Animal quotes
6.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside animal — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"A town is a thing like a colonial animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town is a mystery not easily to be solved. News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences."
"Man and other civilized animals are the only creatures that ever become dirty."
"One may not eat what has a face."
"Well lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than weve lost in the last 65 million years. If we dont find answers to these problems, were gonna be victims of this extinction event that were at fault for."
"Abstain from animals."
"If you want to test cosmetics, why do it on some poor animal who hasn't done anything? They should use prisoners who have been convicted of murder or rape instead. So, rather than seeing if perfume irritates a bunny rabbit's eyes, they should throw it in Charles Manson's eyes and ask him if it hurts."
"Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man."
"I'm in favor of animal liberation. Why? Because I'm an animal."
"Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away."
"I'm not really an animal person."
"The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals."
"A single man has not nearly the value he would have in a state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors."
"Kill no more pigeons than you can eat."
"In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring."
"The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is, and always will be, a wild animal."
"A different set of incentives from rising in an economic establishment where the rewards system, again, the reinforcement, comes from being a truffle hound. That's what Jacob Viner, the great economist called it: the truffle hound - an animal so bred and trained for one narrow purpose that he wasn't much good at anything else, and that is the reward system in a lot of academic departments."
"The depressing thing about an Englishman's traditional love of animals is the dishonesty thereof ... Get a barbed hook into the upper lip of a salmon, drag him endlessly around the water until he loses his strength, pull him to the bank, hit him on the head with a stone, and you may well become fisherman of the year. Shoot.the salmon and you'll never be asked again."
"The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification."
"Man owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the fact that he is a social animal."
"Animals fascinate me because you can find a force, an energy, a fear that also exists in sex."
