Quotes about wild
page 11

“I want to be spontaneous like a wild animal”

Giovanni Morassutti (1980) Italian actor, theatre director and cultural entrepreneur.

“Here is my speech from the Brilliant Minds conference in Stockholm. Since I don't have the video yet, I'm sharing it like this. Around the year 2030, we will be in a position where we probably set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of industrialized society have taken place. Including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%. And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale. Furthermore these scientific calculations do not include most unforeseen tipping points and feed back loops. Nor do these calculations include already locked in warming hidden by toxic air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity, which is absolutely necessary to make the Paris Agreement work on a global scale. And these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses.”

Greta Thunberg (2003) Swedish climate change activist

Greta Thunberg's FB page https://www.facebook.com/732846497083173/posts/853561781678310?s=723487177&sfns=mo, (15 June 2019) 2019

Making love, Change, Time, Dependency

“Under the new circumstances discontent is universal; all the workers feel depressed under capitalist superiority; fuel for explosions has accumulated everywhere. It is not for others, it is for themselves if they join the fight. As long as they feel isolated, afraid to lose their job, uncertain what the comrades will do, without firm unity, they shrink from action. Once, however, they take up the fight, they are changed into new personalities; selfish fear recedes to the background and forth spring the forces of community, solidarity and devotion, rousing courage and perseverance. These are contagious; the example of fighting activity rouses in others, who feel in themselves the same forces awakening, the spirit of mutual and of self-confidence. Thus the wild strike as a prairie fire may spring over to other enterprises and involve ever greater masses.”

Antonie Pannekoek (1873–1960) Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist

Section 2.2
Workers Councils (1947)

Fear, Feeling, Confidence, Spring

“Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she’s just had?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

“And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful.” Peaceful? "Why Women Aren’t Funny" https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/, Vanity Fair, (January 1, 2007). 2000s, 2007

Love, Death, Women, Men

“It can be considered by many to be foolhardy, especially when you’re messing with what’s considered a sacred text. But it’s also an irresistible challenge, isn’t it? It evokes so many different wild and outrageous and beautiful images that anyone who loves both novels and films can’t help but imagine what it would look like on the big screen. In this case I’m glad they took the challenge on. I think Marquez is glad too. Apparently he’s seen it and he’s responded favorably to it, he likes it. The trick is, as you aptly point out, is how to do it but how to do it well. Because it’s not an easy translation to make, and certainly nearly impossible when you’re talking about a great novel, which this is. The best you can hope for really is to capture the essence of the book, and I think the film has done that, which is good news.”

Benjamin Bratt (1963) American actor

On adapting a literary masterpiece for the big screen in “Interview: Benjamin Bratt” https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Interview-Benjamin-Bratt-6673.html in Cinema Blend

Love, Books, Making love, Beauty

“I am a writer. A fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on behalf of social and environmental causes or journals about expeditions to wild places. I have written more books of nonfiction because my fiction is an exploratory process — not laborious, merely long and slow and getting slower.”

Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) American novelist

The Paris Review interview (1999)

Books

“Is gene editing less ethical than human beings killing one another at wars and destroying wildlife on earth? A biomass study showed that humankind represents just 0.01% of all living things on the planet, and yet humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of all plants.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

War, Study, Loss

“I think the most important thing is to instantly give them a sense of who you are and how you feel in that moment. If a speaker is nervous and tells the audience that, people immediately contextualize it and respond accordingly. If a performer is in a good mood or feeling wild and crazy and says so, I’ve found, the crowd will be good at matching that energy. So for me, the rapport is built by a genuineness conveyed as quickly as possible.”

Trevor Noah (1984) South African comedian

On connecting with your audience in “Life’s Work: An Interview with Trevor Noah” https://hbr.org/2018/09/lifes-work-an-interview-with-trevor-noah in Harvard Business Review (September-October, 2018) Personal life

People, Feeling, Mood, Thinking

“This Arthur is the hero of many wild tales among the Britons even in our own day, but assuredly deserves to be the object of reliable history rather than of false and dreaming fable.”

