Quotes about lizard

A collection of quotes on the topic of lizard, likeness, dinosaur, living.

Quotes about lizard

“I am the Lizard King, I can do anything!”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

“It's interesting… there are two different kinds of dinosaurs - the bird-hip and the lizard-hip dinosaur. Their hips are very different. Ask an evolutionist, "Which type of dinosaur evolved into the bird? Was it the bird-hip or the lizard-hip?" And they will probably kind of hang their head and quietly say, "Well, it was the lizard-hip." Oh, so now the hip's got to turn around backwards too in addition to the billions of other changes you've got to make. There's no evidence of how dinosaurs evolved to birds. None.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Lies in the textbooks

Bird, Change

“Being turned into a lizard can really mess up your day.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful, like the flowers, than large, conservative, repressed, fearful, and aggressive, like the thunder lizards; a lesson, by the way, that the Earth has yet to learn.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

Fear, Peace, Color, Way

“I go where the lizards tell me.”

Scott Westerfeld book Behemoth

Source: Behemoth

“I must admit I’m impressed, Sadie. You controlled your magic and controlled Isis. And you, Carter, did well turning into a lizard.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“You've got to get out
and pray to the sky
to appreciate the sunshine;

otherwise
you're just a lizard
standing there
with the sun shining on you.”

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) novelist

Sun

“The classical view of dinosaurs presents a perplexing problem. The group of vertebrates which dominated the land before the rise of the dinosaurs were the synapsids, the mammal-like reptiles… Most paleontologists have believed that the locomotion and physiology of these mammal-like synapsids were more similar to those of active, warm-blooded mammals than to sluggish modern lizards or alligators. Surprisingly, though, when the first dinosaurs and their near relatives appeared in the Triassic period, the synapsids began to decline and soon became extinct. The dinosaurs then ruled the land unchallenged for over 100 million years while the early mammals, the surviving descendants of the synapsids, remained very small in size and number. Only after the dinosaurs suddenly disappeared about 70 million years ago did the mammals develop into the great variety of dominant land vertebrates we have today. The problem is this: if the later synapsids were such splendidly advanced animals with the improved physiology of mammals, and if dinosaurs were slow and sluggish, why were the mammal-like synapsids exterminated in competition with the first dinosaurs? And why didn't the mammals achieve a more significant diversification during the dinosaurs' reign?”

Robert T. Bakker (1945) American paleontologist

"The Superiority of Dinosaurs", Discovery 3(2),(1968) 11–22
The Superiority of Dinosaurs (1968)

Problem, Appearance, Animals

“Giant predator lizards can't evolve in the presence of big mammal predators. So the lesson is that mammals suppress much of the evolutionary potential of modern lizards. Is the Komodo dragon a good working model of how dinosaurs succeeded? Absolutely not. Dinosaurs suppressed the evolutionary potential of mammals, not the other way around. And dinosaurs carried out this supression everywhere, on all the continents, not merely on a few tiny tropical isles. Dinosaurs succeeded where Komodo dragons fail.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 81
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Way

“"The water in music the oar forsakes." The air in music the wing forsakes. All things move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars.”

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

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, from Yosemite Valley (September 1874); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 11: On Widening Currents  (Presumably paraphrasing from the poem Woodnotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Come learn with me the fatal song / Which knits the world in music strong / … / and the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake / The wood is wiser far than thou".) (Turlock: Town where Muir changed from railroad to foot travel in this particular journey from Oakland, California, to Yosemite Valley.) 1870s

Music, Star, Water, Singing

“When asked what he puts on his hair: "Mostly orphans' tears, old clock parts, lizard's tails, spit, the concept of freedom; all up there, all shooshed up right nice and tight, like a bonfire that's never actually burned… it mutters follicular oddities into my mind."”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

