not go with that instead of putting the meat of an animal inside your body.”

Brandon Flowers (American football) (1986) American football player

"Brandon Flowers on building camaraderie, why he’s gone vegan & what excites him about this team" https://www.mighty1090.com/2015/07/30/video-brandon-flowers-on-building-camaraderie-why-hes-gone-vegan-what-excites-him-about-this-team/, interview with Mighty1090.com (30 July 2015).

Love , Feeling , History , Animals

“In the first chapter of Genesis it is made evident that absolutely nothing, except God, has any claim to divinity; even the sun and the moon, supreme gods of the neighbouring peoples, are set in their places between the herbs and the animals and are brought into the service of mankind.”

Reijer Hooykaas (1906–1994) Dutch historian

Source: Religion and the rise of modern science, 1972, p. 8

God , People , Sun , Animals

“Abu Hurayra reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "Once a man was walking along a road and became very thirsty. He found a well, climbed down into it and drank. When he came out, he saw a dog driven by thirst to eat mud. He said, 'This dog has reached the same extreme of thirst that I had reached.' So he climbed back down the well, filled his leather sock with water and, holding it between his teeth, climbed back up and let the dog drink Allah thanked him for that and forgave him." They said, "Messenger of Allah, do we then receive a reward on account of animals?'" He said, "There is a reward for every live animal [lit. everything with a moist liver]."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 1, hadith number 126
Sunni Hadith

Peace , Dogs , Drink , Water

“Suicide evokes revulsion with horror, because everything in nature seeks to preserve itself: a damaged tree, a living body, an animal; and in man, then, is freedom, which is the highest degree of life, and constitutes the worth of it, to become now a principium for self-destruction? This is the most horrifying thing imaginable. For anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world. So suicide evokes horror, in that a man thereby puts himself below the beasts. We regard a suicide as a carcase, whereas we feel pity for one who meets his end through fate.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part II, p. 146
Lectures on Ethics (1924)

Life , Fate , World , Feeling

“Primitive animals will sometimes keep chattering or twitching their muscles even after their heads have been cut off. And that's probably the best analogy today to the president's continuing enunciation of his policies.”

Josh Marshall Talking Points Memo

Talking Points Memo (2007-09-14)

Animals

“The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. … The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“November: A Mighty Fortress”, p. 77.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "November: Axe-in-Hand," "November: A Mighty Fortress," and "December: Pines above the Snow"

Disease , Tree , Animals , Dead

“I am trying to intensify my feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, trying to establish a pantheistic contact with the tremor and flow of blood in nature, in animals, in the air – trying to make it all into a picture, with new movements and with colours that reduce our old easel paintings to absurdity.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote in Marc's letter to the publisher Reinhard Piper, 1908, as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, ed. Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 207
1905 - 1910

Feeling , Nature , Animals , Painting

“Animals whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. — Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind? — animals with affections, imitation, fear of death, pain, sorrow for the dead.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

respect.
" Notebook B http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html" (1837-1838) page 231 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=233&itemID=CUL-DAR121.-&viewtype=side
quoted in [2009, Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution, Adrian Desmond & James Moore, New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 9780547055268, 23042290M, 115, http://books.google.com/books?id=V9cGkBj_8iYC&pg=PA115&dq="Animals+whom+we+have+made+our+slaves"]
Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements

Death , Pain , Fear , Animals

“That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved—who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";—for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

Spencer here references William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology http://books.google.com/books?id=ovgEAAAAYAAJ& see p. 473
The Development Hypothesis (1852)

Education , Thinking , Time , Animals

“Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Tunnel in the Sky

Source: Tunnel in the Sky (1955), Chapter 2, “The Fifth Way” (p. 42)

Animals

“I wanted to get involved with [PETA’s anti-fur campaign] because first off, I’m an animal lover. I have a dog. And I couldn’t imagine someone just taking my dog’s fur or skinning my dog alive or killing him just to be selfish. … If you have a heart, I’m pretty sure it’ll touch you to see how these animals suffer.”

Brandon Flowers (American football) (1986) American football player

"The NFL's Brandon Flowers Says, 'Don't Be Selfish'—Be Fur-Free" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgitAeybVOw, video interview with PETA (11 December 2014).

Dogs , Imagination , Lovers , Suffering

“All animals feel Wonder, and many exhibit Curiosity. They sometimes suffer from this latter quality, as when the hunter plays antics and thus attracts them.”