William of Malmesbury book Gesta Regum Anglorum

Gesta Regum Anglorum (1125), quoted in M. J. Cohen and John Major (eds.), History in Quotations (Cassell, 2004), p. 160

Dreams, History, Falseness

“After all the wild claims made about their findings, the experts themselves have finally spoken… In a normal setting, the ASI findings should finish once and for all the campaign of history denial by the Marxists and their Muslim camp followers. But the world of Indian secularism is a fantasy-land where hard facts don’t count for much. So, a great many diehards unflinchingly reject the findings of science.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya, the Finale (2003)

World, History, Science

“Doniger’s school of scholarship universalizes Freudian methodologies and pathologies, and combines them with obscure Indic materials to weave wild theories about Indian culture. Indians advocating Freudian psychoanalysis have simply accepted and mimicked the Western theories without independently verified clinical and empirical data to establish their applicability in Indian contexts.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

Quoted in Antonio de Nicolas, Krishnan Ramaswamy, and Aditi Banerjee (eds.) (2007), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis Of Hinduism Studies In America (Publisher: Rupa & Co., p. 39)
About Wendy Doniger

School, Universe

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A. M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Color, Business, Tree, Grass

“I have seen a mother mouse in a moment of peril flee from her home among the falling pieces of a cord-wood pile, and disappear under the roots of a neighbouring oak. I have seen her a little later, recovered from her initial dismay, making her way back again, clambering along among the tangled timbers, stopping now and then to look and listen, her eyes wild and anxious, and her whole little body quaking with excitement. I have seen her go among the ruins of her dwelling, take a poor little squeaking young one in her mouth, and hurry away with it to the gloomy refuge in the roots of the oak. I have watched her return again and again, each time taking in her careful teeth the tiny body of a babe, until five mouthfuls of precious pink were safely lodged within the fortress of the oak. And I could as soon believe that woman, when she saves her children from some fearful harm, is a soulless machine as think that that brave little woodmother, out there alone under the trees, snatching her darlings from the jaws of death, was a heroine without sense or feeling.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"The Common-Sense View", pp. 184–185
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Psychical Kinship

Death, Children, Fear, Making love

“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

“Why are non-human beings ostracized and treated by humans with no consideration save as they administer to selfish human ends? Whence the doctrine that non-human species were made for the hominine species, and that there is no logic or sanity in their existence save as they feed or slave for their human tyrants? Because they are dumb, that is, because their language is not understood by human minds, and because they are wild, that is, because they are for the most part unassociated with human animals, and because the civilized consciousness, which is barely able to realize the kinship of human beings, is yet too feeble and rudimentary to comprehend the solidarity of all beings.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, p. 119

Animals, Parting, Selfishness

“Inventions are a blessing. They tame the wild tendencies of the inanimate and train them to do human bidding. They save human bodies hard and laborious exertions by becoming their obsequious aids. But they are not invariable and universal blessings. The sad and peculiar conditions prevailing in human industry cause inventions to be to many human beings a catastrophe and a dread. To those who are able to own them and have lands on which to operate them they are blessings. But to the great disinherited class, who have nothing on earth but their hands, inventions are a disadvantage and an evil.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Problem of Industry, pp. 40–41

Sadness, Universe, Evil, Training

“The long struggle is ended. I must pass away. Good-by. O, men are so cold and hard and half conscious toward their suffering fellows. Nobody understands. O my mother! and O my little girl! What will become of you? And the poor four-footed! May the long years be merciful! Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Suicide note

Men, Girl, Understanding, Bird

“I sit here tonight in this great city and think back along the years. Life is so full and so different now – full of teaching, writing and problem solving. But, oh, those precious memories away back there in the morning! The prairies are gone, where we used to gather wild strawberries and tiger lilies, but the old school house still stands, I am told, where the High Bank lifts its formidableness above the singing stream.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"A One Time Resident Writes", Atchison County Journal, 23 Mar. 1916

Life, School, Problem, Thinking

“Sorry, just very very briefly, the Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led Communism. And Jewish-led Communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia and they were afraid of the same thing. And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff.”