Radio One Interview, July 5th 2007

Tear, Freedom, Parting

“People (and animals) living under the canopy would live longer and grow bigger. Fossils of giant animals have been found too. For example: Six-foot beavers, 1500-pound guinea pigs, fifteen-foot-tall camels, ten-foot tall kangaroos, and fifty-foot-long crocodiles! Since reptiles never stop growing, they would grow to be huge under this canopy! I believe the dinosaur bones we find today were from giant lizards that lived under the canopy and then drowned in the Flood.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 46

People, Animals

“Let's just ruin all the movies about pterosaurs: they could soar like airplanes, but they couldn't hover like hummingbirds. They couldn't carry things in their feet either, they couldn't perch on tree branches like birds, they didn't look like "bird-monsters", and they didn't look like "lizard-bats". They didn't have four-fingered wings like bats; their wings were based on an elongated pinky finger. The only thing bat-like about them was the way they walked; on all fours. So what are the possibilities for fluffy pterosaurs? We know they were a very diverse and almost certainly colorful group. They looked like a wide range of things, from fluttering bats to darting falcons. Some had powerful shell-crushing jaws and some had ridiculous crests, and some were quite huge. For decades, we were told that Pteranodon was the biggest animal that ever flew, then they discovered Ornithocheirus, then Quetzalcoatlus, then Hatzegopteryx (an apex predator)… These were capable killers of even human-sized prey, with a skull larger than that of even the biggest carnosaurs.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Pterosaurs are Terrible Lizards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_htQ8HJ1cA (December 3, 2013)

Color, Way, Bird, Tree

““I’ll admit, I was disappointed to learn that dragons didn’t exist. That’s a hard lesson for a boy to learn.”
Chronicler smiled. “Honestly, I was a little disappointed myself. I went looking for a legend and found a lizard. A fascinating lizard, but a lizard just the same.””

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 6, “The Price of Remembering” (p. 46)

Smile, Disappointment, Boy, Learning

“Sometimes you men are like lizards, sunning on the stones of a crumbled house, thinking: “what a nice basking-spot someone built for me.””

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 9, “Cold and Curses” (p. 207).

Men, Thinking, Sun, Housing

“Godzilla 2014 missed the mark primarily because it is not an origins story. Gojira was a monster of our own making. Similarly Gino was supposed to impose nature’s response to our meddling. But G2014 pre-existed genetic modifications and nuclear testing. We have no responsibility for him, nor the mutos either. They come from a time that never was, millions of years ago, “when the world was much more radioactive than it is today”. The story implies that mutos ‘eat radiation’. In the film, they can track it through every kind of protective shielding, and they eat nuclear devices like fruit -metallic peal and all. I guess millions of years ago, nuclear missiles grew on trees, and kaiju were common even though they’re absent from the fossil record -with only one top-secret exception. As an advocate of science education with a deep interest in paleontology, and as someone who would rather see humans held accountable for what they do to their environment, this film was very disappointing. As an atheist, it was even worse. The star of the film not only has impossible dimensions and an inexplicable power, he is also immortal. He’s been alive forever, and spends all his time sleeping. He awakens only he senses submarines or the arrival of other kaiju, because he has a mission to protect humanity. G2014 put the ‘god’ in Godzilla. The director called him a god, and some of the characters in the movie describe him as a god too. So he’s not a lizard, not a dinosaur, but one of the Lovecraftian great old ones like Cthulhu. In a video I made years ago, I too joked about Godzilla being a god. But it was still somewhat disappointing to see him depicted that way.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Weighing in on Godzilla http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2014/06/08/weighing-in-on-godzilla/ (June 8, 2014)

God, Secret, World, Education

“Dinosaurs are not lizards, and vice versa. Lizards are scaley reptiles of an ancient bloodline. The oldest lizards antedate the earliest dinosaurs by a full thirty million years. A few large lizards, such as the man-eating Komodo dragon, have been called "relicts of the dinosaur age", but this phrase is historically incorrect. No lizard ever evolved the birdlike characteristics peculiar to each and every dinosaur. A big lizard never resembled a small dinosaur except for a few inconsequential details of the teeth. Lizards never walk with the erect, long-striding gait that distinguishes the dinosaurlike ground birds today or the birdlike dinosaurs of the Mesozoic.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 22-23
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Age, Bird