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", page 42 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=55&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Feeling , Suffering , Animals

“If it be granted that the Britons, generally speaking, were expert in hunting, it is still uncertain what animals were obnoxious to the chase; we know however, at least, that the hare was not anciently included; for Cæser tells us, "the Britons did not eat the flesh of hares, notwithstanding the island abounded with them." And this abstinence, he adds, arose from a principle of religion; which principle, no doubt, prevented them from being worried to death: a cruelty reserved for more enlightened ages.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 2
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Britons

Death , Age , Religion , Animals

“Getting involved in Earthlings was pretty intense because there were still a lot of things I didn’t know. To raise compassion and awareness is so necessary. The documentary is not just about animals, it’s about how we treat each other as well. How we have empathy for the weak and we don’t abuse it. It exposes the truth. It is a very difficult film to get into mainstream because there are so many corporations that will hurt if their secrets revealed.”

Persia White (1972) American actress and singer

"Persia White Interviews With Marta Walsh", interview with Talking Makeup (27 October 2009) http://talkingmakeup.com/beauty/featured/persia-white-interviews-with-marta-walsh/.

Truth , Secret , Animals , Hurt

“Every work of art must retain something from the first days of creation, something of the smell of earth, or one could even say: something animate.”

Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881–1919) German sculptor

As quoted in The Art of Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1972) by Reinhold Heller

Art , Animals

“We will talk only about machines with very simple internal structures, too simple in fact to be interesting from the point of view of mechanical or electrical engineering. Interest arises, rather, when we look at these machines or vehicles as if they were animals, in a natural environment. We will be tempted, then, to use psychological language in describing their behavior. And yet we know very well that there is nothing in these vehicles that we have not put there ourselves.”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

p 2
Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984)

Behavior , Nature , Animals

“To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.”

Frans de Waal (1948) Dutch primatologist and ethologist

"Are We in Anthropodenial?" in Discover magazine (July 1997) http://discovermagazine.com/1997/jul/areweinanthropod1180

Animals

“[T]he principal part in the human body, namely, the heart, is in constant motion, and is the source of every motion noticed in the body; it rules over the other members, and communicates to them through its own pulsations the force required for their functions. The outermost sphere by its motion rules in a similar way over all other parts of the universe, and supplies all things with their special properties. Every motion in the universe has thus its origin in the motion of that sphere; and the soul of every animated being derives its origin from the soul of that same sphere.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part I, p. 296 (1881) Tr. Friedlander

Way , Soul , Communication , Universe

“Cruelty to animals is an enormous injustice; so is expecting those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder to do the dangerous, soul-numbing work of slaughtering sentient beings on our behalf.”

Victoria Moran (1950) American writer

Introduction
Main Street Vegan (2012)

Soul , Animals

“People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm: all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others…”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 2, p. 68

People , Animals

“Nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. … That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished. Looking at each animal, the unaccompanied zoo visitor is alone.”

John Berger (1926–2017) British painter, writer and art critic

Source: About Looking (1980), Chapter "Why Look at Animals?"

Men , Animals

“We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the imagination.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Memoirs of My Dead Life http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8mmdl10.txt (1906), Ch. 6: Spent Loves.

Love , Imagination , Animals

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

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

Animals

“Home cooking is good for you, and I eat out less. But that's the least of it. What has surprised me is how stimulating it is. How satisfying. You learn a lot about plants and animals. You begin to recognise your place in the world.”

Michael Pollan (1955) American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism

[Michael Pollan: Why the family meal is crucial to civilisation, Sat 25 May 2013, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/may/25/michael-pollan-family-meal-civilisation, 2018-05-23]

World , Home , Learning , Animals

“In light of the evolutionary links and behavioural similarities between humans and higher animals, it is hard to believe that belief-desire psychology could explain human behaviour, but not animal behaviour. If humans have beliefs, so do animals.”

Stephen Stich (1943) American philosopher

"Do Animals Have Beliefs?" (1979); as quoted in The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan (University of California Press, 2004), p. 36 https://books.google.it/books?id=Y0tWjRmxFE4C&pg=PA36.

