Quotes about hedgehog (18 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Archilochus (-680–-645 BC) Ancient Greek lyric poet

As quoted in The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953) by Isaiah Berlin
Variant translations:
The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing.
The fox knows many tricks; the hedgehog one good one.
The fox knows many tricks; and the hedgehog only one; but that is the best one of all.
Fragments

“If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Thinking

“He had about the same life expectancy as a three legged hedgehog on a six lane motorway.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Life

“Let me give you a piece of advice. The handsome young fellow who's trying to rescue you from a hideous fate is never wrong. Not even if he says the sky is purple and made of hedgehogs.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Fate

“Out of Print" is bookseller speak for "We can't be hedgehogged.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Usenet

“That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the childcatcher from.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Clary, Isabelle, Jace, and Simon, pg. 150
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)
Context: "Traded him for Alec," Clary said.
"Not permanently."
"No," said Jace. "Just for a few hours. Unless I don't come back. In which case, maybe he does get to keep Alec. Think of it as a lease with an option to buy."
"Mom and Dad won't be pleased if they find out."
"That you freed a possible criminal by trading away your brother to a warlock who looks like a gay Sonic the Hedgehog and dresses like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?" Simon inquired. "No, probably not."

“If wits were pins, the man would be a veritable hedgehog.”

Frances Hardinge book Fly by Night

Source: Fly by Night

“Step aside? I step aside for nobeast, whether it be a hallowed hedgehog, an officious otter, a seasoned squirrel, a mutterin' mole or a befuddled badger!”

Brian Jacques (1939–2011) British fiction writer known for Redwall animal fantasy novels

Source: Taggerung

Season

“A hedgehog? And just how does a hedgehog make love?" he demanded.

No, I thought. I won't. I will not. But I did. "Very carefully," I replied, giggling helplessly. So now we know just how old that one is, I thought.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

Love , Making love

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

“The intellectually aggressive hedgehogs knew one big thing and sought, under the banner of parsimony, to expand the explanatory power of that big thing to “cover” new cases; the more eclectic foxes knew many little things and were content to improvise ad hoc solutions to keep pace with a rapidly changing world.”

Philip E. Tetlock (1954) American political science writer

About prediction and forecasting. Fox commented that "psychologist Philip Tetlock (following the lead of Isaiah Berlin), divided the world of political forecasters into hedgehogs and foxes."
Source: Justin Fox. " How to Be Bad at Forecasting https://hbr.org/2012/05/how-to-be-bad-at-forecasting.html," in Harvard Business Review, May 11, 2012.

World , Change

“We decided to go ahead with David O. (Selznick) the way hedgehogs make love: verrry carefully!”

Michael Powell (1905–1990) English film director

Attributed

Love , Making love , Way

“Psychologist Philip Tetlock (following the lead of Isaiah Berlin), divided the world of political forecasters into hedgehogs and foxes.”

Justin Fox (1964) American journalist

Justin Fox. " How to Be Bad at Forecasting https://hbr.org/2012/05/how-to-be-bad-at-forecasting.html," in Harvard Business Review, May 11, 2012.

World

“For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in de facto way for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. This last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or difused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects; for they are themselves, consciously or unconsciously seeking to fit them into or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete at times fanatical, military inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.”

Isaiah Berlin book The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953). Editor Henry Hardy. Collaborator Michael Ignatieff. Editorial Princeton University Press, 2013. ISBN 1400846633, p. 2.

Way , Feeling , Idea , Understanding

“The defensiveness of Islam is its crucial feature today. It's what, by the way, is in such contrast to the most interesting period of Islamic history, when Islam was an open, absorbing religion, constantly taking in outside influences, as opposed to its current hedgehog-like posture, prickly to the outside … always looking backward. This is not how it was in the creative moment, in the first four, six, eight centuries of Islam, where it was constantly seeking out and absorbing.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

Religion , Way , History

“He lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way,
Tormenting himself with his prickles.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg. Her Dream http://www.gerald-massey.org.uk/eop_hood_poetical_works_4.htm#146 (Part the Third, 1840).
1840s

Way

“If you start throwing hedgehogs under me, I shall throw a couple of porcupines under you.”

Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in The New York Times (7 November 1963)

“As a peace-loving man, I have made every effort to give the German nation the defence and the weapons which are appropriate to persuade others also for peace. A hedgehog never attacks another animal except when it is attacked. No one should come near us. We want only our quiet and the right to live.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech in Weimar (6 November 1938), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 10
1930s

Peace , Animals , Love , Making love