Exotic Animals Quotes

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones. ~ Diane Ackerman

In 1255, Louis IX of France presented an elephant to Henry III of England to add to the menagerie of exotic animals he kept in the Tower of London. ~ Karen Maitland

What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything. ~ Bill McKibben

The torture of animals, especially cats, was a popular amusement throughout early modern Europe. The power of cats was concentrated on the most intimate aspect of domestic life: sex. Le chat, la chatte, le minet mean the same thing in French slang as 'pussy' does in English, and they have served as obscenities for centuries. ~ Slavoj Zizek

There is no doubt that there is a huge difference between human and nonhuman animals. But what we are overlooking is the fact that nonhuman animals are conscious beings, that they can suffer. ~ Peter Singer

I know that most domesticated animals aren't indigenous to this country. So guess what, cat? You can beat it. Go back to Catalina Island or Catalonia, Spain, or Katmandu, or wherever the hell your hairy ass is from! 'Cause this is America and around here - Katmandon't. ~ Arj Barker

People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it. ~ Charles Bukowski

...the tender brutality of physical existence...the insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts... ~ Nicole Krauss

You begin paying more attention to what you're seeing when you know the names ... If you don't know the names of plant and animal species that share your neighbourhood, you don't care about them and can't protect biodiversity. ~ Robert Bateman

There is a sort of exotic preposterousness about a lot of elections, the way arguments are made even cruder. ~ Chris Patten

Everyone's pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness. ~ Jean Cocteau

He came over last night. He'd been out chasing foxes with his friends, and you know what he and the boys are like when they do the werewolf thing. The women, the drinking, and the farm animals." "Feeding on raw steak before he went out didn't curb the need to eat sheep? ~ Stephanie Rowe

It is just my imagination that flies,
While she is wrapped up in her bedsheets
like a nest. ~ Kiera Woodhull

Given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family - unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods - should we ear animals? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Walter from Microsoft catches my eye. Here's a young guy with perfect teeth and clear skin and the kind of job you bother to write the alumni magazine about getting. You know he was too young to fight in any wars, and if his parents weren't divorced, his father was never home, and here he's looking at me with half my face clean shaved and half a leering bruise hidden in the dark. Blood shining on my lips. And maybe Walter's thinking about a meatless, pain-free potluck he went to last weekend or the ozone or the Earth's desperate need to stop cruel product testing on animals, but probably he's not. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

It always puzzled me how some of the people who think killing and eating animals in the wild is somehow cruel have no problem buying dead animals at the grocery store, wrapped in cellophane instead of fur. ~ Sarah Palin

My sister Fiona has gone veggie: she won't even eat fish. She's a moron; we live in the west of Ireland with beautiful cows and beautiful fish. She's such a fool; it's like talking to a deaf person to a gig. Anyway there's nothing we can do with her and we've tried. I told her in return for the animals getting somewhere to live so beautiful as the west coast of Ireland we get to eat them, it's a fair deal. God brokered it himself. ~ James Mylet

'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut. ~ Mark Doty

Asian people have a unique way about them and a different sense of beauty. It's exotic to me. I like they way Asians project their feelings. There's a hardness to the culture, but at the same time there's a delicateness. ~ Paz Vega

Yes, Eden was beautiful- and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it- so be it. (Hasn't it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? 'Presume not the ways of God to scan,' you've been told in umpteen variations, 'the proper study of Mankind is Man.' Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That's generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.) ~ Glen Duncan

A team from Sydney, Australia, has lowered levels of these proteins using light. They implanted human genes associated with Alzheimer's into mouse DNA, so that the animals developed abnormal tau proteins and amyloid plaques. Then they treated them for a month with low-level light therapy, simply by holding the light one to two centimeters above the animals' heads. Using the same spectrum of near-infrared light that has helped in traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's disease, and retinal damage, they lowered both the pathological tau proteins and the amyloid plaques by 70 percent in key brain areas that Alzheimer's affects. Thereafter signs of "rusting" decreased, and the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells, improved their function. ~ Norman Doidge

The ten billion animals that are killed every year for meat and the virulent consequences of contemporary animal agricultural practices remain conspicuously absent from public discourse. How often have you seen media exposés on the violent treatment of farm animals and the corrupt practices of carnistic industry? Compare this with the amount of coverage afforded fluctuating gas prices or Hollywood fashion blunders. Most of us are more outraged over having to pay five cents more for a gallon of gas than over the fact that billions of animals, millions of humans, and the entire ecosystem are systematically exploited by an industry that profits from such gratuitous violence. And most of us know more about what the stars wore to the Oscars than we do about the animals we eat. ~ Melanie Joy

The zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. I wanted to see an oyster-catcher, so I was no better than the people who caged the oyster-catcher for me to see. ~ Russell Hoban

Sometimes people are just misunderstood. People and animals. We can't just assume they are thinking one thing and can avoid temptation. it's hard as hell to avoid that red flag when it's waving in your face. ~ Magan Vernon

To accept the environmentalist argument that the suffering of individual animals is inconsequential compared to the ozone layer, we must be willing to admit that the sufferings of minority groups, raped women, battered wives, abused children, people sitting on death row, and our loved ones are small potatoes beneath the hole in the sky. To worry about any of them is, in effect, to miniaturize the big picture to portraits of battered puppy dogs. ~ Karen Davis

Spiders don't chew. They send a special liquid into their prey. The prey's insides turn to mush. Then the spider sucks up its tasty lunch! ~ Julie Murphy

