Madagascar Quotes

Antananarivo is pronounced Tananarive, and for much of this century has been spelt that way as well. When the French took over Madagascar at the end of the last century (colonised is probably too kind a word for moving in on a country that was doing perfectly well for itself but which the French simply took a fancy to), they were impatient with the curious Malagasy habit of not bothering to pronounce the first and last syllables of place names. They decided, in their rational Gallic way, that if that was how the names were pronounced then they could damn well be spelt that way too. It would be rather as if someone had taken over England and told us that from now on we would be spelling Leicester 'Lester' and liking it. We might be forced to spell it that way, but we wouldn't like it, and neither did the Malagasy. As soon as they managed to divest themselves of French rule, in 1960, they promptly reinstated all the old spellings and just kept the cooking and the bureaucracy. ~ Douglas Adams

Insects leave (Madagascar periwinkle) Catharanthus roseus out of their diets. So, for that matter, do deer. The reason is that the plants are loaded with alkaloids so potent that they are the source of vincristine and vinblastine. These are drugs important in routines of chemotherapy for treating Hodgkin's disease and certain forms of leukemia ... ~ Allen Lacy

The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. What is happening to the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil will affect us all. ~ E. O. Wilson

These headsets could pick up a spider scratching in Madagascar." "And is there a spider scratching in Madagascar?" "Well ... I don't know. They can't really - ~ Eoin Colfer

You never know what to expect on encountering royalty. I've seen 'em stark naked except for wings of peacock feathers (Empress of China), giggling drunk in the embrace of a wrestler (Maharani of the Punjab), voluptuously wrapped in wet silk (Queen of Madagascar), wafting to and fro on a swing (Rani of Jhansi), and tramping along looking like an out-of-work charwoman (our own gracious monarch). ~ George MacDonald Fraser

The Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean are a six-day boat ride from Madagascar, and their only inhabitants are French scientists. ~ Cary McNeal

The bigger question now becomes, "so what? Who cares?" You will never have an infinite number of balls and you will never have a large enough urn to hold all of them. You will never build a lamp that can turn on and off arbitrarily fast. We cannot investigate time or space past a certain smallness, except when pretending, so what are supertasks, but recreational fictions, entertaining riddles? We can ask more questions than we can answer, so what?

Well, here's what. Neanderthals. Neanderthals and humans, us, Homo sapiens, lived together in Europe for at least five thousand years. Neanderthals were strong and clever, they may have even intentionally buried their dead, but for hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals barely went anywhere. They pretty much just explored and spread until they reached water or some other obstacle and then stopped. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, didn't do that. They did things that make no sense crossing terrain and water without knowing what lay ahead. Svante Pääbo has worked on the Neanderthal genome at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and he points out that technology alone didn't allow humans to go to Madagascar, to Australia. Neanderthals built boats too. Instead, he says, there's "some madness there. How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it's ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now ~ Michael Stevens From VSauce

When, a year later, the Madagascar project was declared to have become "obsolete," everybody was psychologically, or rather, logically, prepared for the next step: since there existed no territory to which one could "evacuate," the only "solution" was extermination. Not that Eichmann, the truth-revealer for generations to come, ever suspected the existence of such sinister plans. ~ Hannah Arendt

A Madagascar Hissing Roach chasing Jerry Lewis. That would be a really neat treat. ~ Michael O'Donoghue

I was all for setting up a separate Jewish state in Madagascar or Palestine or someplace, but not to exterminate them. Besides, by exterminating 4 million Jews - they say 5 or 6 million at this trial, but that is all propaganda, I am sure it wasn't more than 4.5 million - they have made martyrs out of those Jews. For example, because of the extermination of these Jews, anti-Semitism has been set back many years in certain foreign countries where it had been making good progress. ~ Julius Streicher

Human relations tend to be more difficult when you're dealing with someone who weighs 30 kilograms more than you do. That's when you worry about whether a well-meaning gesture could produce complications. We have no problems with countries like Madagascar or Bolivia, for example. But Germany is our neighbor and we have a shared past. Besides, Germany is powerful and ambitious and more than four times as large as we are. It makes complete sense that we would act cautiously. It's simply Realpolitik. ~ Vaclav Klaus

I was also thinking about isolation on an evolutionary scale as well, like when you think of an island like Madagascar where things are free to evolve unfettered by outside powers. That starts to reach into the underlying narrative, which is more of a literal story that I used as a construct to build songs around. ~ Colin Stetson

The color is yet another variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attracts it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of
the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And its red literally is not the same as it appears in one constellation or in the other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elysées. A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took all these participations into account, we would recogni ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The ears were large, flaring forward, the eyes limpid amber, in which the pupil floated like a glittering jewel, changing color with shifts of the light: obsidian, emerald, ruby, opal, amethyst, diamond. ~ William S. Burroughs

So how long do I have to pack? ~ Don Darkes

I'm in 'Madagascar 2.' I'm Testy the Lion. The franchise moves to Africa, and Bernie Mac is also in the film. I loved working for Dreamworks on that film. ~ Tom Lister, Jr.