Stefan Molyneux (1966) libertarian philosopher, writer, speaker, and online broadcaster

Describing the Holocaust, "Migratory Patterns of Predatory Immigrants" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2RVIi6M7oM, YouTube (March 20, 2016), @4:45

Communication

“Accustomed as we are by hereditary prejudices an absolutely unsound education and training to see Government, legislation and magistracy everywhere around, we have come to believe that man would tear his fellow man to pieces like a wild beast the day the police took his eye off him; that chaos would come about if authority were overthrown during a revolution. And with out eyes shut we pass by thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely, without any intervention of the law, and attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under government tutelage.”

Peter Kropotkin book The Conquest of Bread

Ch 11 : Free Agreement
The Conquest of Bread (1892)

Education, Law, Tear, Training

“I had to act with the utmost circumspection to save myself from the suspicion of insanity. My memory of the Law, of the two dead sailors, of the ambuscades of the darkness, of the body in the canebrake, haunted me; and, unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came, instead of that confidence and sympathy I had expected, a strange enhancement of the uncertainty and dread I had experienced during my stay upon the island. No one would believe me; I was almost as queer to men as I had been to the Beast People. I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions. They say that terror is a disease, and anyhow I can witness that for several years now a restless fear has dwelt in my mind, such a restless fear as a half-tamed lion cub may feel.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 22: The Man Alone

Men, People, Fear, Disease

“We would find ourselves pulling out of the European Community straight into the arms of the wild men of the left. The whole country would be plagued with Foot and Benn disease. … The left are not really all that interested in the Common Market. What they want is for Britain to break her treaty obligations and pull out of the Community so that they could impose their own extreme socialist state in Britain.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech in Catterick, Yorkshire (29 May 1975), quoted in The Times (30 May 1975), p. 4
Post-Prime Ministerial

Men, Disease, Communication, Country

“Let’s stop making wild guesses and start gathering data.”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Epilogue (p. 122)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

Making love

“And may I ask you, Europeans, what country you have ever raised to better conditions? Wherever you have found weaker races, you have exterminated them by the roots, as it were. You have settled on their lands and they are gone forever. What is the history of your America, your Australia and New Zealand, your Pacific Islands and South Africa? Where are those aboriginal races there today? They are all exterminated, you have killed them outright, as if they were wild beasts. It is only where you have not the power to do so, and there only, that other nations are still alive.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Swami Vivekananda Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

History, Country

“In the beginning, some wild and mischievous beast was killed and eaten, and then some little bird or fish was entrapped. And the love of slaughter, being first experimented and exercised in these, at last passed even to the laboring ox, and the sheep that clothes us, and to the poor cock that keeps the house; until by little and little, unsatiableness being strengthened by use, men came to the slaughter of men, to bloodshed and wars.”

Plutarch book Moralia

II, 4
Moralia, Of Eating of Flesh

Love, Men, War, Making love

“When beasts went together in companies, there was said to be a pride of lions; a lepe of leopards; an herd of harts, of bucks, and of all sorts of deer; a bevy of roes; a sloth of bears; a singular of boars; a sownder of wild swine; a dryft of tame swine; a route of wolves; a harras of horses; a rag of colts; a stud of mares; a pace of asses; a baren of mules, a team of oxen; a drove of kine; a flock of sheep; a tribe of goats; a sculk of foxes; a cete of badgers; a richess of martins; a fesynes of ferrets; a huske or a down of hares; a nest of rabbits; a clower of cats, and a kendel of young cats; a shrewdness of apes; and a labour of moles.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 22
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Collective nouns

Cats, Swine, Horse

“He should have been in the same rank as Laurence Olivier, but he was very wild and had a scandal around him all the time and I think in theater circles that would not be approved of.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

Sir John Gielgud, in “Richard Burton, 58, is Dead; Rakish Stage and Screen Star”

Thinking, Time

“This is why Kapoor and Balmond have emerged as embattled heroes of public art. Their Orbit tower is not consensual, or easy to make sense of. It is wild and unexpected. It is, I believe, the most exciting British public artwork since House. Those who commissioned and created it deserve acclaim for choosing electricity over dull consensus.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish Kapoor's Olympic Park sculpture sends public art into Orbit

Making love, Art, Sense, Housing

“When girls go wild, they show their tits to people. When women go wild, they kill men and drown their kids in a tub.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