Light , Animals

“We Jews in this century have been victims of destruction and mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale. We have seen every norm of humanity violated as we were treated like cattle rather than human beings. Our response to this memory is surely a complex and multitextured one. But as we overcome the understandable first reactions to the events, some of us feel our abhorrence of violence and bloodshed growing so strong that it reaches even beyond the borders of the human and into the animal kingdom. We Jews, who always looked upon killing for sport or pleasure as something alien and repulsive, should now, out of our own experience, be reaching the point where we find even the slaughter of animals for food morally beyond the range of the acceptable. If Jews have to be associated with killing at all in our time, let it be only for the defense of human life. Life has become too precious in this era for us to be involved in the shedding of blood, even that of animals, when we can survive without it. This is not an ascetic choice, we should note, but rather a life-affirming one. A vegetarian Judaism would be more whole in its ability to embrace the presence of God in all of Creation.”

Arthur Green (1941) American rabbi and theologian

Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), p. 89.

Life , God , Pleasure , Food

“Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Source: Persons and Places (1944), p. 61

Age , Peace , Solitude , Animals

“Much as we live in an economic and social order that is structured to exploit people, we live in one that is structured to exploit animals. We’re encouraged to understand both are natural and inevitable, but neither are. Both exploitations have long and contentious histories as part of the development of our modern economic order.”

Bob Torres American podcaster

Source: Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (2007), p. 10

People , History , Understanding , Nature

“We are part of nature and it is part of us. Everything about our species, from the shape of our teeth to the size of our brains, has been fashioned over millennia by our interaction with the plants and animals around us. What’s more, our sense of beauty and our greatest artistic achievements have been crafted in response to nature. Our yearning for wilderness is a hankering after the place we have come from, and from which we have become alienated in the headlong march of so-called progress.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

The Impossible Five (2015)

Beauty , Fashion , Nature , Sense

“While there is such a persistency to ordinary observation, it would also appear that nature has a power of producing new varieties, though this is only done rarely. Such novelties of type abound in the vegetable world, are seen more rarely in the animal circle, and perhaps are least frequent of occurrence in our own race.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 281-282

World , Nature , Appearance , Animals

“I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.”

William S. Burroughs book The Wild Boys

The Wild Boys (1971)

Animals , Personality

“Power to vary in plants or animals is itself a feature as readily transmissible as is stability of character. The quality of varying to meet varying environments is therefore one of the hereditary traits which the plant breeder must consider, and which may itself be extended or overcome by the processes of crossing and selection.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 1 Plant Breeding

Animals

“Alexander was still the Greek avenger of Persian sacrilege who told his troops, it was said 'that Persepolis was the most hateful city in the world'. On the road there, he met with the families of Greeks who had deported to Persia by previous kings, and true to his slogan, he honoured them conspicuously, giving them money, five changes of clothing, farm animals, corn, a free passage home, and exemption from taxes and bureaucratic harassments.”

Robin Lane Fox (1946) Historian, educator, writer, gardener

Source: Alexander the Great, 1973, p.256

Money , Hate , World , Family

“Animals arrived, liked the look of the place, took up their quarters, settled down, spread, and flourished. They didn't bother themselves about the past — they never do; they're too busy.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 4

Business , Past , Animals

“The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish. I don't have any love for them. Never have. I don't really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you like monkeys?”

Harry Harlow (1905–1981) American psychologist

Interview with Pittsburgh Press-Roto, 1974. Quoted in Blum, Deborah. The Monkey Wars. Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 92.

Love , Hate , Dogs , Cats

“Warm-bloodedness is one of the key factors that have enabled mammals to conquer the Earth, and to develop the most complex bodies in the animal kingdom. In this series, we will travel the world to discover just how varied and how astonishing mammals are.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Episode I
The Life of Mammals (2002)

World , Travel , Animals

“The happiness of the ignorant is but an animal’s paradise.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 199

Animals , Happiness

“SPAN ID=What_we_call_things> What we call things and where we draw the line between one class of things and another depend upon the interests we have and the purposes of the classification. For example, animals are classified in one way by the meat industry, in a different way by the leather industry, in another different way by the fur industry, and in a still different way by the biologist. None of these classifications is any more final than any of the others; each of them is useful for its purpose. </SPAN”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Giving Things Names, p. 209-210

Way , Animals , Drawing , Dependency

“When I talk to farmers about how they treat the animals on their farms, I come up against a strange fact: while the general public and most research scientists all acknowledge that farm animals suffer, the farmers responsible for them have a tendency to deny it.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Face on Your Plate (2009), Ch. 2, p. 64

Suffering , Animals

“I never was against wearing fur because I truly did not know how these animals were tortured and killed in order to have these coats and accessories. I am done with fur forever and I have now found so many amazing faux fur lines that are great alternatives for women who love the look and love animals. I love that PETA is all about individuals taking baby steps in becoming aware of animal rights. I am not a full vegetarian but I have not eaten red meat or pork in over 10 years. … I am also extremely careful now not to purchase products that are tested on animals. I have started with fur but I hope that over time I will become a full vegetarian.”

