Quotes about hunting
page 5

“On another occasion, I decided to give Konev, who liked to hunt, a custom-built rifle, with a silver plate on the stock inscribed "To Marshal Konev, from his friend, General Clark." I wasn't sure he would get it if I simply delivered it to his headquarters, so I had an officer take it to him. I didn't even get an acknowledgement from Konev, although I saw him on several official occasions. Finally, about three weeks after I had sent the gun, I walked to lunch with him after the commissioners' meeting. Speaking through an interpreter, I asked if he had received the gun. "Yes". "Ask the marshal whether he liked it." "Yes". "I just wondered," I said. "I hadn't received any acknowledgement."”

Mark W. Clark (1896–1984) American general

"Well, you didn't send any ammunition."
Source: Calculated Risk (1950), p. 477

“Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased.”

Alfred Whitney Griswold (1906–1963) American historian

Address at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (9 June 1957).
Context: Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth, we have spoken it.

“Woman is the only creature in nature that hunts down its hunters and devours the prey alive. ”

Абрахам Миллер (1863–1951)

Nature

“The Russian bourgeoisie raised the hunt against the Jews, not only in the hope of diverting the anger of the exploited workers, but also in the hope of freeing themselves from competitors in commerce and industry.”

Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) Soviet politician

Source: ABC's of Communism, pp.253

Hope, Anger

“As the essays kept appearing, so did the five male lawyers (not the same ones, different ones, but they seemed to hunt in packs). And so did the criminal cases, mostly for contempt of court. One of them ended in a very short jail sentence, another is still pending. The debates were often acrimonious. Sometimes violent. But always important. Almost every essay got me into enough trouble to make me promise myself that I wouldn’t write another. But inevitably, situations arose in which the effort of keeping quiet set up such a noise in my head, such an ache in my blood, that I succumbed, and wrote.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

Arundhati Roy: Literature provides shelter. That's why we need it (abridged version of her PEN America Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture,) The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/arundhati-roy-literature-shelter-pen-america (13 May 2019) <br class="br">Articles

Making love, Effort, Appearance

“My dear Dahl, the first, the primary, task is to bring the earth back into ecological balance. That’s your task, you and the Bahamas Corporation. Ours is to give people something exciting to do other than war while that is going on. Without us and our Hunt, you and your high-minded scientists will just be another group of dreamers living in an imaginary kingdom of sweet reason while the madness of real politics rages all around you. Be practical, Dahl, let’s do something together.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

“There is something in what you say,” Dahl admitted. “I’ve been aware for some time of the shortcomings inherent in the sane, dispassionate thinking that we scientists advocate. People don’t pay any attention. Unless there’s an emergency like Love Canal or Chernobyl, the idea of maintaining and upgrading the earth and its ecosystems is not exactly box-office.”
Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 65 (p. 259)

War, People, Rage, Madness

“We of the Hunt are part of the solution. We offer voluntary murder as a substitute for war. You know that mankind will never be satisfied unless it is killing something. People can’t even properly enjoy a landscape unless there’s something moving across it that can be shot at.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 65 (p. 258)

War, People, Parting

“Menny people spend their time trieing tew find the hole whare sin got into this world--if two men brake through the ice into a mill pond, they had better hunt for sum good hole tew git out, rather than git into a long argument about the hole they cum tew fall in.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Men, People, World, Time

“Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", p. 101
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Physical Kinship

God, Fate, Family, Star

“Those who think Roman slavery was such a benign institution have not explained why fugitive slaves were a constant problem. Owners did not lightly countenance the loss of valuable property. They regularly used chains, metal collars, and other restraining devices. Slaves who ﬂed were hunted down and returned to irate masters who were keen to inﬂict a severe retribution.”

Michael Parenti book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome

Source: The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome (2003), Ch. 1

Problem, Thinking, Loss

“When I went to America, her message had so sunk into my ears that I became a radical. I went to America to study at the University of California, where a jurist of international law was teaching. I wanted to take my degree in international law. And that was the period of McCarthyism, of the communist witch hunts—my choices were laid out. To get away from Sunset Boulevard, from the girls with red nail polish, I ran off to Maxwell Street and lived among the Negroes. A week, a month. I felt good with them—they were real, they knew how to laugh. And the day in San Diego when I wasn’t able to get a hotel room because I have olive skin and looked like a Mexican … well, that helped.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Ali Bhutto in Karachi, April 1972

Law, Girl, Study, Universe

“Artemis: (to Spiro) About my name- Artemis- you were right. In London, it is generally a female name, after the Greek goddess of archery. But every now and then a male comes along with such a talent for hunting that he earns the right to use the name. I am that male. Artemis the Hunter. I hunted you.”