“Lizards don't look anything like dinosaurs. Why doesn't anyone understand this?… Ignore what you've seen in the cheesy old movies made by those who don't know anything; there's not even one dinosaur that looks anything like a lizard. It's so obvious it bothers me that no one can see this.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Geerup's Terrible Lizard Classification https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhZeowON8l8 (July 28, 2009)

Understanding

“The lizard dragged the priest’s body back to her nest, and her children feasted very well. As for the rifle, it lay in the grass where Father Gomez had laid it down, quietly turning to rust.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000), Ch. 36 : The Broken Arrow

Children, Grass

“What would happen to a reptile if you put him in the Garden of Eden and let him live to be 900 years old? You'd have a big lizard - a really big lizard! Dinosaurs were big lizards that lived with Adam and Eve before the Flood came. You can get these Jackson chameleons right now at the pet store. What's he going to look like at about 15 tons? Probably some kind of triceratops.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

“You might also see why it seemed a bit odd, to Radchaai ears, to hear someone who believed gravity wells were the land of the dead call people superstitious for worshiping a lizard.”

Ann Leckie book Ancillary Justice

Source: Ancillary Justice (2013), Chapter 4 (p. 54)

People, Dead

“Duckbills were supposedly croc-style swimmers, moving by strong, easy, side-to-side flexures of their tail. Therefore, the optimal design would feature vertical tail spines. But duckbill spines all slanted strongly backward, exactly as in land-living lizards, not in swimmers.
Another problem in the duckbill's swimming equipment lies in the profile of the tail. The deepest part of the croc's tail is close to the end, because the end swings through a wider arc than does the base in moving side to side. Thus the tail is deepest where it can do the most good in pushing against the water. All powerful tail-scullers have such deep tail ends. But duckbill tails were deepest at the hips and become progressively narrower from top-to-bottom toward the tip - another caudal feature nearly totally maladapted for its primary function.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 153
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Optimism, Problem, Strong, Water

“Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly
as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand
when the sunrise brightens the river's memory and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound.
Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends
and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens
over its lost name, when the hunched island was called
'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from' But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale
the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned,
its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes
ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries,
that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees.
These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space
for a single God where the old gods stood before, The first god was a gommier. The generator
began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw,
sent the chips flying like mackrel over water into trembling weeds”

Derek Walcott book Omeros

"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), Omeros

God, Tree, Silence, Water

“You are my favorite movie star / You are my big buddy / You are a low-down rotten man / You are crazy like a roll lizard”

Wesley Willis (1963–2003) American singer-songwriter

Arnold Schwarzenegger
Lyrics, Solo

Star

“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

“The original 1954 Japanese film, Gojira was iconic, and only made a couple mistakes of any significance. (1)They killed him in the end, and we saw his body turned to skeleton. Not the best way to begin 60 years worth of sequels. (2) Godzilla was depicted as a dinosaur, and was associated with living trilobites. Even if there was some sort of ‘realm that time forgot’ out in the Pacific somewhere, Trilobites were already extinct before the first dinosaurs, and Godzilla was clearly no dinosaur. The conceptual artists reportedly referenced illustrations of dinosaurs, but that’s not what they rendered. All bi-pedal dinosaurs [Therapods] were digigrade, walking on their toes, like birds, and usually only three or four digits. Godzilla was plantigrade and pentadactyle, (having five digits and walking on the whole foot) just like lizards. It even looks like a lizard, apart from the fact that no reptile has an actual nose or external ears. In a sense, what Toho pictures created was actually an oriental dragon. These tend to mix reptilian and mammalian traits. Amusingly in 1954, Toho made a giant lizard and called it a dinosaur. In 1998, Tristar re-designed Godzilla as a dinosaur, but called it a lizard. Of course that wasn’t the only thing Tristar did wrong. They tried to ruin the monster completely. They took away the only thing that worked in decades of sequels, the look of the monster itself. Then they took away everything that made Godzilla appealing to Kaiju fans, then they tied it down and shot it. Such disrespect. If you’re going to make a movie that already has a fan-base, and they are the ones who will decide whether your film will pay off, respect those fans and the story they’re paying to see.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Weighing in on Godzilla http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2014/06/08/weighing-in-on-godzilla/ (June 8, 2014)