Khloé Kardashian (1984) American television personality

"My PETA Billboard Has Been Unveiled!!!!!" https://archive.fo/gSKe, on her blog Khloekardashian.celebuzz.com (10 December 2008).

Love , Women , Hope , Time

“If we recognize, following the materialist theories, that only the physical nature exist, and that man contain ("renferme", Fr.) no higher essence, divine, which, by one side of his being, raise (promote or improve…) him above his animal nature, it would be a question ("il ne saurait être question", Fr.) neither of obligation, nor of moral responsability; then the supreme good would consist for him, indeed, to satisfy his appetites and his natural inclinations (fondness or partiality, -"penchant", Fr.), to look for the pleasure and flee from (scud, shun, avoid, -"fuir", Fr.) pain. In this case, there could be neither religion nor moral, since religion is precisely what raise man above vulgar (or common, - "vulgaire", Fr.) reality, and that moral is the very negation of selfishness.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 41.

Pain , Pleasure , Religion , Question

“Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism.”

Lewis Thomas book The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

"Antaeus in Manhattan"
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Animals , Parting

“We need an extreme movement because what is happening to animals is so extreme. Some misinformed people claim that animal rights activists are terrorists, but these people are simply ignorant of who the real terrorists are - the companies and industries that torture literally billions of animals each year.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

The Animals Voice Magazine (1989)

People , Animals

“Why do we weep in grief,' the aunt wondered. 'Dogs, deer, birds sufferent with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique.”

Annie Proulx book The Shipping News

Source: The Shipping News (1993), P. 24

Dogs , Bird , Silence , Suffering

“I came out stunned. I was angry at them, then. Angry at them for surprising me, touching me like that. Of course I was angry at their stupidity, their manic barbarity, their unthinking, animal obedience, their appalling cruelty; everything that the memorial evoked… but what really hit me was that these people could create something that spoke so eloquently of their own ghastly actions; that they could fashion a work so humanly redolent of their own inhumanity.”

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer

“State of the Art” (p. 94)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

People , Stupidity , Fashion , Memory

“Perhaps the mere idea of receiving a nasty missive will allow animal researchers to empathize with their victims for the first time in their lousy careers. I find it small wonder that the laboratories aren’t all burning to the ground. If I had more guts, I’d light a match.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1999 November 12.
After The Justice Department mailed 87 razor blade–laced threats to medical researchers studying news drugs on primates.
On animal research and activism against it

Idea , Light , Time , Animals

“The bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) is a creature of superlatives. Growing to 1500 pounds (700 kilos), traveling on transoceanic migrations, and reputedly capable of swimming 50 miles (90 km) per hour, it is one of the largest, most wide-ranging, and fastest of animals. To anyone who has seen this saber-finned giant explode through the surface of the sea, it is among the most magnificent.”

Carl Safina (1955) American biologist

[Conservation Biology, 7, 2, June 1993, Bluefin Tuna in the West Atlantic: Negligent Management and the Making of an Endangered Species, 229–234, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2386419]

Travel , Animals , Sea

“What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man’s animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God’s sanctity”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 40

God , Nature , Reality , Animals

“Men! The only animal in the world to fear!”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Mountain Lion (1923)

Men , World , Fear , Animals

“Virgil is serene and lovely like a marble Apollo in the moonlight; Homer is a beautiful, animated youth in the full sunlight with the wind in his hair.”

Helen Keller book The Story of My Life

Source: The Story of My Life (1903), Ch. 21

Love , Youth , Beauty , Animals

“I started [in Paris, 1920's, making toys] right away, using wire as my main material as well as working with others like string, leather, fabric and wood. Wood combined with wire (with which I could make the heads, tails and feet of animals as well as articulating parts) was almost always my medium of choice. One friend of mine suggested that I should make bodies entirely of wire, and that is how I started to make what I called 'Wire Sculpture.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

In Montparnasse, I became known as the 'King of Wire'.

