Animal Quotes

Had a person attempted to taste me so soon after we met, I would have been alarmed; but since Athena was an octopus, I was thrilled. Although we couldn’t have been more different — I, a terrestrial vertebrate constrained by joints and bound to air; she, a marine mollusk with not a single bone, who breathed water — she was clearly as curious about me as I was about her.

~ Sy Montgomery

Purr more, hiss less

~ Linda C. Marchman

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

~ C.s. Lewis

Like some winter animal the moon licks the salt of your hand,Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac treeFrom which a small wood-owl calls.

~ Johannes Bobrowski

A world without braves is a world without heroes, but a world without wisdom is a world of animals.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

I just can’t think of anybody abusing an animal; nor of allowing it to stay around, sick, hurt or hungry. I think that an animal is but a point short of human; and, having a skin varying but slightly from our own, will know as much pain from a whipping as would a human child. A blow upon any animal, if I am within sight, is almost as a blow upon my own body. You would think that, with that vast gap which Mankind is continually placing back of him in his onward march in improving this big world, Man would think, a bit, of his pals of hoof, horn and claw.

~ Ernest Vincent Wright

A man wasn't equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm. We should be dying. the judge almost wept.

~ Kiran Desai

Chloroplasts bear chlorophyll; they give the green world its color, and they carry out the business of photosynthesis. Around the inside perimeter of each gigantic cell trailed a continuous loop of these bright green dots. They spun . . . they pulsed, pressed, and thronged . . . they shone, they swarmed in ever-shifting files around and around the edge of the cell; they wandered, they charged, they milled, raced . . . they flowed and trooped greenly . . . All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts . . . If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring’s center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish’s tail.

~ Annie Dillard

Using information about animal behavior to justify social or political ideology is wrong . . . People need to be able to make decisions about their lives without having to worry about keeping up with the bonobos.

~ Marlene Zuk

All animals understand love and affection, but only man shows the propensity to place himself into the shoes of another life form

~ The Cruxshadows

If you like a person you say 'let's go into business together.' Man is a social animal after all, but such partnerships are fraught with danger.

~ Brian Tracy

I see myself as no color. I can play the role of a man. I can paint my face white if I want to and play the role of white. I can play a green, I can be a purple. I think I have that kind of frame and that kind of attitude where I can play an animal.

~ Grace Jones

We didn't ever want 'Tarzan' to feel like he was just a man. We didn't want him to stand up straight or wave good-bye. We wanted to make sure he always had that piece of gorilla in him, that he always had an animal attitude about him.

~ Kevin Lima

I'm a vegetarian and very much active in regards to how I feel about animal rights and protecting animals and giving animals a voice. But at the same time, I appreciate and respect other people's decisions to eat meat. The only thing that I hope is that people are educated, that they're aware, that they're living a conscious lifestyle.

~ Abbie Cornish

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

~ Luigi Pirandello

There are a lot of people in the animal rights movement who can be very passionate and aggressive, and I applaud people's passion, but when people are judgmental and aggressive, all you end up doing is getting other people to turn away in irritation. To change people's minds, you have to respect the people you're talking to.

~ Moby

The way you really find out about the performer's seriousness about the cause is how long they stay with it when the spotlight gets turned off. You see a lot of celebrities switch gears. They go from the environment to animal rights to obesity or whatever. That I don't have a lot of respect for.

~ Robert Redford

I plan to see St. Louis as a global competitor. As an international trade hub, as an incubator of new companies, as a place of culture and the arts, as a magnet for immigrants, for entrepreneurs, for animal lovers, and for gays, as a city of parks and trails, and as the sort of place that figures in young people's dreams.

~ Francis G. Slay

When you look into the eyes of an animal you've rescued, you can't help but fall in love.

~ Paul Shaffer

He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and smelly fish.

~ José Rizal

A great deal has been learned about cell communication. The universal nature of cellular structure and organization in bacteria, plant and animal cells has been discovered.

~ Gunter Blobel

We have these words 'space' and 'time,' but you can't touch them. They're not objects, they're not things, they go forever. Space and time are really tools of animal sense perception, the way we organize and construct information.

~ Robert Lanza

Without computers, in the 17th century, we could classify the entire animal kingdom... there was this idea of the speciation, right? And now, all a search engine is is essentially the mathematical speciation of ideas - and these things really derive from the way that language is used and the way words relate.

~ Joshua Cohen

What the flamingo teaches a child, at that subliminal level where animal encounters work, is that gravity is not just a limitation, but also a possible partner in an intriguing, potentially joyful game.

~ John Burnside

Man is by nature a political animal.

~ Aristotle

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

~ H. G. Wells

No one likes to have less than they had before. That's the nature of the human animal.

~ Joni Mitchell

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

~ Isabella Rossellini

To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

~ P. J. O'rourke

When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it. There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.

~ John Burroughs

My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including 'The Black Cat' and 'The Purloined Letter.' Being an animal person, I had trouble with 'The Black Cat!' I got hooked instead by 'The Purloined Letter,' a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin.

~ Matthew Pearl

The puma... the cat... is not just about power and speed and strength... but it is also a very elegant animal. That's what we've tried to reflect in our products.

~ Jochen Zeitz

The term 'alpha female' originated in my field of animal behavior, but has acquired new meaning. It refers to women who are in charge, for example, by flirting and dating on their own terms. It is also used maliciously for a loud-mouthed, controlling woman who has no patience with deviating opinions.

~ Frans De Waal

Puerto Ricans who find they can no longer afford to keep their pets often choose to drop their dogs, sometimes even whole litters of puppies, at a beach - sometimes under cover of night, in secret - rather than surrender the animal to a city or state-run shelter where the animals will face grim conditions and almost certain death by euthanasia.

~ Juliana Hatfield

I'm a huge animal lover - I love animals to death. I've got tortoises and three dogs, and I've had a million animals in the past. I just think that we should do all we can to take care of them.

~ Roshon Fegan

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

~ Samuel Johnson

The first thing I do each morning is get out of bed and give my dog, Audrey, a hug. She's a Jack Russell. I think having an animal is a wonderful thing, particularly dogs. They are great levelers, there's no nonsense with them, and they just want simple affection.

~ Donatella Versace

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

~ George Herbert Mead

When we see animals doing remarkable things, how do we know if we're simply seeing tricks or signs of real intelligence? Are talented animals just obeying commands, or do they have some kind of deeper understanding? One of the biggest challenges for animal researchers is to come up with tests that can distinguish between the two.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson