Quotes about dolphin (43 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Does anybody like dolphins? Don’t go to SeaWorld.”

Harry Styles (1994) English singer, songwriter, and actor

Speaking at One Direction's concert in San Diego (9 July 2015) https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34123070

“I like to help the whales, the otters, and the dolphins. When I`m acting and I take a break, the first thing on my list is spending time by the sea.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

Time , Help , Sea

“The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner', but in fact the message was this:”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Star

“More than anything, it was the blue dolphins that took me back home.”

Scott O'Dell book Island of the Blue Dolphins

Source: Island of the Blue Dolphins

Home

“Why he would agree to install an eight-by-eight-foot fish tank and then not fill it with a single dolphin made me want to burn his eyebrows off.”

Chelsea Handler book Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang

Source: Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang

Fish

“Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Mermaid Chair

Source: The Mermaid Chair

“It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Learning

“Connor smiles with mocking warmth at him, and glances at the tattoo on his wrist. "I like your dolphin.”

Neal Shusterman book Unwind

Source: Unwind

Smile , Tattoo

“Roses. Wolf mutts. Tributes. Frosted Dolphins. Friends. Mockingjays. Stylists. Me. Everything screams in my dreams tonight.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Dreams , Wolf

“I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.”

Karen Joy Fowler book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Personality

“The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it”

Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and …

Bee , Happiness

“I am not exuding anything," said Holly through gritted teeth.

Orion tapped her shoulder. "I beg to differ. You're exuding right now, a wonderful aura. It's pastel blue with little dolphins.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Atlantis Complex

“Across this dazzling
Mediterranean
August morning
The dolphins write such
Ideograms:
With power to wake
Me prisoned in
My human speech
They sign: 'I AM!”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"Dolphins"

“EEK EEK EEK!! That's dolphin for 'I'm sorry.' But you already knew that..”

Tucker Max (1975) Internet personality; blogger; author

The Tucker Max Stories

“Here's the clear "science:"When the male sperm and female egg join, a new and unique life form is created. At conception. Not at birth or viability, or when a lawyer says so. At conception this happens. John McCain got it right; Obama pled less scientific knowledge than a 5th grader.This life is either human or something else. Science irrefutably would declare that the life which is starting from that moment is human. It's not a stalk of broccoli, it's not a parrot, squirrel, or dolphin. It will never become a tree—it can only become a human. It has the entire DNA schedule that it will have for the rest of its life right then. In days it will begin to take on increasingly observable human characteristics and form, but at conception, it is biologically human.If this life is human, then the only issue left is whether this human life falls under the notion that it has a fundamental right of existence or not. If not, it is because we as a culture have decided that some human lives are simply not worth living. If we can decide that about an innocent and unborn baby, we can also decide it on the basis of less absolute criteria than that. If we make that choice (and this is all about "CHOICE," isn’t it?) then someone may decide that a terminally ill person is not a life worth living. Maybe a severely disabled child is a life not worth living; what about a person with a limited IQ? Say that's absurd—that an educated and enlightened society would never be so audacious as to begin to terminate life based on such arbitrary excuses? Maybe you haven't studied Nazi Germany, in which the murder of six million Jews was justified because of their religion and millions of others were murdered because of their politics. Germany was not a primitive, superstitious culture. It was one filled with the intelligentsia and enlightened.This is an important issue. It's why we can't trust Obama with America's future because he's not even sure which Americans are worth saving and which ones aren't. And it's why that for many of us, McCain's selection of a running mate really does matter. Because John McCain clearly is pro life, I will support and vote for him because Obama is not an option for me as a pro life person. I will be disappointed if McCain doesn't pick a true pro life person and realize that should that happen, he will lose many of the very people who supported me. I cannot expect all of you to vote for McCain if he chooses someone whose record isn't pro life. It will be a less than perfect decision for all of us—our only real choices are McCain and Obama; one will protect life and one won't. Some will argue for a 3rd party candidate and I respect that, but in political realities, that is essentially a vote for Obama and I can't go there.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