Way, Bird, Sense, Time

“And whilst the lizard’s having a kip, the scorpion says, ‘Tell ya what: I’ll do you a little deal…”

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

Xfm 04 May 2002
On Nature

“It has become an axiom that, to accomplish results organization is requisite. Nevertheless, there is "organization" and "organization."That this is so appears clearly from the fact that the pure and simmplers have been going about saying to the workers: "Organize! Organize!"and after they have been saying that, and have been organizing"and "organizing" for the past thirty or forty years, we find that they are virtually where they started, if not worse off; that their "organization" parttakes of the nature of the lizard, whose tail destroys what his foreparts build up.”

Daniel De Leon (1852–1914) American newspaper editor

Organization
Reform or Revolution (1896)

Nature, Appearance, Past

“I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizard, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the color seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail.
Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendor. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag.”

Karen Blixen book Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)

Beauty, Color, Soul, Imagination

“I have a liking old
For thee, though manifold
Stories, I know, are told
Not to thy credit;
How one (or two at most)
Drops make a cat a ghost—
Useless, except to roast—
Doctors have said it:How they who use fusees
All grow by slow degrees
Brainless as chimpanzees,
Meagre as lizards;
Go mad, and beat their wives;
Plunge (after shocking lives)
Razors and carving knives
Into their gizzards.”

Charles Stuart Calverley (1831–1884) British poet

Ode to Tobacco.

Cats, Madness

“I realized, then, that I had stood without intending to. Flight reaction, I said to myself. Instinctive. Upon experiencing close adversaries. The lizard part of the brain.”

Philip K. Dick The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Page 158
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

Parting

“Demanding an “ape-man” is actually just as silly as asking to see a mammal-man, or a half-human, half-vertebrate. How about a half dachshund, half dog? It’s the same thing. One may as well insist on seeing a town half way between Los Angeles and California. Because the problem with bridging the gap between humans and apes is that there is no gap because humans are apes –definitely and definitively. The word, “ape” doesn’t refer to a species, but to a parent category of collective species, and we’re included. This is no arbitrary classification like the creationists use. It was first determined via meticulous physical analysis by Christian scientists a century before Darwin, and has been confirmed in recent years with new revelations in genetics. Furthermore, it is impossible to define all the characters exclusively indicative of every known member of the family of apes without describing our own genera as one among them. Consequently, we can and have proven that humans are apes in exactly the same way that lions are cats, and iguanas are lizards, and whales are mammals. So where is the proof that humans descend from apes? How about the fact that we’re still apes right now!”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU, Youtube (May 8, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Family, Dogs, Angels, Way

“He remembers when lizards were fish. Thats how old he is!”

Harry Hill (1964) English comedian, doctor

Harry Hill's TV Burp

Fish

“Only the mercenaries were here by choice. To Simon, the minds of men who would come to this of their own will were suddenly as incomprehensible as the thoughts of spiders or lizards—less so, even, for the small creatures of the earth almost always fled from danger. These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they could force their will on the weak and peace-loving. If God allowed such madness to be, Simon could not help thinking, then He was an old God who had lost His grip.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 1, Chapter 12, “Raven’s Dance” (pp. 392-393).