Chewed Up

Women, Men, People, Girl

“When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. xi

Reading

“A wild impetuous whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly melody dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic, honest; true simplicity of strength; with its lightning-fire, with its soft dewy pity;—like the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters

God, Home, Passion, Heart

“We commenced research where modern conjecture closes its faithless wings. And with us, those were the common elements of science which the sages of to-day disdain as wild chimeras, or despair of as unfathomable mysteries.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton book Zanoni

Quoted by H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Part One, Science, Ch. 1 (1877)
Zanoni (1842)

Science, Despair

“On the day when the human conscience shall lose its bearings, on the day when success shall carry the day before that forum, all will be at an end. The last moral gleam will reascend to heaven. Darkness will be in the mind of man. You will have nothing to do but to devour one another, wild beasts that you are!”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part First, III
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Success

“DESOLATE are the mansions of the fair, the stations in Minia, where they rested, and those where they fixed their abodes! Wild are the hills of Goul, and deserted is the summit of Rijaam.
The canals of Rayaan are destroyed: the remains of them are laid bare and smoothed by the floods, like characters engraved on the solid rocks.
Dear ruins! Many a year has been closed, many a month, holy and unhallowed, has elapsed, since I exchanged tender vows with their fair inhabitants!
The rainy constellations of spring have made their hills green and luxuriant: the drops from the thunder-clouds have drenched them with profuse as well as with gentle showers:
Showers, from every nightly cloud, from every cloud veiling the horizon at day-break, and from every evening cloud, responsive with hoarse murmurs.
Here the wild eringo-plants raise their tops: here the antelopes bring forth their young, by the sides of the valley: and here the ostriches drop their eggs.
The large-eyed wild-cows lie suckling their young, a few days old—their young, who will soon become a herd on the plain.
The torrents have cleared the rubbish, and disclosed the traces of habitations, as the reeds of a writer restore effaced letters in a book;
Or as the black dust, sprinkled over the varied marks on a fair hand, brings to view with a brighter tint the blue stains of woad.
I stood asking news of the ruins concerning their lovely habitants; but what avail my questions to dreary rocks, who answer them only by their echo?”

Labīd (560–661) Sahabah and poet

Translated by C. J. Lyall, quoted in Arabian Poetry, p. 41-42. First Stanza, lines 1-10 https://archive.org/details/arabianpoetryfo00clougoog/page/n127/mode/2up The Poem of Labīd (translated by C. J. Lyall in 1881)

Love, Lie, Books, Making love

“Once a virus gets into an intensive poultry shed it can move quickly through the flock, constantly replicating itself. Any "errors" or changes to the genetic code during replication don't get repaired: this is how the virus mutates and new variant strains emerge. The tragedy is that while intensive farms provide ideal conditions for the emergence of new aggressive disease strains, wild birds can then become infected too. Experience from the 2005 outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (AI) H5N1 suggests that the disease is more likely spread along major road and rail routes than on the flight routes of migratory birds.”

Philip Lymbery book Farmageddon

Farmageddon (2014)

Disease, Error, Bird, Change

“If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; And that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came,
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Now wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 4
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)

Love, Making love, Nature, Past

“They’re your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they’re going to flare off in different directions like wild fireworks, the more they’re going to surprise and disappoint you.”

Alastair Reynolds book House of Suns

Introduction to Part 8 (pp. 485-486)
House of Suns (2008)

Children, Disappointment

“If all men were upon an equality in point of means, England would become what the wilds of America are, inhabited by wild men; nobody would work except just to provide food and raiment for the day; and our country would become the most beggarly upon the earth, instead of being what it formerly was (and I hope and trust will be again) the pride of its people and the envy of the world.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