Eoin Colfer book Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code

Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code (2003)

“I can recall the first time I missed your presence at home and discovered that you were out hunting for a job scrubbing floors in order to bring home some food for the family. I knew that something was very wrong with life, but I had no idea what to do about it to make it any different. It was only when I grew up and I too had to go around begging for work to live that I realized the wrongs had to be corrected.”

Bill Bailey (Spanish Civil War veteran) (1910–1995) American labor activist

The Kid from Hoboken: An Autobiography by Bill Bailey (1993)

Life, Making love, Family, Food

“We are an egalitarian State, (royalty) should go…. to either keep this temple or else become president of a thousand other temples. Except Pallivetta (the royal ritualistic hunt of the deities) and the Arat, when the deity is taken in procession to the seashore, we lost all other privileges. We sold our personal assets to keep this temple.”

Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma (1922–2013) Maharaja of Travancore

In 1971, when the privy purse was abolished to the royal families, in "Royal vignettes: Travancore - Simplicity graces this House (30 March 2003)"

Personality

“He never discriminated between us children. He got us to learn horse riding. He always used to take us out shooting when hunting was still allowed. My first experience was a tiger hunt when I was 14-year old. We went to Omkar, a favourite hunting place of my father which lies between Begur and Kakanakote forest range. I shot a spotted deer with Daddy’s supervision.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

My daddy, His Highness, the Maharaja of Mysore

Children, Learning, Horse

“I paced up and down the little room, a queer thing happened. It was as though my wandering imagination came upon a new quality, different from all that I had ever known; yet one which was also more familiar and intimate than the smell of Plaxy in the mood of love, more piercing sweet than bitches, more hunt-worthy than the trail of a fox.”

Olaf Stapledon book Sirius

Sirius (1944)

Love, Making love, Imagination, Mood

“In the twelfth century the Basque fisherman of Biarritz used to hunt whales with deadly efficiency. When the whales sensibly moved away, the Basques chased them further and further, with consequence that the fishermen of Biarritz discovered America before Columbus did.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did
'Postcard from Biarritz'
Essays and reviews, Flying Visits (1984)

“Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed — chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. … It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods — trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries … God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that.”

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

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 10: The American Forests

God, Making love, Disease, Beauty

“It is a cliche that the gun is a penis-symbol as well as a weapon. Gun organizations are conventionally masculine in cultural style; hunting and gun magazines dress their models in check shirts and boots to emphasize their masculinity. The gun lobby hardly has to labour the inference that politicians trying to take away our guns are emasculating us. At both symbolic and practical levels, the defense of gun ownership is a defence of hegemonic masculinity.”

Raewyn Connell book Masculinities

Source: Masculinities (1995), Chapter 9

“The white men aren't friends to the Indians... At first they only asked for land sufficient for a wigwam; now, nothing will satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds from the rising to the setting sun.”

Tecumseh (1768–1813) Native American leader of the Shawnee

Quoted in Seeking a Nation Within a Nation, CBC Canada https://www.cbc.ca/history/EPCONTENTSE1EP5CH12LE.html

Men, Sun

“If science, and devoting oneself to it, had no other use than avoiding exhausting temptations, rushes of hope that give worry, and thoughts that sadden the soul, that alone should give us reasons to seek it… Kinglets have sought distraction in chess, wine, music, hunting and much else that only bring harm in this world and the other.”

Ibn Hazm (994–1064) Arab theologian

ibid

World, Hope, Music, Soul

“Hunt, look at me, look at me. I love you, I love you.”

Hunter Biden (1970) American lawyer, investment advisor, and second son of former Vice President Joe Biden

~1973 by Beau Biden when Hunter was 3 years old, as narrated by Joe Biden in interview with Stephen Colbert as transcribed 11 September 2015 by Jonathan Allen of Vox https://www.vox.com/2015/9/11/9309931/colbert-biden-late-show <br class="br">About

Love, Making love

“What advantage does my noble Friend think could be derived by humanity, civilization or commerce from leaving the vast tracts of territory which he has described to be simply wandered over by naked savages or to be the hunting ground of slavers?”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Source: Speech in the House of Lords (6 July 1888), quoted in Michael Bentley, Lord Salisbury's World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain (2001), p. 231

Thinking

“Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he's not our hero. He's a silent guardian. A watchful protector.”

movie The Dark Knight

Character Lt. James Gordon

“We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not policeman and soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help.”

Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter XII, Conclusion—Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

Pleasure, Help, Christmas

“It was not a very original period of my life. I won’t say I fell in with bad company—I more hunted them down.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (2012), Chapter 11 (p. 231)

Life, Bad luck

“It is impossible for me to express my loathing and horror of the practice men have of killing things for pastime so-called 'hunting,' or 'sport. No one but a barbarian can engage in such pursuits, or can look upon them or know of them without pain and indignation. It makes me want to fight and cry whenever I think of them. And when I see men engaged in such execrable activities (the crippling, killing, and terrifying of whole communities of innocent and happy beings, shooting them down in cold blood, and with hellish enthusiasm), my feeling is that I must stop them at all hazards. And there have been times, when I have come upon men engaged in these fiendish doings, when I would have shot them down if I had been armed, the enormity of their crimes has come over me with such vividness and power.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, pp. 157–158

Men, Pain, Happiness, Making love

“Suppose we human beings were hunted with traps by a race of giants loo feet high, very ingenious, and absolutely without conscience so far as their treatment of us was concerned. Suppose that, in spite of all our vigilance, we were continually falling into these traps, which were hidden all about us, and compelled in order to escape to eat off our own arms or legs. Suppose that even then one out of every five of us was so ill-starred as to be caught a second time, and ended up, after hours or days of unspeakable agony, by having his head smashed into a jelly by a big club. Suppose we were absolutely helpless in the matter, and that our victimisers had no higher purpose in inflicting these fiendish outrages than to get a scalp or a jawbone to dangle about their demoniacal necks. Suppose, finally, in order to complete the analogy, that these people imagined themselves to be highly civilised and enlightened. What sort of an opinion do you think we would have in the course of ages as to the real character of these people and of their fitness to be the models and superintendents of a planet?”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Cost of a Skin, pp. 70–71

People, Age, Imagination, Star

“I knew from hunting food the thing you need most of isn't water or ammo, it's patience.”

Tim Winton (1960) Australian writer

Part III, Ch.5 - p.248
The Shepherd's Hut (2018)

Food, Water, Patience

“The perils of duck hunting are great - especially for the duck.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

Free the Airwaves! (2002)

“When the lights go out
come and hunt me down,
keep me in your line of sight
Be my predator, I'll give in to ya
Take a taste, do what you like
Show me how to love ya
Show me how to get you high
Show me how to love ya
I just wanna rock you right”

Example (musician) (1982) English rapper and singer

"Show me how to Love" (song), feat. Hayla <br class="br"> ("Show me how to Love" on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLTcHyuKAb0 <br class="br">Mixtapes, Bangers & Ballads (2018)

Love, Light

“Critics, you have been so kind,
I would not have you think me blind
To all the wisdom that you preach;
Yet before I strictlier run
In straiter lines of chiselled speech,
Give me one more hour, just one
Hour to hunt the fairy gleam
That flutters through this childish dream.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Apologia
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), Forest of Wild Thyme

Wisdom, Dreams, Thinking

“The slave trade has another character; it is the very denial of every law, of all social order. Man-hunting constitutes a crime of high treason against humanity. It ought to be repressed wherever it can be reached, on land as well as by sea.”

Auguste, Baron Lambermont (1819–1905) Belgian politician

Source: New Africa; an essay on government civilization in new countries, and on the foundation, organization and administration of the Congo Free State, THE ORIENTAL SLAVE-TRADE, Page 132. https://archive.org/details/newafricaessayon00desciala/page/152/mode/2up Lambermont at the Berlin Conference.

Law, Sea

“When I was a lion, panther was my prey;
I caught everything which I hunted.
When I came to embrace tightly love for you,
A lame fox drove me from den.”

Abu Sa'id Abu'l-Khayr (967–1049) poet

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 97

Love

“Can any modern fox-hunter honestly say that his hunting is done with the legitimate object of getting rid of a noxious animal in the quickest way? It is nothing of the kind. It is plain that instead of men hunting with any object of getting rid of foxes, the fox exists simply for the purpose of being hunted. But for the practice of hunting, the fox would long ago have been as extinct in England as his cousin the wolf.”

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) English historian (1823-1892)

Source: 'The Morality of Field Sports', The Fortnightly Review (October 1869), quoted in E. A. Freeman, The Morality of Field Sports (1874), p. 18

Men, Way, Wolf, Animals

“I’ve heard that some of the larger spiders hunt songbirds. I have no objection to that. The spiders belong here, too. Let nature do what it needs to do. We who are people know more than to guide ourselves by nature’s practices.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

The Tales of Zanthias (published in Weird Tales (July-August, 2003); reprinted in David G. Hartwell (ed.), Year’s Best Fantasy 4 (pp. 400-401))
Short fiction

People, Nature