I can't say I'm anything like a devoted animal rights activist, but I certainly oppose cruelty to animals. ~ Robert Paul Weston

Women love guys who care for furry animals but mutilate yucky ones ~ Hog Wild

The animals listened first to Napoleon, then to Snowball, and could not make up their minds which was right; indeed, they always found themselves in agreement with the one who was speaking at the moment. ~ George Orwell

In the old days, people told their kids stories about the big, bad wolf, and men who were especially cruel and horrible were said to be like animals, maybe werewolves. But the things ordinary men do every day are a million times worse than anything a wolf would do. A wolf would never torture another animal to death, or lock it up. They kill out of instinct, in order to survive, because they have to - not because they just feel like it, not because they're evil. Not like us. Man is the scariest animal on the planet, but from the beginning of time, the wolf has gotten the bad rap. We've tried to pretend that evil is out there, lurking inside animals beyond the campfire, and not where it really is, in here.' He [Cody] tapped his chest. ~ Lisa Tuttle

We look at the world through our own eyes, naturally. But by looking from the inside out, we see an inside-out world. This book takes the perspective of the world outside us - a world in which humans are not the measure of all things, a human race among other races ... In our estrangement from nature we have severed our sense of the community of life and lost touch with the experience of other animals ... understanding the human animal becomes easier in context, seeing our human thread woven into the living web among the strands of so many others. ~ Carl Safina

How arrogant we are, Adam thought, to deliver babies who can't walk or talk or feed themselves. How sure we are that nothing will destroy them before they can take care of themselves. How fragile they were, how easily abandoned and neglected and beaten and hated. Prey animals were born afraid. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Humans and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. With aliens, that has to go double. ~ Gregory Benford

I don't believe in pets. I like animals to be wild and free. ~ John Lydon

One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain ... is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

If unconditional love, loyalty, and obedience are the tickets to an eternal life, then my black Labrador, Venus, will surely be there long before me, along with all the dear animals in nature who care for their young at great cost to themselves and have suffered so much at the hands of humans. ~ Richard Rohr

The closeups of pornography make human genitals look like undiscovered prehistoric animals. ~ Mason Cooley

The boulderfields, the spaces empty of people--a lonesomeness city-dwellers could never comprehend. Sometimes it seems like you know animals more intimately than people. Beaver heads cutting wake in the water, bear shit jeweled with seeds, deer quenching themselves in the river's cool. Her family has lived here for three hundred years. But the place is wretchedly poor and backward and may never be right. ~ Matthew Neill Null

Animals are here to live their lives. We are here to live ours. We can live well without eating them. How pathetic it is that we have to eat a life just to live our lives! ~ Debasish Mridha

I needed a place to put the dogs. The prisoners ruined the jail, so I put the prisoners in the tents and I had a nice place to put the dogs. We treat the cats nice too, and horses. I have the inmates take care of the animals. It's therapy too, you see. ~ Joe Arpaio

I was lucky that one of my first movies, 'One Million Years B.C.' was made in Europe by a British company. The Brits, and a lot of the rest of Europe, seemed to really love exotic women. The fact that I was American and exotic just made me more appealing to them. ~ Raquel Welch

When God becomes glad with our good works, then He sends the cute animals, birds, butterflies etc. near us like a signal to express His happiness! ~ Md. Ziaul Haque

The canals had big, thick reeds, almost like trees, growing up from them so it was hard to see what was inside the reeds or to the other side of the canals. And then all of a sudden, as we were walking we saw something run through the weeds in one of the canals. It was large and black, a blur it was moving so fast. Now we were all chattering at once. What was that?
"That was a cougar. It had to be a cougar," I said.
"No, that was a bear. Looked like a bear to me. That was a bear," Jerry said.
"You know when we invaded a lot of animals escaped from the zoo. It could have been a cougar."
Jerry again said it was a bear and then one of the other guys said, "There are no bears in this part of the world."
This silly argument went on for quite a while. We were all laughing and having a good time. Our mission had been pointless, so this helped lighten the mood. Someone even said they thought it was a ninja because a ninja is just as plausible as a bear or a cougar in the middle of Iraq. ~ Noah Galloway

It is a fact that plants also have life like animals. But animals are endowed with mind, and nervous systems too while the plants do not possess the same. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

Every one knows that the heavenly bodies move in certain paths in relation to each other with seeming consistency and regularity which we call [physical] law ... No one attributes freewill or motive to the material world. Is the conduct of man or the other animals any more subject to whim or choice than the action of the planets? ... We know that man's every act is induced by motives that led or urged him here or there; that the sequence of cause and effect runs through the whole universe, and is nowhere more compelling than with man. ~ Clarence Darrow

The circulatory system of man and the vertebrate animals can be considered as made up of a small number of organs or subordinate systems, which are easy to recognize anatomically, and the functions of which are on the whole quite distinct. ~ August Krogh

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquility; and I affirm that tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind. Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself; and let thy principles be brief and fundamental, which, as soon as thou shalt recur to them, will be sufficient to cleanse the soul completely, and to send thee back free from all discontent with the things to which thou returnest. For with what art thou discontented? With the badness of men? Recall to thy mind this conclusion, that rational animals exist for one another, and that to endure is a part of justice, and that men do wrong involuntarily; and consider how many already, after mutual enmity, suspicion, hatred, and fighting, have been stretched dead, reduced to ashes; and be quiet at last.- But perhaps thou art dissatisfied with that which is assigned to thee out of the universe.- Recall to thy recollection this alternative; either there is providence or atoms, fortuitous concurrence of things; or remember the arguments by which it has ~ Marcus Aurelius