‘To the Labourers of England’, Political Register (2 April 1831), p. 8
1830s

Men, People, World, Food

“It seems, moreover, that my argument has some relevance to choices we must make even now. There are some species of large predatory animals, such as the Siberian tiger, that are currently on the verge of extinction. If we do nothing to preserve it, the Siberian tiger as a species may soon become extinct. The number of extant Siberian tigers has been low for a considerable period. Any ecological disruption occasioned by their dwindling numbers has largely already occurred or is already occurring. If their number in the wild declines from several hundred to zero, the impact of their disappearance on the ecology of the region will be almost negligible. Suppose, however, that we could repopulate their former wide-ranging habitat with as many Siberian tigers as there were during the period in which they flourished in their greatest numbers, and that that population could be sustained indefinitely. That would mean that herbivorous animals in the extensive repopulated area would again, and for the indefinite future, live in fear and that an incalculable number would die in terror and agony while being devoured by a tiger. In a case such as this, we may actually face the kind of dilemma I called attention to in my article, in which there is a conflict between the value of preserving existing species and the value of preventing suffering and early death for an enormously large number of animals.”

Jeff McMahan (philosopher) (1954) American philosopher

" Predators: A Response https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/predators-a-response/", The New York Times, 28 Sept. 2010

Death, Fear, Making love, Suffering

“[I]f suffering is bad for animals when we cause it, it is also bad for them when other animals cause it. That suffering is bad for those who experience it is not a human prejudice; nor is an effort to prevent wild animals from suffering a moralistic attempt to police the behavior of other animals. Even if we are not morally required to prevent suffering among animals in the wild for which we are not responsible, we do have a moral reason to prevent it, just as we have a general moral reason to prevent suffering among human beings that is independent both of the cause of the suffering and of our relation to the victims. The main constraint on the permissibility of acting on our reason to prevent suffering is that our action should not cause bad effects that would be worse than those we could prevent.”

Jeff McMahan (philosopher) (1954) American philosopher

" The Meat Eaters http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/", The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2010

Bad luck, Behavior, Effort, Suffering

“Put starkly, most of the wild nature that was here fifty years ago is gone. And still we seek to grow the human economy, and cheer when that growth accelerates.”

Shaun Chamberlin

"The Sequel: Life After Economic Growth", Tikkun (2018) https://www.tikkun.org/the-sequel-life-after-economic-growth

Nature

“At first sight, domesticated animals may seem much better off than their wild cousins and ancestors. Wild buffaloes spend their days searching for food, water and shelter, and are constantly threatened by lions, parasites, floods and droughts. Domesticated cattle, by contrast, enjoy care and protection from humans. People provide cows and calves with food, water and shelter, they treat their diseases, and protect them from predators and natural disasters. True, most cows and calves sooner or later find themselves in the slaughterhouse. Yet does that make their fate any worse than that of wild buffaloes? Is it better to be devoured by a lion than slaughtered by a man? Are crocodile teeth kinder than steel blades?”

Yuval Noah Harari (1976) Israeli historian

" Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/25/industrial-farming-one-worst-crimes-history-ethical-question", The Guardian, 25 Sept. 2011

Fate, People, Making love, Disease

“But Parz was better than nothing: it offered stability, regulation, a framework to live in. People gripe about their tithes—and nobody’s going to pretend that the Committee gets it right all the time—but most of us would prefer taxes to living wild. With all respect to you, my friend.”

Stephen Baxter book Flux

He bit into his cake. “And that’s still true today; as true as it ever was.”

Flux (novel) (1993), Chapter 20 (p. 497)

People, Time

“Human exploitation of animals is horrific and needs to be stamped out, but we should consider taking action against another considerable source of pain and suffering for wild animals — nature itself.”

Jacy Reese (1992) American social scientist

[Wild animals endure illness, injury, and starvation. We should help., December 14, 2015, Vox, https://www.vox.com/2015/12/14/9873012/wild-animals-suffering]

Pain, Nature, Suffering, Animals

“I have been looking for spontaneous generation for twenty years without discovering it. No, I do not judge it impossible. But what allows you to make it the origin of life? You place matter before life and you decide that matter has existed for all eternity. How do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel scientists to consider that life has existed during eternity, and not matter? You pass from matter to life because your intelligence of today cannot conceive things otherwise. How do you know that in ten thousand years, one will not consider it more likely that matter has emerged from life? You move from matter to life because your current intelligence, so limited compared to what will be the future intelligence of the naturalist, tells you that things cannot be understood otherwise. If you want to be among the scientific minds, what only counts is that you will have to get rid of a priori reasoning and ideas, and you will have to do necessary deductions not giving more confidence than we should to deductions from wild speculation.”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

