Animal Quotes - Page 220

Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.

The activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. His instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or pleasure. But to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in a way agreeable to others.

Evolution was in a strange mood when that creation came along.... It makes one wonder just where the plant world leaves off and the animal world begins.

Who could believe an ant in theory? A giraffe in blueprint? Ten thousand doctors of what's possible Could reason half the jungle out of being.

I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant’s brilliant non-fiction about humankind’s tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar’s Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it.

Science has so far been unable to tell us how self-aware dogs are, much less whether they have anything like our conscious thoughts. This is not surprising, since neither scientists nor philosophers can agree about what the consciousness of humans consists of, let alone that of animals.

Knowledge acquired in biological research is seldom directly applicable to human beings ... The results of scientific research, obtained under these conditions, cannot be applied directly to human beings who vary widely in their hereditary make-up, in their environment, and in their past health record.

We can't test these absolute limits on humans. We can't blast them with sound. However, we can do that to animals because they don't have the same political base that we do.

Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.

wheresoever the earth may be placed, or whithersoever it may be carried by its animal faculty, heavy bodies will always be carried towards it.

He who serves the public is a poor animal; he worries himself to death and no one thanks him for it.

Animals, we have been told, are taught by their organs. Yes, I would add, and so are men, but men have this further advantage that they can also teach their organs in return.

Nothing is so pregnant as cruelty; so multifarious, so rapid, so ever teeming a mother is unknown to the animal kingdom; each of her experiments provokes another and refines upon the last; though always progressive, yet always remote from the end.

I love my house. I love my family. I love my animals.

You really, really have to care about animals to want to kill one. You have to learn all this stuff about them and start thinking like them.

The industrial food system is so cruel and so horrific in its treatment of animals. It never asks the question: 'Should a pig be allowed to express its pig-ness?'

Lower caloric exposure and episodic fasting can extend the life span of all animals, the longer we spend in the catabolic state, the longer we live.

I think there's always going to be a problem dealing with firearms, with knives. It's the animal we are that cause the problems.

People are just greedy animals, after all.

Joseph Obomsawin, the elder I lived with there, says that those who turn to animals do so because humans have let them down.

There is no logical basis to support the theory that plants feel pain. The dubious possibility that they might, however, is no justification for killing obviously sentient beings. Any rational person understands the striking difference between slitting the throat of a sentient animal and plucking a fruit or a vegetable.

Theyre not group animals, theyre completely solitary, so if the babys mother is taken away, theres no system of aunts ... their whole system is destroyed.

Comedy exists to laugh at things that aren't laughable. But isn't it? That's what separates us from the animals. We laugh.

I love sports. I love animals. I love kids. I want to save the world. So how do I combine all those things? I don't know

In scripture God brings the animals to the human for naming. In that simple act the human is brought to recognize the particular personality and worth of each living creature. Too bad we forget so often.