A Message from the Governor
HuckPAC
2008-08-23
http://www.huckpac.com/?Fuseaction=Blogs.View&Blog_id=1848&CommentPage=5
2011-03-01

Life , People , Education , Religion

“Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea — look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

"The Eye"

War , Mountain , Water , Sea

“Dolphins read each other’s emotions by sonar and it’s the inside of the body, the configuration of the viscera, that lets dolphins know whether the dolphin they are meeting is tense or happy. Their emotions are much more connected with the insides of each other’s bodies. We don’t have that. It’s like denying 90% of what we are physically, not knowing it.”

David Cronenberg (1943) Canadian film director, screenwriter and actor

Bomb Magazine http://bombmagazine.org/article/1160/david-cronenberg, Bette Gordon.

Reading , Happiness

“…compare mankind with other animals that share our highly social habits: with colonial birds, monkeys and dolphins. As we shall see, the lesson they teach is that we are designed for a system of monogamy plagued by adultery.”

Matt Ridley (1958) economist

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 5

Bird , Animals

“But then again, Cape Town is an old lover. There are good days and bad days. Mostly, I think, I have made my peace. On the stormy days – perhaps a Cape Times report on gangland rape, or Sol Kerzner’s promise of a Noddyland hotel for the Waterfront, will trigger my unfaithfulness – Potchefstroom and Perth look suddenly greener. On the good days – maybe a school of Heaviside’s dolphins playing outside my window, full-moonrise from Signal Hill or a spring morning so unutterably blue it demands to be drunk, not written about – life here seems unrepeatable anywhere else in the world. As in all relationships, the dialogue is never over.”

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

Cape Town Calling (2007)

Life , World , Unfaithfulness , School

“Such close observations of apes and birds and dolphins remind us that humanity is part of a great animal kingdom. All species within this kingdom differ from one another in significant ways, to be sure, but the kingdom does not seem to be organized on the superior/inferior hierarchy. Species are merely different from one another; they are not better than, nor more or less advanced than, each other. The core experience of all animal life is strikingly similar.”

Hugh Downs (1921) American broadcaster

"ABC Radio Perspective on ABC News 20/20 on May 29, 1994"

Life , Way , Bird , Animals

“We have restricted humans from giving ‘free’ food to bears and dolphins because we know that such feeding would make them dependent and lead to their extinction. But when it comes to our own species, we have difficulty seeing the connection between short-term kindness and long-term cruelty; we give women money to have more children, making them more dependent with each child and discouraging them from developing the tools to fend for themselves. The real discrimination against women, then, is ‘free feeding’.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 346.

Women , Money , Children , Food

“Though pleased to see the dolphins play,
I mind my compass and my way.”

Matthew Green (1696–1737) British writer

The Spleen (1737)

Way

“I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet. (Chuckles) Did I say that? I guess I did.”

Sylvia Earle (1935) American oceanographer

Quote from her 2009 TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans

Life , Hope , Intelligence , Universe

“Write by WASTE. The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad. Love the dolphins.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Love , Madness

“Rightly did Darwin pin up a paper warning himself to be careful about using such words as "higher" and "lower." What is downward about the trend that has produced elephants, chimpanzees, wolves, dolphins, and jackdaws by comparison with ants and bees?”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 148.

Bee

“Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

Sea

“Who hopes by strange variety to please,
Puts dolphins among forests, boars in seas.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry of Horace (1869), Art of Poetry, p. 172

Hope , Sea

“Hey man, so can you speak to dolphins and pilot whales with that forehead of yours?”

Tucker Max (1975) Internet personality; blogger; author

The Midget Story http://www.tuckermax.com/archives/entries/date/the_midget_story.phtml,
The Tucker Max Stories

“A bunch of bong-smoking, America-bashing, flag-burning, yoga-posing, incense-burning, dolphin-saving, salmon-eating hypocrites. These are the sensitive, liberal people who are always yelling about people's freedom of speech and expression, unless you happen to say something that pisses them off.”

