"The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis."
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Animal quotes
Animal
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Animal quotes (page 41 of 316)
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"In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen."
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"Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so extraordinary a series of gradations as this [step by step, from humans to apes to monkeys to lemurs] - leading us insensibly from the crown and summit of the animal creation down to creatures, from which there is but a step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least intelligent of the placental Mammalia. It is as if nature herself had forseen the arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided that his intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves, admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust."
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"The best thing about animals is they don't talk much."
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"All creatures tread across the rubble of ruined civilizations. The trick is to keep moving. No animal ever goes about dispensing shallow compassion."
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"The human animal dances wildest on the edge of the grave."
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"Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself."
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"An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes."
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"The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined."
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"Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire."
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"Comedy is there to basically show us we fart, we laugh, to make us realize we still are part animal."
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"Studying elephants is like going back into prehistoric times. In size, elephants are the closest thigns we have to dinosaurs. There are days when I feel as though there is nothing we can do for elephants - I feel that the only good I am doing is recording the extinction of one of the most magnificent animals that ever walked the earth."
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"Tolerance of Cruelty in any form is a degraded state of mind and soul. When we freely allow the massacre and prolonged torture of defenseless creatures, it increases our receptivity to human cruelty and war and steals our humanity, peace and soul. Very little speeds and greases your way to Hell, like animal cruelty."
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"Family organisation is broken and young animals are increasingly being denied a mother to turn to for comfort and for grooming. One of the saddest and most pathetic of farm practices - inevitable at the present time for the supply of dairy produce - is the separation of the calf from the cow at birth or soon after."
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"For the water animals, the ocean is like a garden; for the land animals, it is death and pain."
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"Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males, and in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady . . . I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others?"
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"If we possessed a thorough knowledge of all the parts of the seed of any animal (e.g. man), we could from that alone, be reasons entirely mathematical and certain, deduce the whole conformation and figure of each of its members, and, conversely if we knew several peculiarities of this conformation, we would from those deduce the nature of its seed."
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"I'd like to open an animal orphanage in Kenya. I do a lot of work for Born Free."
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"Beyond my desire to boycott the torture factories, I am also way happier when I eat a plant-based diet, and I feel about a thousand times more energetic."
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"The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cats teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice."
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