Love, Men, God, World

“Godzilla is the ultimate culmination of the "who cares about plot" summer movie. A loose remake of the 1954 "classic" Japanese monster movie, Godzilla, King of the Monsters (which is itself pretty thin in the story department), Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's big-budget lizard-stomps-Manhattan disaster flick has been written with the brain dead in mind. The script isn't just "dumbed down," it's lobotomized. Godzilla lives and dies on special effects alone.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=58 of Godzilla (1998). One-and-a-half star reviews

Summer, Dead

“Painting is the magic art, the fire set alight on the windows of the rich dwelling, as on those of the humble hovel, from the last rays of the setting sun, it is the long mark, the humid mark, the fluent and still mark that the dying wave etches on the hot sand, it is the darting of the immortal lizard on the rock burnt by the midday heat, it is the rainbow of conciliation, on sad May afternoons, after the storm has passed, down there, making a dark backdrop to the almond trees in flower, to the gardens with their washed colours, to the ploughmen's huts, smiling and tranquil, it is the livid cloud chased by the vehement blowing of Aeolus enraged, it is the nebulous disk of the fleeting moon behind the ripped-open funereal curtain of a disturbed sky in the deep of night, it is the blood of the bull stabbed in the arena, of the warrior fallen in the heat of battle, of Adonis' immaculate thigh wounded by the obstinate boar's curved tusk, it is the sail swollen with the winds of distant seas, it is the centuries-old tree browned in the autumn..”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from the first lines in De Cirico's essay 'Painting', 1938; from http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/211_Painting_1938_Metaphysical_Art.pdf 'Painting', 1938 - G. de Chirico, presentation to the catalogue of his solo exhibition Mostra personale del pittore Giorgio de Chirico, Galleria Rotta, Genoa, May 1938], p. 211
1920s and later

Sadness, Smile, Art, Flowers

“Today's American bemoans the extermination of the passenger pigeon and the threatened extinction of the whooping crane and the ivory billed woodpecker; he contributes to conservation organizations that seek to preserve the Hawaiian goose, the sea otter of the Aleutian Islands, the lizard of the Galapágos Islands… But who ever shed a tear over the loss of the native American cultures?”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

1st edition
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Tear, Loss, Sea

“"You kids think you invented sex," my mother was fond of saying. But hadn't we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn't we all come away feeling we'd discovered something unspeakably modern? What produced in others a feeling of exhilaration left Jason and me with a mortifying feeling of guilt. We fled the room as if, in our fumblings, we had uncapped some virus we still might escape if we ran fast enough. Had one of the counselors not caught me scaling the fence, I felt certain I could have made it back to Raleigh by morning, skittering across the surface of the ocean like one of those lizards often featured on television wildlife programs.”

David Sedaris Naked

Essay: "I like guys". (p.106-107) [Page numbers per the 2006 Abacus paperback edition.]
Naked (1997)

Feeling, Sex, Training, Thinking

“My cry could only waken him. And what
a poor gift: I, confined to my own form,
when I used to be a birch, a lizard
shedding times and satin skins
in many shimmering hues.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"I Am Too Close..."
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)

Time, Cry

“One great mystery is why sexual reproduction became dominant for higher life-forms. Optimization theory says it should be otherwise.
Take a fish or lizard, ideally suited to her environment, with just the right internal chemistry, agility, camouflage—whatever it takes to be healthy, fecund, and successful in her world. Despite all this, she cannot pass on her perfect characteristics. After sex, her offspring will be jumbles, getting only half of their program from her and half their re-sorted genes somewhere else.
Sex inevitably ruins perfection. Parthenogenesis would seem to work better—at least theoretically. In simple, static environments, well-adapted lizards who produce duplicate daughters are known to have advantages over those using sex.
Yet, few complex animals are known to perform self-cloning. And those species exist in ancient, stable deserts, always in close company with a related sexual species.
Sex has flourished because environments are seldom static. Climate, competition, parasites—all make for shifting conditions. What was ideal in one generation may be fatal the next. With variability, your offspring get a fighting chance. Even in desperate times, one or more of them may have what it takes to meet new challenges and thrive.
Each style has its advantages, then. Cloning offers stability and preservation of excellence. Sex gives adaptability to changing times. In nature it is usually one or the other. Only lowly creatures such as aphids have the option of switching back and forth.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 8 (pp. 123-124)
Glory Season (1993)

Life, World, Sex, Optimism

“[…] Reptiles never stop growing, so before the Flood came, when the reptiles lived to be 900 years old, they would get to be really big. Dinosaurs were just big lizards that lived with Adam and Eve before the Flood came.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