Richard Jeni (1957–2007) American comedian

On the left wing
A Big, Steaming Pile Of Me

People , Freedom

“As when in fair weather herds of dolphins come up from the depths and sport in circles round a ship as it speeds along, now seen in front, now behind, now again at the side and delight comes to the sailors; so the Nereids darted upward and circled in their ranks round the ship Argo, while Thetis guided its course.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book IV. Homeward Bound, Lines 933–938 (tr. R. C. Seaton)

Sport , Speed , Weather

“If a human being is isolated from other humans for a month or more, and is confined to a small area geographically and a small range of activities, his interest in his surroundings and its minutiae increase radically…. Further, if a confined, isolated human is allowed brief contacts with other humans even without a shared language, he begins to find their presence comforting, and a pleasant relief from the "evenness" of his surroundings. If these humans controls his only sources of food as well as his sources of intraspecies stimulation, he mat adapt to their demands in subtle and not so subtle ways. He may, given time, learn their language, take on their beliefs, etc. When we catch a dolphin and put him alone in a small tank, we are imposing similar "solitary confinement" structures on him. Maybe we can thus capture his loyalty and his initiative.”

John Lilly (1915–2001) American physician

Man and Dolphin (1961), p.190-191; as quoted in The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (2012), by D. Graham Burnett, p.578-579

Food , Way , Learning , Time

“In the middle of the lawn was a lake adorned with an ornamental fountain, depicting an amorous Greek god trying to kiss a dolphin.†
† Inadvisable”

Jonathan Stroud book The Amulet of Samarkand

The Amulet of Samarkand (2003)

God , Kiss

“Then, cleaving the grass, gazelles appear
(The gentler dolphins of kindlier waves)
With sensitive heads alert of ear;
Frail crowds that a delicate hearing saves.”

Thomas Sturge Moore (1870–1944) British playwright, poet and artist

"The Gazelles", line 13; from The Centaur's Booty (London: Duckworth, 1903) p. ix.

Grass , Appearance

“Andrew Holland was prosecuted in the UK for possessing "extreme pornography", a term which appears to mean porn that judges and prosecutors consider shocking. He had received a video showing a tiger having sex with a woman, or at least apparently so.
He was found innocent because the video he received was a joke. I am glad he was not punished, but this law is nonetheless a threat to other people. If Mr Holland had had a serious video depicting a tiger having sex with a woman, he still would not deserve to go to prison. … I've read that male dolphins try to have sex with humans, and female apes solicit sex from humans. What is wrong with giving them what they want, if that's what turns you on, or even just to gratify them?
But this law is not concerned with protecting animals, since it does not care whether the animal really had sex, or really existed at all. It only panders to the prejudice of censors.
A parrot once had sex with me. I did not recognize the act as sex until it was explained to me afterward, but being stroked on the hand by his soft belly feathers was so pleasurable that I yearn for another chance. I have a photo of that act; should I go to prison for it?
Perhaps I am spared because this photo isn't "disgusting", but "disgusting" is a subjective matter; we must not imprison people merely because someone feels disgusted. I find the sight of wounds disgusting; fortunately surgeons do not. Maybe there is someone who considers it disgusting for a parrot to have sex with a human. Or for a dolphin or tiger to have sex with a human. So what? Others feel that all sex is disgusting. There are prejudiced people that want to ban all depiction of sex, and force all women to cover their faces. This law and the laws they want are the same in spirit.
Threatening people with death or injury is a very bad thing, but violence is no less bad for being nonsexual. Is it worse to shoot someone while stroking that person's genitals than to shoot someone from a few feet away? If I were going to be the victim, and I were invited to choose one or the other, I would choose whichever one gave me the best chance to escape.
Images of violence can be painful to see, but they are no better for being nonsexual. I saw images of gruesome bodily harm in the movie Pulp Fiction. I do not want to see anything like that again, sex or no sex. That is no reason to censor these works, and would still not be a reason even if most people reacted to them as I do.
Since the law doesn't care whether a real human was really threatened with harm, it is not really concerned about our safety from violence, any more than it is concerned with avoiding suffering for corpses or animals. It is only prejudice, taking a form that can ruin people's lives.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