In my own creations, the earliest influence came from the ancient civilisations of Egypt, China, Africa and Persia. In fact, one of my earlier creations was a range of tunics, made from silk procured from the islands of Madagascar. ~ Mary McFadden

I would love to go to Iran. The island of Madagascar, everyone says is pretty exotic, or the wonderful Namibian desert. ~ Michael Palin

Why should we hate them? Because ours is the only true civilization! Even in science -- consider that we invented the sternpost rudder twelve hundred years before the Europeans did! Fore-and-aft sails in the third century! Treadmill paddle wheel for boats five hundred years later! Warships with rams and twenty paddle wheels by the twelfth century -- the British thought we had copied theirs, the fools! In the thirteenth century we had ships with fifty cabins for passengers, six-masts, double planking, water-tight compartments! Only in the last century did the barbarians even have transverse bulkheads! Five hundred years ago we already had ships four hundred and fifty feet long, and we grew fresh vegetables aboard in tubs! WE sailed the high seas to Sumatra and India, to Aden and Africa and even to Madagascar -- sixty years before the Portuguese bit a piece from the thigh of India! I curse Confucius and all those mad saints who persuaded us against war! Did you ever hear of Sun Wa, who lived three thousand years ago? No? Read the Art of War! 'If you are not in danger, do not fight,' he wrote. Now we are in danger! ~ Pearl S. Buck

We're lucky enough, especially in these 'Madagascar' films, to be working with some of the best people in the industry, who are not only great actors, but great comedians and improvisers and filmmakers. And they then become a part of creating their characters. ~ Eric Darnell

He wraps an arm around me, and I swear we were once a single unit, a supercontinent divided millions of years ago - like my fifth grade science project - now reunited into some kaleidoscopic New Pangea. "I'm Madagascar," I say, sleepily. "You're what?" "I'm Madagascar. And you're Africa." He squeezes my shoulder, and - I think he gets it. I bet he does. ~ David Arnold

Oh, I hate him,' she said, and I noticed a flush of colour come into her cheeks and the manner in which the fingers of her left hand dug into her palm, as if she wanted something to take away the pain. 'I absolutely detest him. Afterwards, I didn't feel very much at all for a week or two. I suppose I was in shock. But then the fury rose and it hasn't subsided since. Sometimes I find it difficult to control. I think it was around the time that everyone stopped asking me whether I was all right, when lives went back to how they had been before. Had he been in Dublin I might well have gone over there, broken down his door and stabbed him as he slept. Fortunately for him, he was in Madagascar with his lepers.' (p. 268) ~ John Boyne

Although his intimacy with Stephen Maturin did not allow him to ask questions that might be judged impertinent, it was of such a rare kind that he could ask for money without the least hesitation. "Have you any money, Stephen?" he said, the Marine having vanished in the trees. "How I hope you have. I shall have to borrow the Marine's guinea from you, and a great deal more besides, if his message is what I dearly trust. My half-pay is not due until the month after next, and we are living on credit."
"Money, is it?" said Stephen, who had been thinking about lemurs. There were lemurs in Madagascar: might there not be lemurs on Reunion? Lemurs concealed among the forests and the mountains of the interior? "Money? Oh, yes, I have money galore." He felt in his pockets. "The question is, where is it?" He felt again, patted his bosom, and brought out a couple of greasy two pound notes on a country bank. "That is not it," he muttered, going through his pockets again. "Yet I was sure--was it in my other coat? did I perhaps leave it in London?--you are growing old, Maturin--ah, you dog, there you are!" he cried triumphantly, returning to the first pocket and drawing forth a neat roll, tied with tape. "There. I had confused it with my lancet-case. It was Mrs Broad of the Grapes that did it up, finding it in a Bank of England wrapper that I had--that I had neglected. A most ingenious way of carrying money, calculated to deceive the pick-pocket. I hope it will suffice."
"How much ~ Patrick O'Brian

Dubbed the pink panthers of Madagascar, the fossas are killing machines, eating pretty much anything that moves with powerful jaws filled with canines as big as any guard dog's and long, retractable claws on both front and hind feet...What get most scientists' attention is the fossa's penis. An adult fossa is about 3.5 feet long and has a penis of about 7 inches, a sixth of its body length. If a man had the same ratio, he would be 3 feet tall and very smug. ~ Mireya Mayor

My first job was actually as a social worker. And then later, I got my PhD in anthropology. And I've always been interested in humans as well as primates. We are all kind of have the same emotions, the same goals and lives really. But to me, when I first got to Madagascar I realized that the lemurs lives are very closely related to what the humans are doing; partially because they've got both looking for natural resources. And if we can make some way that both humans and lemurs can live together peaceably and happily, that would be my goal for Madagascar. ~ Patricia Wright

My first time in Madagascar was awesome because lemurs are kind of funny; they throw fruit at the back of your head when you're not looking and then point at one another when you turn around. ~ Kevin Hearne