Animal Quotes - Page 29

• Suppose I grant that pigs and dogs are self-aware to some degree, and do have thoughts about things in the future. That would provide some reason for thinking it intrinsically wrong to kill them - not absolutely wrong, but perhaps quite a serious wrong. Still, there are other animals - chickens maybe, or fish - who can feel pain but don't have any self-awareness or capacity for thinking about the future. For those animals, you haven't given me any reason why painless killing would be wrong, if other animals take their place and lead an equally good life.

  Peter Singer

  Dog, Pain, Good Life

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• Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.

  John Rawls

  Pain, Compassion, Evil

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• Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike, and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself.

  Oswald Spengler

  Running, Men, Culture

  Oswald Spengler (1967). “Aphorisms”

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• Old friend, there are people—young and old—that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it's revolutionary mumbo-jumbo by a young one, or loud lessons from scripture by and old one. We are all comical, touching, slapstick animals, walking on our hind legs, trying to make it a noble journey from womb to tomb, and the people who can't see it all that way bore hell out of me.

  John D. MacDonald

  Journey, People, Touching

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• We have to do away with a false and misleading dualism, one which abstracts man on the one hand and technology on the other, as if the two were quite separate kinds of realities.... Man is by nature a technological animal; to be human is to be technological.... When we speak of technology, this is another way of speaking about man himself in one of his manifestations.

  Daniel Callahan

  Technology, Reality, Men

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• The secret is, first, get a thoroughbred horse because they are the most nervous animals on earth. Then get the biggest gun you can find and make sure the starter fires that big gun right by the nervous thoroughbred's ear.

  Jesse Owens

  Sports, Horse, Athlete

  "Jesse Owens: Champion Athlete". Book by Tony Gentry, Heather Lehr Wagner, 2009.

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• In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

  Paul R. Ehrlich

  Years, Sea, Important

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• God looks after children, animals and idiots.

  Lou Holtz

  Children, Looks, Idiot

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• There are some viviparous flies, which bring forth 2,000 young. These in a little time would fill the air, and like clouds intercept the rays of the sun, unless they were devoured by birds, spiders, and many other animals.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Clouds, Air, Bird

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• The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at work and he is considered a poor credit risk.

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  Wind, Risk, Males

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• Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.

  Thomas Huxley

  Humble, Men, Experience

  1880 Man's Place in Nature.

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• MUMMY, n. - an ancient Egyptian handy, too, in museums in gratifying the vulgar curiosity that serves to distinguish man from the lower animals.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Men, Museums, Curiosity

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.148, 谷月社

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• Dull witted brooding people love to stuff themselves with quantities of heavy food, just like animals for fattening. Bubbly intellectual people love foods which stimulate the taste buds without overloading the belly. Profound, meditative people prefer neutral foods which do not have an assertive flavor and are not difficult to digest, and therefore do not demand too much attention.

  Carl Friedrich von Rumohr

  People, Profound, Intellectual

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• John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

  Emma Goldman

  Character, Space, Captivity

  Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism: Top Crime Collections”, p.34, 谷月社

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• Man is a tool-making animal

  Benjamin Franklin

  Men, Tools, Statistics

  Quoted in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (entry for 7 Apr. 1778)

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• Look at the animals roaming the forest: God’s spirit dwells within them. Look at the birds flying across the sky: God’s spirit dwells within them. Look at the tiny insects crawling in the grass: God’s spirit dwells within them. Look at the fish in the river and sea….There is no creature on earth in whom God is absent… his breath had brought every creature to life… God’s spirit is present within plant as well. The presence of God’s spirit in all living things is what makes them beautiful; and if we look with God’s eyes, nothing on earth is ugly.

  Pelagius

  Beautiful, Eye, Sky

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• The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Spirit, Reason, Moved

  "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money". Book by John Maynard Keynes, Book 4, Chapter 12, Section 7, p. 161, February 1936.

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• Communities do not let prostitutes, pedophiles, voyeurs, adulterers, and those who sexually prefer animals to publicly celebrate their lifestyles, so why should homosexuals get such privileges?

  James Dobson

  Community, Privilege, Lifestyle

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• For the bliss of the animals lies in this, that, on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those--few at any moment on the earth--who do not 'look before and after, and pine for what is not,' but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now.

  George MacDonald

  Lying, Shadow, Looks

  George MacDonald (2015). “George MacDonald: The Complete Fantasy Collection - 8 Novels & 30+ Short Stories and Fairy Tales (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Lilith, Phantastes, The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind, Portent, The Lost Princess, Adela Cathcart, Dealings with the Fairies and many more”, p.812, e-artnow

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• You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

  Joy Williams

  Believe, Eye, Past

  Joy Williams (2015). “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals”, p.1, Rowman & Littlefield

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• You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.

  Joy Williams

  Thinking, Race, Long

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• 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.

  John Bradshaw

  Dog, Self, Philosopher

  John Bradshaw (2014). “Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You A Better Friend to Your Pet”, p.182, Basic Books

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• A tiger does not ignore or slight any small animal. The way he catches a mouse and catches and devours a cow are the same.

  Shunryu Suzuki

  Doe, Cows, Way

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• To live in this precious animal body on this earth is as great a part of spiritual life as anything else.

  Jack Kornfield

  Spiritual, Body, Earth

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• Because Christian morality leaves animals out of account, they are at once outlawed in philosophical morals; they are mere 'things,' mere means to any ends whatsoever. They can therefore be used for vivisection, hunting, coursing, bullfights, and horse racing, and can be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy carts of stone. Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Christian, Horse, Struggle

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