Mammals Quotes - Page 2

• Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Atheist, Believe, Animal

  "Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (Holier Than Thou)". TV Series, May 23, 2005.

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• If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man. The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, when it was making fish. Then ... amphibia ... reptiles ... mammals, and now it's making men.

  George Wald

  Ocean, Science, Men

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• On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: “An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work'”

  Charles Darwin

  Thinking, Two, Australia

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• Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all mammals.

  Ingrid Newkirk

  Dog, Animal, Boys

  Vogue, September 1, 1989.

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• All Nature bristles with the marks of interrogation-among the grass and the petals of flowers, amidst the feathers of birds and the hairs of mammals, on mountain and moorland, in sea and sky-everywhere. It is one of the joys of life to discover those marks of interrogation, these unsolved and half-solved problems and try to answer their questions.

  J. Arthur Thomson

  Life, Nature, Flower

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• I have always found small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.

  Donald Griffin

  Life, Adventure, Science

  Donald Redfield Griffin (1959). “Science Study Series”

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• There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish; but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief — a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

  George Eliot

  Beauty, Crush, Baby

  "Adam Bede".

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• The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.

  Gary Larson

  Gentleman, Brain, Climate

  Gary Larson (1989). “The PreHistory of the Far side: a 10th anniversary exhibit”, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• We are the only species of mammal that doubts our ability to give birth. It's profitable to scare women about birth. But let's stop it. I tell women: Your body is not a lemon.

  Ina May Gaskin

  Inspirational, Women, Giving

  FaceBook post by Ina May Gaskin from Mar 22, 2015

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• How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

  Andy Weir

  Whales

  Andy Weir (2014). “The Martian”, p.64, Random House

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• Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish.

  Michael Shermer

  Want, Evolution, Instinct

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• Consciousness," according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The "self" was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Garden, Self, Order

  Robert Charles Wilson (2000). “The Perseids and Other Stories”, p.151, Macmillan

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• Elephants have the largest brains of any mammal on the face of the Earth. They are creative, altruistic and kind.

  Ingrid Newkirk

  Elephants, Creative, Brain

  Ingrid Newkirk (2009). “The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights: Simple Acts of Kindness to Help Animals in Trouble”, p.106, Macmillan

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• Even the humblest mammal's strong sexual, parental, and social instincts give rise to 'do unto others as yourself' and 'love thy neighbor as thyself'.

  Charles Darwin

  Love, Strong, Giving

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• The largest living land mammal is the absent mind.

  Don Van Vliet

  Inspirational, Land, Mind

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• Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees. As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing. Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.

  Bill Mollison

  Animal, Years, Apples

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

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• We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

  Lewis Thomas

  Party, Dna, Sea

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Darwin and his successors have railed against the fallacy of confusing the current utility of a trait with the reason the trait evolved. For example, Darwin argued that skull sutures in mammals did not evolve because they facilitate live birth; the sutures were in place well before live birth evolved. Checking the chronological order in which different traits evolved in a lineage is one way to test an adaptive hypothesis; the fact of common ancestry is what makes that checking possible.

  Elliott Sober

  Skulls, Order, Confusing

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.

  Carl Jung

  Mind, Acorns, Consciousness

  Carl Gustav Jung (2012). “Man and His Symbols”, p.105, Dell

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• 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.

  Daniel Dennett

  Animal, Thinking, Views

  "Big Thinkers on Evolution". NOVA Interview, www.pbs.org. October 6, 2009.

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• There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

  Elon Musk

  Animal, Important Events, Years

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Man is a sad mammal that combs its hair.

  Cees Nooteboom

  Men, Hair, Combs

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• If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes.

  Susan Blackmore

  Found, Memes, Wells

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• It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about this responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.

  Peter Singer

  Lying, Roots, Elements

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.11, Princeton University Press

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• Livestock adopted in Africa were Eurasian species that came in from the north. Africa's long axis, like that of the Americas, is north/south rather than east/west. Those Eurasian domestic mammals spread southward very slowly in Africa, because they had to adapt to different climate zones and different animal diseases.

  Jared Diamond

  Animal, Axes, Long

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