Animal Quotes - Page 131

If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages, maybe take an animal degree.

Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think... This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep.

An infinity of these tiny animals defoliate our plants, our trees, our fruits... they attack our houses, our fabrics, our furniture, our clothing, our furs ... He who in studying all the different species of insects that are injurious to us, would seek means of preventing them from harming us, would seek to cause them to perish, proposes for his goal important tasks indeed.

I've always been fascinated by the way that children and animals suffer stoically in a way that I don't think adults do.

The chemical differences among various species and genera of animals and plants are certainly as significant for the history of their origins as the differences in form. If we could define clearly the differences in molecular constitution and functions of different kinds of organisms, there would be possible a more illuminating and deeper understanding of question of the evolutionary reactions of organisms than could ever be expected from morphological considerations.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

We have come into the world naked, and all the animals are naked, why should man hide his body behind clothes?

Every animal has its own intelligence and sensitivities. They're all lovely, worthwhile, and deserving of our respect.

If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax

The graceful tear that streams for others' Man is the weeping animal born to govern all the rest.

Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him not yet regulated.

However, the small probability of a similar encounter [of the earth with a comet], can become very great in adding up over a huge sequence of centuries. It is easy to picture to oneself the effects of this impact upon the Earth. The axis and the motion of rotation changed; the seas abandoning their old position to throw themselves toward the new equator; a large part of men and animals drowned in this universal deluge, or destroyed by the violent tremor imparted to the terrestrial globe.

he cut through the 21st Century Gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal headed gods of lost America

If we are concerned about the exploitation of human workers in countries with low standards of worker protection, we should also be concerned about the treatment of even more defenceless non-human animals.

If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering - insofar as rough comparisons can be made - of any other being. So the limit of sentience is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. To mark this boundary by some other characteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in an arbitrary manner. Why not choose some other characteristic, like skin color?

Typically, defenders of experiments on animals do not deny that animals suffer. They cannot deny the animals' suffering, because they need to stress the similarities between humans and other animals in order to claim that their experiments may have some relevance for human purposes. The experimenter who forces rats to choose between starvation and electric shock to see if they develop ulcers (which they do) does so because the rat has a nervous system very similar to a human being's, and presumably feels an electric shock in a similar way.

I don't understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It's a pretty gross interference with nature. I think it ought to be governed by the standards of how it affects the individual animals, just as we'd want to deal with institutions that deal with humans by how they affect individual humans.

It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road...A stone has no interests because it cannot suffer. The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is, however, not only necessary, but also sufficient for us to say that a being has interests - at an absolute minimum, an interest in not suffering. A mouse, for example, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road because it will suffer if it is.

The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.

Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong.

The civilization you sit in ... is now obvious in crisis, perhaps death pangs, twisting grotesquely like a dying animal, swirling down the garbage drain-this civilization was founded on God's road map.

My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything - every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate - is always changing, moment to moment.

Once we get three more directors elected, the Sierra Club will no longer be pro-hunting and pro-trapping and we can use the resources of the $95-million-a-year budget to address some of these issues.

Atlantic puffins starve to death so that Danish chickens can feast on their fish.