Quotes about jackal (26 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“It is better to be a live jackal than a dead lion--for jackals, not men. Men who have the moral courage to fight intelligently for freedom have the best prospects of avoiding the fate of both live jackals and dead lions. Survival is not the be-all and end-all of a life worthy of man. Sometimes the worst we can know about a man is that he has survived. Those who say life is worth living at any price have already written for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person they will not betray to stay alive. Man's vocation should be the use of the arts of intelligence in behalf of human freedom.”

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) American philosopher

Out of Step (1985)

Life , Men , Fate , Art

“We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa book The Leopard

Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti Gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra.
Page 152
Il Gattopardo (1958)

Thinking

“It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Time Enough for Love (1973)

Dead

“I may be biased, but I think jackals are cute and cuddly, even if they were known for digging up graves in Ancient Egypt.”

Rick Riordan book The Serpent's Shadow

Source: The Serpent's Shadow

Thinking

“Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Democracy

“The ancestral canids that would eventually produce coyotes sprang from North American stock, a line of animals that evolved in the American Southwest. That ancient coyote line spawned animals that migrated to Eurasia and eventually to Africa to become Old World jackals. In North America, archeological sites from the late Pleistocene have yielded coyote remains from as far east as Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and genetic evidence indicates that coyotes thronged eastward out of their core range in the American West in at least two swarms, roughly between three hundred and nine hundred years ago. The truth is, roaming coyotes have probably been swimming the Mississippi River to eastern America during most decades since there have been coyotes.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

Truth , World , Animals

“The sky was dark, the night was black, obscurity reigned, the gleam of the wolves eyes was the only light that came to sight, the howling of the jackal was the only sound to be heard, conspiracies were in the making while slanderers and the malicious were busily chattering”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Quote in: Ali Rahnema An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariati. (2000), p. 258
Rahnema commented that "Shariati did not believe he had any chance of returning to Ershad and evaluated his situation in a poetical and macabre fashion".

Light , Night

“To live like a lion for a day is far better than to live for a hundred years like a jackal.”

Tipu Sultan (1750–1799) Ruler of the Sultanate of Mysore

As quoted in Encyclopedia of Asian History (1988) Vol. 4, p. 104
Variants:
It is far better to live like a lion for a day than to live like a jackal for a hundred years.
It is far better to live like a tiger for a day than to live like a jackal for a hundred years.
Variant mentioned in Tipu Sultan : A Study in Diplomacy and Confrontation (1982) by B. Sheikh Ali, p. 329

“Thank you for your very detailed letter regarding Scientology. We haven't yet found a way to attack these jackals who feed on children and young adults who are too emotionally weak to stand by themselves when they reach the age of consent. It's too bad there isn't a 20th Century Charles Dickens to write about the terrible destruction of these 20th Century fagins who make themselves rich while they destroy the psyche of so many. At the present time, I can only encourage you to do more of what you have been doing.”

Leo Ryan (1925–1978) American teacher and politician

Letter to Ida Camburn (10 December 1976).

Children , Age , Way , Time

“You pin-heads, you have not understood in communism its admirable, instantaneous manner of appeasing all your ruined tax-payer grudges ferociously, in the name of a new purity, a non-existent proletarian virtue, you deceived jackals. Your intimate personal plan won't wash. I am well acquainted with you.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) French writer

128
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

Communication , Personality

“Outside the wind of Jehovah still beat on the door, trying to enter. There was no other sound. Not a jackal on the earth, nor a crow in the air. Every living thing cowered in fear, waiting for the Lord's anger to pass.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Last Temptation of Christ

Source: The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), Ch. 10

Fear , Waiting , Anger

“Our free eyes open now on new horizons and can see what yesterday, in our condition as colonial slaves, we could not observe: that “Western Civilization” disguises behind its showy facade a picture of hyenas and jackals … A carnivorous animal that feeds on unarmed peoples.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Address to the United Nations (1964)

People , Animals

“You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Dracula, having found Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood in his house
Dracula (1897)

Love , Girl , Revenge , Thinking

“…today’s…newspapers…full of…diminishing exports, the unkillable widening grin of the pullulating East, the expanding machine of the almighty infallible State…. He himself could only turn to the past, but he heard that it was already possible to change the past, bringing the past perpetually up to date, a perpetual jackal fawning on the present, a malleable witness with no qualms about perjury. He knew that the armies were on the march, the Tannoys blaring, the collective mind – tool of oligarchy – being fashioned under the anaesthetic of the catchphrase and the mass entertainment…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Eve of St. Venus (1964)

Fashion , Change , Past

“For no reason at all, I thought of New Year's Eve, when all those people crowd into Times Square and scream like jackals as the lighted ball slides down the pole, ready to shed its thin party glare on three hundred and sixty-five new days in this best of all possible worlds. I have always wondered what it would be like to be caught in one of those crowds, screaming and not able to hear your own voice, your individuality momentarily wiped out and replaced with the blind empathic overslop of the crowd's lurching, angry anticipation, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder with no one in particular.”

