Reptiles Quotes - Page 2

• What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities.

  Carl Sagan

  Caring, Thinking, Wind

  "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage". TV Series (Episode 11: The Persistence of Memory), 1990.

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• Hiccup: Thank You For Nothing You Stupid Reptile.

  Cressida Cowell

  Stupid, Hiccups

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• FROG, n. A reptile with edible legs

  Ambrose Bierce

  Food, Science, Cooking

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.72, 谷月社

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• It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Loss, Sharks, Lakes

  Elizabeth Kolbert (2014). “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History”, p.15, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I am a monarch of God's creation, and you reptiles of the earth dare not oppose me. I render an account of my government to none save God and Jesus Christ.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Jesus, Army, Government

  "The life of Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of the French: with a preliminary view of the French revolution" by Sir Walter Scott, Philadelphia: Leary & Getz, (p. 91), 1857.

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• The combination of such characters, some, as the sacral ones, altogether peculiar among Reptiles, others borrowed, as it were, from groups now distinct from each other, and all manifested by creatures far surpassing in size the largest of existing reptiles, will, it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria.

  Richard Owen

  Character, Science, Order

  Report of the Eleventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science "Report on British Fossil Reptiles" (1842)

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• I can no more explain why I like "natural history" than why I like California canned peaches; nor why I do not care for that enormous brand of natural history which deals with invertebrates any more than why I do not care for brandied peaches. All I can say is that almost as soon as I began to read at all I began to like to read about the natural history of beasts and birds and the more formidable or interesting reptiles and fishes.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Animal, California, Interesting

  Theodore Roosevelt (1941). “Theodore Roosevelt Cyclopedia”

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• Nice creepy reptile,” Frank said, very aware of the driftwood in his coat pocket. “Nice poisonous, fire-breathing reptile.

  Rick Riordan

  Nice, Fire, Breathing

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• With his venom irresistible and bittersweet that loosener of limbs, Love reptile-like strikes me down

  Sappho

  Love, Bittersweet, Limbs

  Sappho, Mary Barnard (1958). “Sappho”, p.53, Univ of California Press

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• I like to walk, touch living Mother Earth—bare feet best, and thrill every step. Used to envy happy reptiles that had advantage of so much body in contact with earth, bosom to bosom. [We] live with our heels as well as head and most of our pleasure comes in that way.

  John Muir

  Mother, Feet, Envy

  John Muir (1999). “To Yosemite and Beyond: Writings from the Years 1863-1875”

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• There is not a moral to every story in animal behavior. Sometimes a snake is just a snake, and sometimes snake sex is only about sex in snakes, or sex in egg-laying reptiles. Although a biologist's job in part is to interpret what organisms do in a broader context, that context does not, and should not, need to include a lesson for human beings. This is true regardless of whether the lesson is something we would like to teach, which means that using animals as vehicles for nonsexist thinking is just as out of bounds as using them to keep women barefoot and pregnant.

  Marlene Zuk

  Sex, Jobs, Mean

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• America eats its youth like reptiles...Educat e yourself before they dumb you down.

  Ice Cube

  America, Dumb, Youth

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• If you have birds, or if you're a herpetologist and raise reptiles - you look in those eyes, and there is nothing there that's human. I mean, they don't think like us, they don't see the world like us.

  Stephen R. Bissette

  Mean, Eye, Thinking

  Interview with Chris Dahlen, www.avclub.com. July 23, 2009.

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• Old people who live too long come to resemble turtles. As though time turned in a curve, and down they go to the reptiles again. Not the little wet naked frog they were born. But the tortoise. Cold eyes, sagging circles of skin, the nose becomes beak. The shell of sleep.

  Josephine Winslow Johnson

  Sleep, Eye, Curves

  Josephine Winslow Johnson (1996). “The Inland Island”, Writer's Digest Books

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• If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it for the reptile from whom it has been fabricated.

  Albert Einstein

  Hogwash, Has Beens, Ifs

  "Einstein to Curie: Ignore the haters", www.foxnews.com. December 8, 2014.

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• Invade me now, my ruthless friend,
  
  And make me cower in the dark.
  
  Remind me that I'm all alone
  
  And draw upon my face your mark.
  
  How is it that you capture me,
  
  When all my thoughts deny your force?
  
  Is it the reptile in my brain
  
  That lets your terror run its course?
  
  
  
  Baseless Fear undoes us all
  
  Despite our quest for lofty goals.
  
  We would-be Galahads don't die,
  
  Fear just freezes all our souls.
  
  It keeps us mute when feeling love,
  
  Reminding us what we might lose.
  
  And if by chance we meet success,
  
  Fear tells us which safe route to choose.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Running, Fear, Dark

  Arthur C. Clarke, Gentry Lee (2012). “Rama Revealed”, p.40, RosettaBooks

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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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• Books, of which the principles are diseased or deformed, must be kept on the shelf of the scholar, as the man of science preserves monsters in glasses. They belong to the study of the mind's morbid anatomy, and ought to be accurately labelled. Voltaire will still be a wit, notwithstanding he is a scoffer; and we may admire the brilliant spots and eyes of the viper, if we acknowledge its venom and call it a reptile.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Book, Eye, Men

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• Sometimes it is good to fall down so that we can see whether we honourably get up or disgracefully turn into a miserable reptile!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Fall, Sometimes, Miserable

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• As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal.

  Charles Dickens

  Wall, Night, Men

  Charles Dickens (1839). “Oliver Twist”, p.78

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• This is a unique aquarium in that a large portion of its collection features freshwater species, and it specializes in fish, amphibians and reptiles from the southwestern part of the country. The River Journey exhibit transports visitors from the Appalachian highlands through ponds, rivers and swamps, all the way to the seacoast. The recently added Ocean Journey exhibit allows visitors to sample a variety of saltwater environments.

  John Grant

  Country, Ocean, Unique

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• One of the best gifts you can give a poet is to present them with field guides - to rocks, to stars, to birds, to wildflowers, to trees and bushes, to butterflies, to reptiles and amphibians. Because when you look at anything long enough to be able to identify it, you see far more clearly and you make a tiny beginning at understanding the life, the place, the history of that bird or rock or mammal.

  Marge Piercy

  Stars, Butterfly, Rocks

  Source: margepiercy.com

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• I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate.

  Frederick Douglass

  Thinking, Sight, Matter

  Frederick Douglass (2016). “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, p.81, Frederick Douglass

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• Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?

  Yann Martel

  Giving, Answers, Littles

  Yann Martel, Canongate Books (2007). “Life of Pi (Illustrated): Deluxe Illustrated Edition”, p.111, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A woman once rang me up and said, 'Mr. Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print -Reptiles- you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.' I replied, 'Madam, if that's the way you see it, so be it.'

  M. C. Escher

  Crazy, Illustration, Way

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