Quote of Alexander Calder (1952), looking back, from Permanence Du Cirque, in 'Revue Neuf', Calder Foundation, 1952; as quoted in Calder and Mondrian: An Unlikely Kinship, senior-thesis by Eva Yonas http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.517.581&rep=rep1&type=pdf, Ohio State University August 2006, Department of Art History, p.19 – note 26

Calder first began using wire extensively in 1926, creating mechanical toys that would be the precursors to the Paris' 'Cirque Calder'
1950s - 1960s

Animals , Parting

“Keynes didn’t make an all-out assault on Economic Man, but he often resorted to plausible psychological theorizing rather than careful analysis of what a rational decision-maker would do. Business decisions were driven by “animal spirits,” consumer decisions by a psychological tendency to spend some but not all of any increase in income, wage settlements by a sense of fairness, and so on.
But was it really a good idea to diminish the role of Economic Man that much? No, said Friedman, who argued in his 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics” that economic theories should be judged not by their psychological realism but by their ability to predict behavior. And Friedman’s two greatest triumphs as an economic theorist came from applying the hypothesis of rational behavior to questions other economists had thought beyond its reach.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

"Who Was Milton Friedman?", The New York Review of Books (February 15, 2007)
The New York Review of Books articles

Behavior , Idea , Question , Business

“This divergence and perversion of the essential question is most striking in what goes today by the name of philosophy. There would seem to be only one question for philosophy to resolve: What must I do? Despite being combined with an enormous amount of unnecessary confusion, answers to the question have at any rate been given within the philosophical tradition on the Christian nations. For example, in Kant´s Critique of Practical Reason, or in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and specially Rousseau.

But in more recent times, since Hegel´s assertion that all that exists is reasonable, the question of what one must do has been pushed to the background and philosophy has directed its whole attention to the investigation of things as they are, and to fitting them into a prearranged theory. This was the first step backwards.

The second step, degrading human thought yet further, was the acceptance of the struggle for existence as a basic law, simply because that struggle can be observed among animals and plants. According to this theory the destruction of the weakest is a law which should not be opposed. And finally, the third step was taken when the childish originality of Nietzsche´s half-crazed thought, presenting nothing complete or coherent, but only various drafts of immoral and completely unsubstantiated ideas, was accepted by the leading figures as the final word in philosophical science. In reply to the question: what must we do? the answer is now put straightforwardly as: live as you like, without paying attention to the lives of others.

If anyone doubted that the Christian world of today has reached a frightful state of torpor and brutalization (not forgetting the recent crimes committed in the Boers and in China, which were defended by the clergy and acclaimed as heroic feats by all the world powers), the extraordinary success of Nietzsche´s works is enough to provide irrefutable proof of this.

Some disjointed writings, striving after effect in a most sordid manner, appear, written by a daring, but limited and abnormal German, suffering from power mania. Neither in talent nor in their basic argument to these writings justify public attention. In the days of Kant, Leibniz, or Hume, or even fifty years ago, such writings would not only have received no attention, but they would not even have appeared. But today all the so called educated people are praising the ravings of Mr. N, arguing about him, elucidating him, and countless copies of his works are printed in all languages.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: What is Religion, of What does its Essence Consist? (1902), Chapter 11

People , World , Education , Law

“I have already informed my readers, that bull-baiting, or worrying of bulls with dogs, was one of the spectacles exhibited by the jugglers and their successors. It is also necessary to observe, that this cruel pastime was not confined to the boundaries of the bear-gardens; but was universally practiced on various occasions, in almost every town or village throughout the kingdom, and especially in market towns, where we find it was sanctioned by the law; and in some of them, I believe, the bull-rings, to which the unfortunate animals were fastened, are remaining to the present hour. It may seem strange, that the legislature should have permitted the exercise of such a barbarous diversion, which was frequently productive of much mischief by drawing together a large concourse of idle and dissipated persons, and affording them an opportunity of committing many grross disorders with impunity. Indeed a public bull-baiting rarely ended without some riot and confusion.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 277
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Law , Dogs , Exercises , Universe

“As far as fidelity is concerned, there is no animal in the world as treacherous as man.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book II, Ch. 12
Essais (1595), Book II

World , Animals

“It should be remembered that the pharmacologic treatment of raised farm animals can cause damage to the health of anyone who eats their meat. For example, the antibiotics that are legally added to animal feed—with the objective of preventing infections—can cause a resistance to antibiotics in humans. That is to say, a selection of bacterial strains resistant to antibiotics can be transmitted from animals to man through food; and can thereby generate infections difficult to stop”

Umberto Veronesi (1925–2016) Italian oncologist and politician

at times fatal, as with salmonella
The First Day Without Cancer (2013)

Health , Food , Time , Animals

“It didn't make any sense to me, to put out a publication, to tell people about atrocities, and ask them to send money so we can tell you next month about more atrocities. Meanwhile, the atrocities keep increasing, the treasuries of tha antivivisection groups keep increasing, and it doesn't help one solitary animal.
It just defies common sense to me why people would be doing that. What's the point in giving people an ulcer, getting people upset, getting them frustrated, and telling them, what we're going to do is frustrate you next month, isn't that nice?”