Original: (fr) La génération spontanée, je la cherche sans la découvrir depuis vingt ans. Non, je ne la juge pas impossible. Mais quoi donc vous autorise à vouloir qu'elle ait été l'origine de la vie? Vous placez la matière avant la vie et vous faites la matière existante de toute éternité. Qui vous dit que, le progrès incessant de la science n'obligera pas les savants, qui vivront dans un siècle, dans mille ans, dans dix mille ans... à affirmer que la vie a été de toute éternité et non la matière.? Vous passez de la matière à la vie parce que votre intelligence actuelle, si bornée par rapport à ce que sera l'intelligence des naturalistes futurs, vous dit qu'elle ne peut comprendre autrement les choses. Qui m'assure que dans dix mille ans on ne considérera pas que c'est de la vie qu'on croira impossible de ne pas passer à la matière? Si vous voulez être au nombre des esprits scientifiques, s, qui seuls comptent, il faut vous débarrasser des idées et des raisonnements a priori et vous en tenir aux déductions nécessaires des faits établis et ne pas accorder plus de confiance qu'il ne faut aux déductions de pures hypothèses."

As quoted in Pasteur et la philosophie (2004), by Patrice Pinet, p. 63

Partially quoted in Louis Pasteur : Free Lance of Science (1950) by René Dubos, p 396

Life, Making love, Confidence, Intelligence

“When'er with soft serenity she smiled,
Or caught the orient blush of quick surprise,
How sweetly mutable, how brightly wild,
The liquid lustre darted from her eyes?”

William Mason (poet) (1724–1797) poet

Source: On the Death of a Lady (1760), The poems of William Mason, vol. 1, 1822, p. 86 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101032743732&view=1up&seq=94

Smile

“...no Monarchy limited or unlimited, nor any of the old Republics, can possibly be safe as long as this strange, nameless, wild, enthusiastic thing is established in the Center of Europe.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to John Trevor (January 1791), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789–December 1791 (1967), p. 218
1790s

“The universe is always stranger than you think.
It didn’t matter how broad her imagination was, how cynical, how joyous and open, how well researched or wild minded. The universe was always stranger. Every dream, every imagining, however lavish and improbable, inevitably fell short of the truth.”

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

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 50 (p. 522)

Truth, Dreams, Imagination, Thinking

“Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. Surely the lesson of the last decade is that budget deficits are not caused by wild-eyed spenders but by slow economic growth and periodic recessions, and any new recession would break all deficit records. In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. The experience of a number of European countries and Japan have borne this out. This country's own experience with tax reduction in 1954 has borne this out. And the reason is that only full employment can balance the budget, and tax reduction can pave the way to that employment. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1962, Address and Question and Answer Period at the Economic Club of New York

Truth, Way, Country

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

Edward Abbey book Down the River

"Down the River", p. 148
Desert Solitaire (1968)

Water

“War taken at the best is a frightful scourge to the human race; but because it is so the wisdom of ages has surrounded it with strict laws and usages, and has required formalities to be observed which shall act as a curb upon the wild passions of man, to prevent that scourge from being let loose unless under circumstances of full deliberation and from absolute necessity. You have dispensed with all these precautions.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1857/mar/03/resolution-moved-resumed-debate-fourth#column_1802 in the House of Commons against the Second Opium War (3 March 1857) 1850s

Wisdom, War, Age, Law

“In a history book, you can't imagine, you can't speculate, you can't conjure new worlds because that would ruin the history book. .... And in a novel you can't have too much fact-dumping, too much history, it just doesn't work, too much footnoting, again that ruins the story. So I love the fact that I can do speculation and imagination in one and go wild in a novel and then do proper, scrupulous research in the other. I think they compliment each other.”

Kate Williams (historian) (1974) British historian

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/entertainment-arts-17945784
Meet the Author: Kate Williams
BBC
3 May 2012
2 May 2021

Love, Books, World, Making love

“It was a dangerous area, for certain. There were saloons, prostitutes, everything. The real Wild West. There was no law to speak of; everyone carried weapons, and they used them. Gambling was rampant, and crime increased with the growing population.”

