The most ridiculous of all animals is a proud priest; he cannot use his own tools without cutting his own fingers.
All the animals come out at night.
Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.
As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.
People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.
I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.
I do not want to make my stomach a graveyard of dead animals.
Caution is the instinct of the weaker animal.
For once, I believe that PETA, at least on the level of logic, is correct. If the NCAA has to protect offended Native Americans. . . by God, PETA ought to advocate for the protection of every organism in the animal kingdom.
How many of those dead animals you see on the highway are suicides?
Some things have eternal value, and compassion is one of them. I hope we never lose that. Compassion for humans as well as animals.
Today's fishing industry supplies land farms with fish as well. Over fifty percent of the fish caught is fed to livestock on factory farms and "regular" farms. It is an ingredient in the enriched "feed meal" fed to livestock. Farm animals, like cows, who by nature are vegans, are routinely force-fed fish as well as the flesh, blood, and manure of other animals. It may take sixteen pounds of grain to make one pound of beef, but it also takes one hundred pounds of fish to make that one pound of beef.
It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
[The taxidermist is] a historian, dealing with an animal's past; the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present; and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future (. . . ) The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.
The goat, for us, is an image that's stuck in our heads since we were kids, coming from Iowa people are like 'Beware the horned goat of satan!' and all that. It's bullshit. It's just an animal.
Man is the "ethical animal" ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being is based upon his consciousness of himself.
I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible to civilization. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that the reformation must be worked.
Early in my career I discovered that there was something really special about photographing at night that places your mind on the surface of the planet. You’re no longer just a human being walking around in the regular world. You’re a human animal striding around on the surface of the planet that’s out in the middle of the galaxy. We as a culture, we’re forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this very deep connection and contact with nature. You can’t divorce civilization from nature. We totally depend on it.
Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power. . . but then, so should every other living creature.
Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.