| … if Man would but treat other animals with kindness, so that they might approach us without fear, and we might have the constant pleasure of watching their winning ways. Their origin and history, structure and habits, senses and intelligence, offer an endless held of interest and wonder.
– John Lubbock (1834-1919) |
Tag Archives: animals
Quotations about animals and wildlife
John Grogan – Short little lives our pets spend with us
Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come Stephen Jay Gould – Competition and cooperation
| Animals in nature, contrary to the suspicions of cynics or the hopes of idealists, are neither intrinsically vicious nor altruistic. Competition and cooperation are both nature’s ways.
– Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) |
Henry Beston – The animal shall not be measured by man
| For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
– Henry Beston (1888-1968) |
Nick Trout – Animals enter our lives prepared to teach
 Over the years I’ve come to appreciate how animals enter our lives prepared to teach and far from being burdened by an inability to speak they have many different ways to communicate. It is up to us to listen more than hear, to look into more than past.
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Aldous Huxley – Man’s intelligence makes him behave more stupidly than beasts
 It is man’s intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.
Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. |
Henry David Thoreau – It is a part of the destiny of the human race
 I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
– Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) |
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The beastial cruelty of man
 People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
Mahatma Gandhi – Treatment of animals
 The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
– Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) |
Mark Twain – Man is the only animal that is cruel
 Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.
– Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
