Quotes about cockroach (20 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“A good friend once told me that the problems are like cockroaches. If drawn to light, they'll get scared.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book Marina

Source: Marina

Problem , Light

“The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Everything in the universe is everything else. A man is a killer is a saint is a monkey is a cockroach is a goldfish is a whale, and the Devil is just the angel who asked for More.”

Craig Clevenger Dermaphoria

Source: Dermaphoria

Angels , Universe

“Violence is never the answer but sometimes, like with cockroaches, it is the only possible response.”

Tanya Huff (1957) Canadian fantasy author

“I leave the human cockroaches to discuss their heroin and child pornography.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

“I saw a cockroach playing Pacman. It was on the internet, right, and somebody had linked up a cockroach to err… to some… I can't even be bothered explaining it, but that's what I'm saying - everything is moving on”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

The Podfather Trilogy, Episode 3 Christmas
On Nature

“The argument of the “long view” may be correct in some meaninglessly abstract sense, but it represents a fundamental mistake in categories and time scales. Our only legitimate long view extends to our children and our children's children's children—hundreds or a few thousands of years down the road. If we let the slaughter continue, they will share a bleak world with rats, dogs, cockroaches, pigeons, and mosquitoes. A potential recovery millions of years later has no meaning at our appropriate scale.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier", p. 365
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Children , World , Dogs , Sense

“Cockroaches and socialites are the only things that can stay up all night and eat anything.”

Herb Caen (1916–1997) American newspaper columnist

Byrne, Robert. The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said, page 372. http://books.google.com/books?id=odz2rZirMAkC&pg=PT372 Simon and Schuster, 2012. ISBN 145164891X
Attributed

Night

“I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Said in reference to those who wished to abolish all religious teaching, rather than freeing state education from Church controls, in Critiques and Addresses (1873) p. 90
1870s

“A secret is a strange thing. There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid. And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it. Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate. All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or keptfrom, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

The Raven Cycle Series, The Dream Thieves (2013)

People , Secret , Time

“(on cockroaches living without a head for a week) Why, when it was invented, has it got that facility?”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Xfm 18 January 2003
On Nature

“I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

The Sixth Presidential Paper — A Kennedy Miscellany : An Impolite Interview
The Presidential Papers (1963)

Women , Men , Hostility , Cats

“Of course, sometimes a species’ invention only benefited itself. Goats developed an ability to eat almost anything, right down to the roots. Goats proliferated. Deserts spread behind them.
Then another creature appeared, one whose originality was unprecedented. Its numbers grew. And in its wake some other types did flourish. The common cat and dog. The rat. Starlings and pigeons. And the cockroach. Meanwhile, opportunity grew sparse for those less able to share the vast new riches—huge expanses of plowed fields and mowed lawns, streets and parking lots…
The coming of the grasses had left its mark indelibly on the history of the world.
So would the Age of Asphalt and Concrete.”

David Brin book Earth

Part II (p. 122)
Earth (1990)

Age , World , Dogs , History

“To whom does this terrace belong? —
With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust,
Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs?
Not to me, but this lizard,
Older than I, or the cockroach.”

Theodore Roethke book The Far Field

"The Lizard," ll. 27-31
The Far Field (1964)

Bee , Sun

“When I purchase a food item at the supermarket, I can be confident that the label will state how much riboflavin is in it. The United States government requires this, and for a good reason, which is: I have no idea. I don't even know what riboflavin is. I do know I eat a lot of it. For example, I often start the day with a hearty Kellogg's strawberry Pop-Tart, which has, according to the label, a riboflavin rating of 10 percent. I assume this means that 10 percent of the Pop-Tart is riboflavin. Maybe it's the red stuff in the middle. Anyway, I'm hoping riboflavin is a good thing; if it turns out that it's a bad thing, like "riboflavin" is the Latin word for "cockroach pus," then I am definitely in trouble.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway (2001)

Food , Hope , Confidence , Idea

“There is nothing so despicable as a secret society that is based upon religious prejudice and that will attempt to defeat a man because of his religious beliefs. Such a society is like a cockroach — it thrives in the dark. So do those who combine for such an end.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

Speech to the Young Men's Hebrew Association in New York (20 December 1914).

Secret

“Do you promise you won't hurt me?" asked Arthur.
"You will be safe from all harm for the space of a quarter hour, as measured by this clock," replied the Old One. "You are mortal enough that I would not slay you like a wandering cockroach, or a Denizen of the House.”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

"Thanks," said Arthur. "I think."
Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Superior Saturday (2008), p. 67.

Thinking , Hurt , Housing

“Do we have to let every tree stay up and rot in the way that all our forests will turn into impassable thickets that are nicely called virgin forests? And just in order to ensure that every furniture beetle and cockroach can live a diverse and happy life. We the Finns are close to nature but why would we conserve so much that we run out of bread?”

Sauli Niinistö (1948) 12th president of Finland

Niinistö, the leader of the National Coalition Party, criticised the Natura 2000 environmental protection programme on 17 May 1997.
Source: Niinistö haukkui Natura 2000 -ohjelman "Miksi suojelisimme leivän suustamme?" http://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art-2000003625116.html Helsingin Sanomat. 18 May 1997. Retrieved 13 July 2017.

Life , Way , Nature , Tree

“Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them—and that’s how we create religions. Nature does weird stuff, so it must be governed by supernature. There’s lightning in the clouds: Zeus must be throwing his thunderbolts again. Everyone’s dying of plague except those weird folks with the strange god who wash every day: it must be evil sorcery. And so on.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 8, “Club Zero” (p. 128)

God , Religion , Bad luck , Nature

“I think that this stupid Polish society, this fucking bunch of imbeciles who voted for these whores cockroaches from PiS is some fucking misunderstanding!”

Zbigniew Stonoga (1974) Polish businessman, video blogger, social and political activist

On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n--mf4fGfkg, about the results of the parliamentary elections in October 2015 in Poland.

Whore , Thinking , Stupidity