“Since that not far-distant time when, tired of being poor, I had made up my mind to cast my lot with the multitude in Paris, I had tried to lay aside my old self, as lizards do their skins, and I had almost succeeded.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

The Age for Love
Context: Since that not far-distant time when, tired of being poor, I had made up my mind to cast my lot with the multitude in Paris, I had tried to lay aside my old self, as lizards do their skins, and I had almost succeeded. In a former time, a former time that was but yesterday, I knew — for in a drawer full of poems, dramas and half-finished tales I had proof of it — that there had once existed a certain Jules Labarthe who had come to Paris with the hope of becoming a great man. That person believed in Literature with a capital "L;" in the Ideal, another capital; in Glory, a third capital. He was now dead and buried. Would he some day, his position assured, begin to write once more from pure love of his art? Possibly, but for the moment I knew only the energetic, practical Labarthe, who had joined the procession with the idea of getting into the front rank, and of obtaining as soon as possible an income of thirty thousand francs a year. What would it matter to this second individual if that vile Pascal should boast of having stolen a march on the most delicate, the most powerful of the heirs of Balzac, since I, the new Labarthe, was capable of looking forward to an operation which required about as much delicacy as some of the performances of my editor-in-chief? I had, as a matter of fact, a sure means of obtaining the interview. It was this: When I was young and simple I had sent some verses and stories to Pierre Fauchery, the same verses and stories the refusal of which by four editors had finally made me decide to enter the field of journalism. The great writer was traveling at this time, but he had replied to me. I had responded by a letter to which he again replied, this time with an invitation to call upon him. I went I did not find him. I went again. I did not find him that time. Then a sort of timidity prevented my returning to the charge. So I had never met him. He knew me only as the young Elia of my two epistles. This is what I counted upon to extort from him the favor of an interview which he certainly would refuse to a mere newspaper man. My plan was simple; to present myself at his house, to be received, to conceal my real occupation, to sketch vaguely a subject for a novel in which there should occur a discussion upon the Age for Love, to make him talk and then when he should discover his conversation in print — here I began to feel some remorse. But I stifled it with the terrible phrase, "the struggle for life," and also by the recollection of numerous examples culled from the firm with which I now had the honor of being connected.

Distant, Time

“We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about.”

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

34 min 00 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Persistence of Memory [Episode 11]
Context: What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities.

Behavior

“mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida,
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
For now the noonday quiet holds the hill:
The grasshopper is silent in the grass:
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead.
The purple flower droops: the golden bee
Is lily-cradled: I alone awake.
My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,
My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim,
And I am all aweary of my life.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

" Oenone http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/britlit/tenn/oenone.html", st. 3 (1832)

Love, Life, Flowers, Tear

“The proportions, the black hair, the dark eyes, everything was the same. Only, giant. It short-circuited his neural wiring. The lizard living at the back of his brain kept jumping back and forth between Mate with it! and Flee from it!”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 42 (p. 459)

“Would you like red or white wine with your piece of vulcanised lizards cock from the moon? How about an extra bread roll, there to dip in your otter vomit pate?”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

And you're going, "Red or white wine, well, what would you like, darling? I don't know, what would you like?", all to block out the thought that's in your mind which is - "We're gonna die, we're all gonna die, we're all gonna die, right now. The plane is made of metal, the wings are made of metal, we're all eating, and I'm the only non-terrorist aboard, we're all going to die."
On travelling by aeroplane.
Like, Totally (2006)

Wine

“What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism.”

Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist

America Is Too Dumb for TV News https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/america-is-too-dumb-for-tv-news-157274/, The Rolling Stones, Matt Taibbi, November 25, 2015

Country

“Would you be upset if you found out your dog was just a robot and it was being driven by a lizard?”

Gavin Free (1988) English filmmaker

"RT Podcast: Ep. 240" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FJfRkg2dfQ. youtube.com. October 22, 2013. Retrieved May 20, 2022.

Dogs