Henry Spira (1927–1998) American activist

Ethics Into Action: Henry Spira and The Animal Rights Movement by Peter Singer (1998).

Money , People , Sense , Help

“My motto has always been “If you love animals, don’t eat them”…. the moment I began to understand what was going on with the treatment of animals, it led me more and more in the way of the path I am [on] now, which is a complete vegan.”

Bryan Adams (1959) Canadian singer-songwriter

“Bryan Adams on Animal Rights and Being Vegan”, interview with PETA, in Peta.org (7 January 2007) http://www.peta.org.uk/blog/bryan-adams-animal-rights-vegan/

Love , Way , Understanding , Animals

“Tis evident, that sympathy, or the communication of passions, takes place among animals, no less than among men. Fear, anger, courage and other affections are frequently communicated from one animal to another […] And 'tis remarkable, that tho' almost all animals use in play the same member, and nearly the same action as in fighting; a lion, a tyger, a cat their paws; an ox his homs; a dog his teeth; a horse his heels: Yet they most carefully avoid harming their companion, even tho' they have nothing to fear from his resentment; which is an evident proof of the sense brutes have of each other's pain and pleasure.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

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

Men , Pain , Pleasure , Fear

“I became a vegetarian at 15. I was never a big meat eater — I was always picky. I was raised in a kosher home, and if you're raised with a food restriction, it's not that difficult to have another kind of food restriction. … At some point, I had a dream that I was eating chicken. But in the dream, I understood that it was actually miniature human legs and arms. My brain was connecting muscle and bone to another animal. Once I had made that connection, it just wasn't something I wanted to eat.”

Lisa Edelstein (1967) American actress, playwright

"Lisa Edelstein: "I Don't Eat for Entertainment!"" https://web.archive.org/web/20100506024115/http://online.prevention.com/lisaedelstein/index.shtml, interview with Prevention magazine (7 May 2010).

Food , Dreams , Home , Animals

“Every individual who eats flesh food, whether an animal is killed expressly for him or not, is supporting the trade of slaughtering and contributing to the violent deaths of harmless animals.”

Philip Kapleau (1912–2004) American Zen Buddhist monk

Source: To Cherish All Life (1981), p. 55

Death , Food , Support , Animals

“Seriously, I think everybody needs to be more disciplined; nobody needs any meat. But from a perspective of how many animals suffer, it’s probably better to kill and eat one whale than it is to eat fish, chickens, cows, lambs and eggs.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

Satya, November, 2000 http://www.satyamag.com/novdec00/newkirk.html

Thinking , Fish , Suffering , Animals

“When you consider your choices—heart disease, colon cancer, plus-size pants, melting ice caps, gale force storms, and animal suffering vs. good health, energy, a trim physique, a livable planet, compassion, and tasty, diverse foods—it's clear that going vegetarian is an excellent choice as we move toward living a more conscious life.”

Kathy Freston American self-help writer

"One Bite at a Time: A Beginner's Guide to Conscious Eating", in the HuffPost (27 February 2007) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-bite-at-a-time-a-begi_b_42211.

Life , Health , Disease , Food

“Animation in itself is an art form, and that's the point I think always needs clarification. True animation exists without any background, or any color, or any sound, or anything else; it exists in your hand. And you can take it and flip it. […] What makes animation is the fact that you have a series of drawings that move. You don't even have to have a camera, you see; animation exists without it. If you want to broaden your audience, or make it more colorful or add music, then you put it under a camera one frame at a time, and then you run it at the same speed as you flip it, and then you have animation. If it depends basically upon soundtrack, or basically upon music, or color, graphic design, or anything else to sustain itself, then it is not unique to animation.”

Chuck Jones (1912–2002) American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films

Joe Adamson, "Witty Birds and Well-Drawn Cats: An Interview with Chuck Jones [1971]", in Chuck Jones: conversations, ed. Chuck Jones and Maureen Furniss (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2005), 63.

Art , Music , Color , Thinking