Elephants Quotes - Page 12

• I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I've heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.

  Elizabeth Berg

  Running, Believe, Adversity

  Elizabeth Berg (2012). “Talk Before Sleep”, p.184, Random House

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• The elephant needs a thousand times more food than the ant but that is not an indication of inequality.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Equality, Needs, Thousand

  Mahatma Gandhi (1981). “Collected Works”

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• If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

  James Thurber

  Eye, Theatre, Trying

  James Thurber (1990). “Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself”

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• There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants.... The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken.

  Jack London

  Stupid, Fall, Men

  "John Barleycorn" by Jack London, (Ch. II), 1913.

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• Over-population is the 'cause of drive-by shootings' and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants.

  Ted Turner

  Christian, Religious, Sea

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• Americans should never underestimate the constant pressure on Canada which the mere presence of the United States has produced. We're different people from you and we're different people because of you. Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is effected by every twitch and grunt. It should not therefore be expected that this kind of nation, this Canada, should project itself as a mirror image of the United States.

  Pierre Trudeau

  Sleep, Mirrors, People

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• Do not carry with you your mistakes. Do not carry your cares. Travel on alone. Like an elephant in the forest.

  Gautama Buddha

  Mistake, Care, Forests

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• My biggest influence growing up was Mad magazine, which is a very text-heavy form of visual satire. I didn’t grow up wanting to draw donkeys and elephants with the names of politicians written across them.

  Tom Tomorrow

  Growing Up, Names, Mad

  "Dan Perkins". Interview with Julian Brookes, www.motherjones.com. January 2001.

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• Every theory in philosophy, which is built on pure conjecture, is an elephant; and every theory that is supported partly by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay.

  Thomas Reid

  Philosophy, Iron, Feet

  Thomas Reid, William Hamilton, Harry M. Bracken, Thomas Reid, Sir William Hamilton (1967). “Philosophical Works”, p.180, Georg Olms Verlag

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• I need to finish this scarf/shawl/blanket thing so I can start something for Emma- a hat, maybe, or a sweater for her stuffed elephant.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Sweaters, Needs, Scarves

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2009). “Wintergirls”, p.180, Penguin

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• There appears to be a deeply embedded uneasiness in our culture about throwing away junk that can be reused. Perhaps, in part, it is guilt about consumption. Perhaps it also feels unnatural. Mother Nature doesn't throw stuff away. Dead trees, birds, beetles and elephants are pretty quickly recycled by the system.

  William Booth

  Mother, Tree, Bird

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• If size mattered, the elephant would be king of the jungle.

  Rickson Gracie

  Art, Kings, Would Be

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• It's said that when we die, the four elements - earth, air, fire and water - dissolve one by one, each into the other, and finally just dissolve into space. But while we're living, we share the energy that makes everything, from a blade of grass to an elephant, grow and live and then inevitably wear out and die. This energy, this life force, creates the whole world.

  Pema Chodron

  Life, Fire, Air

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• High quality water is more than the dream of the conservationists, more than a political slogan; high quality water, in the right quantity at the right place at the right time, is essential to health, recreation, and economic growth. Of all our planet's activities - geological movements, the reproduction and decay of biota, and even the disruptive propensities of certain species (elephants and humans come to mind) - no force is greater than the hydrologic cycle.

  Richard Bangs

  Dream, Rain, Rivers

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• when there's an elephant in the room, you can't pretend it isn't there and just discuss the ants.

  Ellen Wittlinger

  Rooms, Ants, Elephant In The Room

  Ellen Wittlinger (2012). “Blind Faith”, p.70, Simon and Schuster

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• You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Strong, Struggle, People

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.50, Vintage

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• Despite the reams of paperwork, obstacles worthy of a horse show, and a wait that can rival an elephant's gestation, adoption feels no different on the inside.

  Scott Simon

  Horse, Waiting, Adoption

  Scott Simon (2010). “Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption”, p.76, Random House

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• It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

  Beryl Markham

  Animal, Men, Rivers

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.227, Open Road Media

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• Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

  William S. Burroughs

  Memories, Long, Wish

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• Sometimes I think that the only effective and productive method of destroying speciesism would be for each uncaring human to be forced to live the life of a cow on a feedlot, or a monkey in a laboratory, or an elephant in the circus, or a bull in a rodeo, or a mink on a fur farm. Then people would be awakened from their soporific states and finally understand the horrors that are inflicted on the animal kingdom by the vilest species to ever roam this planet: the human animal!

  Gary Yourofsky

  Live Life, Thinking, Animal

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• The Christian icon is not the Stars and Stripes but a cross-flag, and its emblem is not a donkey, an elephant, or an eagle, but a slaughtered lamb.

  Shane Claiborne

  God, Christian, Stars

  Shane Claiborne, Chris Haw (2009). “Jesus for President”, p.197, Harper Collins

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• After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of Earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet? What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.

  Douglas Coupland

  Memories, White, Yuppies

  "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture". Book by Douglas Coupland, March 15, 1991.

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• If elephants didn't exist, you couldn't invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense.

  Lyall Watson

  Common Sense, Challenges, Groups

  Lyall Watson (2003). “Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant”, p.38, W. W. Norton & Company

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• There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

  Clifford Geertz

  Turtles, Stories, World

  René Girard, Clifford Geertz, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Stanford University. Committee on Modern Thought and Literature (1973*). “Myth and ritual in Shakespeare: A midsummer night's dream”

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• Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant.

  Mira Nair

  Heart, Challenges, Skins

  "Portrait of the artist: Mira Nair, film director". Interview with Laura Barnett, www.theguardian.com. November 9, 2009.

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