Stephen King book Rage

Rage (1977)

People , World , Light , Time

“Joined together with bones and sinews, having a plastering of skin and flesh, covered with hide, the body is not seen as it really is—full of intestines, full of stomach, of the lump of the liver, of bladder, of heart, of lungs, of kidneys and of spleen, of mucus, of saliva, and of sweat, and of lymph, of blood, of synovial fluid, of bile, and of fat, … and its hollow head is filled with brain. A fool, overwhelmed by ignorance, thinks of it as beautiful, but when it lies dead, swollen up and discoloured, cast away in a cemetery, relatives have no regard for it. Dogs devour it, and jackals, and wolves and worms. Crows and vultures devour it, and whatever other living creatures there are. The bhikkhu possessing knowledge here, having heard the Buddha's word, indeed understands it, for he sees the body as it really is.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

§ 194-202
Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Khuddaka Nikaya (Minor Collection), Sutta Nipata (Suttas falling down)

Beauty , Dogs , Fools , Understanding

“Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 389

War , Business

“War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Institute, I feared men. I feared what Titus and the Jackal could do to me. You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here, you don't have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won't even see it.”

Pierce Brown book Golden Son

Source: Golden Son (2015), Ch. 38: The Iron Rain

Death , Men , War , Fear

“[The] swarming, grunting masses of jackals…”

Conrad Black (1944) Canadian-born newspaper publisher

On investigative journalists:
"The world according to Conrad Black", 2007

“Slowly he turned the pages, scanning the pictures and the text for a repetition of the combination B-O-Y. Presently he found it beneath a picture of another little ape and a strange animal which went upon four legs like the jackal and resembled him not a little. Beneath this picture the bugs appeared as: A BOY AND A DOG There they were, the three little bugs which always accompanied the little ape.
And so he progressed very, very slowly, for it was a hard and laborious task which he had set himself without knowing it — a task which might seem to you or me impossible — learning to read without having the slightest knowledge of letters or written language, or the faintest idea that such things existed.
He did not accomplish it in a day, or in a week, or in a month, or in a year; but slowly, very slowly, he learned after he had grasped the possibilities which lay in those little bugs, so that by the time he was fifteen he knew the various combinations of letters which stood for every pictured figure in the little primer and in one or two of the picture books.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 7 : The Light of Knowledge

Books , Dogs , Boy , Idea

“Personal columnists … are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat — no matter who killed the meat for him.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

A Letter from Cuba (1934)

Grass , Learning , Personality

“Today is indeed a historic day. It is also a special day in the history of a great people, with a history of over thousands of years. Mr Speaker this Constitution is designed to end the ethnic war which totally destroyed the lives of the people of this country…Though anybody may hoot or howl like jackals, we shall go through with this. …Mr. Speaker, we are doing this regardless of the number of votes we will get.”

Chandrika Kumaratunga (1945) President of Sri Lanka

Quoted by Tamil Nation, "Chandrika's 'Devolution Proposal'" http://tamilnation.co/conflictresolution/tamileelam/cbkproposals/00chandrika.htm, August 7, 2000.

War , People , History , Country

“The wretched desert takes its form, the jackal proud and tight.
In search of you, I feel my way, through the slowest heaving night.
Whatever fear invents, I swear it makes no sense.
I reach through the border fence.
Come down, come talk to me.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Come Talk to Me
Song lyrics, Us (1992)

Fear , Way , Feeling , Search

“If [Hitler's] proposal means that we should come to an understanding with Germany to dominate Europe I think this would be contrary to the whole of our history. You know the old fable of the jackal who went hunting with the tiger and what happened after the hunt was over. Thus Elizabeth resisted Philip II of Spain. Thus William III and Marlborough resisted Louis XIV. Thus Pitt resisted Napoleon, and thus we all resisted William II of Germany. Only by taking this path and effort have we preserved ourselves and our liberties, and reached our present position. I see no reason myself to change from this traditional view.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Lord Rothermere (12 May 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), pp. 648−649
The 1930s

History , Understanding , Thinking , Effort

“The lions had come into the plateau in great quantities and the herds of little pigs dwindled fast. Those the lions spared, Kane slew, and tossed to the jackals. This racked Kane's heart, for he was a kindly man and this wholesale slaughter, even of pigs who would fall prey to hunting beasts anyhow, grieved him. But it was part of his plan of vengeance and he steeled his heart.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Wings in the Night" (1932)

Heart , Parting

“If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The United States hires terrorist states.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk titled "Distorted Morality" at Harvard University, February 2002 http://www.chomsky.info/talks/200202--02.htm.
Quotes 2000s, 2002
Context: Remember, the U. S. is a powerful state, it's not like Libya. If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The United States hires terrorist states.