James Doolittle (1896–1993) United States Air Force Medal of Honor recipient

On the memories of his childhood place of Nome, Alaska in an 1993 interview, "The Extraordinary Life Of Aviation Legend Jimmy Doolittle" https://allthatsinteresting.com/jimmy-doolittle

Law

“To me "where the wild things are" is a place that exists in our minds; it's a place of liberty and shamelessness. It can take a split second or a lifetime to find it, but once you do, you'll be free.”

Alessia Cara (1996) Canadian singer

"Wild Things" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De30ET0dQpQ, Know-It-All (2015), New York: Def Jam Recordings

“There's a wild thing that exists in all of us. It lives in our passions, in the people we love, in our subconscious thoughts, our beliefs. It's even made a home in the darkest parts of us, but we can't be scared of it, we have to become it.”

Alessia Cara (1996) Canadian singer

"Wild Things" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De30ET0dQpQ, Know-It-All (2015), New York: Def Jam Recordings

Love, People, Home, Passion

“To me where the wild things are is a place that exists in our minds; it's a place of liberty and shamelessness. It can take a split second or a lifetime to find it, but once you do, you'll be free.”

Alessia Cara (1996) Canadian singer

"Wild Things" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De30ET0dQpQ, Know-It-All (2015), New York: Def Jam Recordings

“You are crying for freedom because you have allowed your temper to go wild.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Freedom, Cry

“Light, my light, the world-filling light,
the eye-kissing light,
the heart-sweetening light!
Ah, the light dances and the sky opens,
the wind runs wild, laughter passes over the earth,
the light is generosity, is shattered into gems,
and it scatters its golden aura in profusion”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://twitter.com/AKarpouzos/status/1459547844180951043

World, Kiss, Laughter, Light

“We looked o'er London, where men wither and choke,
Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
And lore of woods and wild wind prophecies,
Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke.”

Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832–1914) English literary critic and poet

"A Talk on Waterloo Bridge: The Last Sight of George Borrow", p. 150.
The Coming of Love and Other Poems (1897)

Men, Soul, Star

“I’m definitely still wild at heart. But I’ve struck bio-gravity.”

Jack Nicholson (1937) American actor, film director, producer, and writer

"'I used to feel irresistible to women. Not any more': The melancholy confessions of Jack Nicholson", dailymail.co.uk, 31 January 2011.

Heart

“Once, not so long ago, wild pig were common all over Europe, and they're great diggers and rootlers. So maybe the robin's boldness and friendliness with other kinds of animals started in prehistory, even before human beings arrived in Europe.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

"The Insatiable Appetites"
The Life of Birds (1998)

Animals

“When I die, I want people to play my music, go wild and freak out and do anything they want to do.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

People, Music

“The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow,
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me—
I will not, cannot go.”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

Spellbound (November 1837)

Tree, Night

“Beyond these wild winds and gloomy skies,
beyond death’s cloudy portal, there is a land where beauty never dies and love becomes immortal,
a land whose light is never dimmed by shadow,
where nothing beautiful can ever fade,
but blooms for aye eternal.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://twitter.com/AKarpouzos/status/1609906977001406466

Love, Death, Beauty, Light

“It is human instinct that makes it ferocious and wild. It could be anyone or anything. That is why cruelty, savagery, criminality, brutality and evil never cease.”

Titon Rahmawan

Evil

“Everything you are experiencing today: the struggle, the misunderstanding, the fatigue, even that sense of loneliness, will not be in vain. In the darkest moments, sow. And even if everything seems still, something will already be growing underground. One day it will blossom, powerful and wild, and it will be your name that glitter.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Tutto ciò che state vivendo oggi: la lotta, l'incomprensione, la fatica, persino quel senso di solitudine, non sarà vano. Nei momenti più bui, seminate. E anche se tutto vi sembrerà fermo, qualcosa starà già crescendo sottoterra. Un giorno sboccerà, potente e selvaggio, e sarà il vostro nome a brillare.
Source: prevale.net

Sense, Loneliness

Quotes about wild page 11

Quotes about wild
page 11