"Extreme Pornography Law in the UK" (2010) http://stallman.org/articles/extreme.html
2010s

Death , Women , Pain , People

“No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard.
A favourite has no friend!”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 6
On the Death of a Favourite Cat http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=odfc (1747)

“I, I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins
Like dolphins can swim Though nothing, nothing will keep us together
We can beat them, forever and ever
Oh, we can be heroes just for one day.”

Brian Eno (1948) English musician, composer, record producer and visual artist

"Heroes", written with Brian Eno

“In the course of some experiments I conducted from 1954 through 1956 I was suspended in water for several hours at a time, and I noticed that my skin gradually became more and more sensitive to tactile stimuli and an intense sense of pleasure resulted. However, if the stimulation was carried too far it became intensely irritating, I reasoned that the dolphin is suspended in water all of his life, twenty four hours a day, and possibly had developed an intensely sensitive skin.”

John Lilly (1915–2001) American physician

Man and Dolphin (1961), p.172; as quoted in The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (2012), by D. Graham Burnett, p.580

Life , Pleasure , Sense , Water

“Dolphins, unlike us, do not have manual skills, but their dances, jumps, are perhaps the equivalent of our ballet. Sounds, like music in the Orthodox Church – without musical instruments – are probably their songs, by which they are holding long discourses. It is a semantically organized signal system.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Vetulani, Jerzy (6 December 2009): W każdym z nas tkwi mr Hyde https://nto.pl/profesor-jerzy-vetulani-w-kazdym-z-nas-tkwi-mr-hyde/ar/4135849, interview. Nowa Trybuna Opolska (in Polish).

Music , Dance

“(After asking the audience about their negative experiences with Marijuana)
BB: So, what form did these experiences take?
Audience Member: Swimming with dolphins! (mentioned earlier on the show)
BB: (misunderstands) Dolby? What, you hear everything with a slightly reduced hiss? (As Audience Member) I like to hear the world in Dolby, it's fantastic! Mind you, it means that no snake will I ever hear. And I said that in a very strange way. [As Yoda] No snake will I ever hear, mmm! [Normally] Never put Dolby on snake detectors, that's what we must remember.”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Part Troll (2004)

World , Way , Marijuana

“If we used our discriminatory power to full, we could generate an undulating sea of sound that displayed continuously changing frequency rather like the undersea sonic songs of dolphins and whales.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

The Artful Universe (1995)
Context: Our sensitivity to changes of pitch... is underused in musical sound. Western music, in particular, is based on scales that use pitch changes that are at least twenty times bigger than the smallest changes that we could perceive. If we used our discriminatory power to full, we could generate an undulating sea of sound that displayed continuously changing frequency rather like the undersea sonic songs of dolphins and whales.<!-- Ch. 5, p. 225

Change , Sea

“For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Coda (1979)
Context: For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.

World , Law , Water , Madness

“When we saw the most beautiful fishes of the sea, the dolphin and bonito, in pursuit of the flying fish, and when these forsook their native element to seek for shelter in air, the application to human nature was obvious. What empire is not like a tumultuous ocean, where the great in all the magnificence and pomp of power, continually persecute and contrive the destruction of the defenceless?”

Georg Forster book A Voyage Round the World

Sometimes we saw this picture continued still farther, when the poor fugitives met with another set of enemies in the air, and became the prey of birds, by endeavouring to escape the jaws of fishes.
Book I, ch. II, The Passage from Madeira to the Cape Verd Islands, and from thence to the Cape of Good Hope.
A Voyage Round the World (1777)

Sea , Flying , Fish , Beauty

“Penguins underwater look somewhat like dolphins, and indeed the two families have similar evolutionary histories.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

"Fishing for a Living"
The Life of Birds (1998)

Family , History