Animal Quotes - Page 241

For a long time that's all I could do, howl and scream and cry like the wild animal of the night that I'd become.

I might have to drink the blood of animals to stay alive, but I would never feast on one of my own kind, no matter what Mr.Crepsley said, or hows much my belly growled.

[Referring to the birds:] Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.

Count Olaf sounds like an awful person. I hope he is torn apart by wild animals someday. Wouldn't that be satisfying?

Like People, animals will become frightened and likely do whatever you say if you whip them enough.

For more than a century, people have often thought that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision is that Homo sapiens, our species - and we're just animals too, we're just mammals - that there is nothing morally special about us. I myself don't think this follows at all from Darwin's vision, but it is certainly the received view in many quarters.

A novel is like an animal you have to hunt down and kill. If you let it sit for two days, it's got a two-day head start. So, if I just look at it every day, I'm so much better off.

People have opinions about everything and especially when you get into that world of animal rights or tree rights or whatever rights, they all have an opinion.

Here was something that I did all the time, and thought nothing of it, and it turns out the rest of the world thinks it's completely reprehensible. That's when I knew I needed to change, so I started making rules. The first one was; Don't mess with animals.

Marriage is the only game where the trapped animal has to buy the license.

Back in the eighties, people thought a vegan was someone from Vegas. It's a different world now and I feel lucky to have been a part of the revolution, both for animal rights and gay rights.

On leather jackets: That's the next step. You have to take one step at a time. It was easier to start with fur.

It's often said that elephants are the most human of animals - there's something comical about their acquiescence, and tragic also. The long elephant poem - I was trying to write from the point of view of someone who had been seduced by the logic of his punishers and who, in a kind of awful way, could reproduce the very logic that had put him in this predicament in the first place. And maybe, in some kind of minor way, that's something I feel about myself, or maybe about all selves, that they fall in love with the thing that oppresses them.

Aristotle thought that humans are rational animals and Hobbes thought that we act on the basis of rational self-interest. If only! It's not that we never do these things, it's that they are hardly constituative of who and what we are.

The problem is that for almost any feature of humanity that you can name, whether it's the ability to suffer, whether it's the capacity to reason, whether it's having lives that can go better or worse, there are at least some other non-human animals that have all of these features as well. So to exclude non-human animals from the range of moral concern but to include all humans, just seems morally arbitrary.

Some philosophers have begun writing sympathetically about predator elimination as a way of reducing animal suffering. From an environmental perspective this is somewhere between naïve and potentially disastrous.

We're not good at noticing slow, steady changes in our environments, our senses are not very acute compared to those of many animals, and we're pretty awful at abstract thought, much less acting on it.

Increasingly both environmentalists and animal ethicists recognize the enormous destruction caused by animal agriculture.

Sometimes people feel mind is merely the - in some animal, the energy or something from the brain. Now there are little sort of curiosities or I think doubt sometimes a sheer sort of mental attitude, some change in our brain. So these fields, now scientists are showing some interest.

[Animals] appreciate others' affection, they also have the sort of ability to show their own affection. And then as soon as we're born, child, no religious faith.

Many of the earth's habitats, animals, plants, insects and even micro-organisms that we know to be rare may not be known at all by future generations. We have the capability and the responsibility to act; we must do so before it is too late.

We are social animals. Others' suffering is ultimately your suffering; their happiness is ultimately your happiness.

Morally speaking, we should be concerned for our whole environment.

I am like a wounded animal in a remote isolated place - How wonderful! - How happy!

If the basic human nature was aggressive, we would have been born with animal claws & huge teeth -- but ours are very short, very pretty, very weak! That means we are not well equipped to be aggressive beings. Even the size of our mouth is very small. So I think the basic nature of human beings should be gentle.