"Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized - the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals."
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Animal quotes
Animal
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Animal quotes (page 83 of 316)
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"You can judge a society by the way it treats it's animals"
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"The measure of a society can be how well its people treat its animals"
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"Himsa does not need to be taught, Man as animal is violent, but as spirit is nonviolent."
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"When the intelligent and animal souls are held together in one embrace, they can be kept from separating."
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"Man, when living, is soft and tender; when dead, he is hard and tough. All animals and plants when living are tender and delicate; when dead they become withered and dry. Therefore it is said: the hard and tough are parts of death; the soft and tender are parts of life."
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"No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret."
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"I was very lucky. I was just finishing my PhD at Cambridge in 1981. This opportunity came up because whaling was drawing to an end. There was the prospect of a moratorium, and one of the arguments that was brought up, especially by Japanese whalers, was that, if we didn't have whaling, we would know nothing of whales. All the science depends on having dead animals, they argued, so that's one of the benefits of the whaling industry."
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"Religion's pretty pervasive in humans. And why it's pervasive in humans is debated a lot. There are indications of things that look like religion in other animals, like chimps doing rain dances, and that sort of thing. Actually, I say that, but there's that and not much else."
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"Whales are cultural animals, and we're cultural animals, so although we shouldn't expect whales to do what we do, it doesn't seem unreasonable to hypothesize that we might share some of these things."
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"I don't like to be dismissive of whales speaking possibilities. There is a pretty New Age-y, poorly thought set of ideas about this going around. I also think these animals benefit most from us staying out of their way. I think we learn the most by being as passive as we can, so those are my biases, and I'm sort of against it from that perspective."
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"I don't think in biology it's very controversial at all. Whether certain behavior is culture or is not culture is argued. I think virtually all biologists would agree that some animal behavior is culture. Bird song is a good example."
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"Psychologists would say that the only two important forms of social learning are imitation and teaching, and they will spend time trying to figure out if animals imitate or teach. Sometimes they find they do; sometimes they find they don't. And so that's kind of the level of controversy there. Biologists would include imitation and teaching and a range of other kinds of social learning. So we would call that culture, whereas the psychologist wouldn't."
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"The real controversy comes with anthropologists - not all, but some - who see themselves as studying culture, and they then see culture from the perspective of humans, which is what they study. From their perspective, or, from some of their perspectives, it's sort of heresy to even talk about culture in any other animal. Others would say, "Yeah, you can talk about it, but our definitions of culture are so utterly different from yours and include things like values, and so on, which you've never shown to exist in any of these other creatures.""
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"We believe we're seeing, in other animals, a process, or an attribute, that isn't fundamentally different from what we see in humans, so it seems to us to be spurious to call them different things. Now there are aspects of human culture that we don't find in animals, and that's really interesting, but there are also probably aspects of animal cultures that we don't find in humans, and that's really interesting."
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"What I mean is, if you look at the behavior of an animal and ask, "Well, why did it do that?" and then consider the alternatives, those alternatives probably wouldn't be as successful at getting its genes around."
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"Humans are particularly interesting; our culture is incredible, there's no doubt about that. In many respects, no other species matches ours. But in quite a few respects, they do, and that can help us, perhaps, to better understand our own culture. We look at the ways humans are similar to other animals, and at the ways they differ, rather than just saying, "We have culture and you don't.""
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"How can you say you're trying to spiritually evolve, without even a thought about what happens to the animals whose lives are sacrificed in the name of gluttony?"
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"One should make movies innocently - the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden. Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody."
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"Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement."
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