Predation Quotes

The arms race between [predators] and [prey] is asymmetric, in which success on either side is felt as failure by the other side, but the nature of the success and failure on the two sides is very different. The two sides are 'trying' to do very different things. [Predators] are trying to eat [prey]. [Prey] are not trying to eat [predators], they are trying to avoid being eaten by [predators].
From an evolutionary point of view asymmetric arms races are more [likely] to generate highly complex weapons systems. ~ Richard Dawkins

Most people are like sheep. Nice, harmless creatures who want nothing more than to be left alone so they can graze. But then of course there are wolves. Who want nothing more than to eat the sheep.

But there's a third kind of person. The sheepdog. Sheepdogs have fangs like wolves. But their instinct isn't predation. It's protection. All they want, what they live for, is to protect the flock. ~ Barry Eisler

Most bacteriologists were trained as medical men - Burnet himself had been, before going into bacteriological research - and "their interest in general biological problems was very limited." They cared about curing and preventing diseases, which was well and good; less so about pondering infection as a biological phenomenon, a relationship between creatures, equal in fundamental importance to such other relationships as predation, competition, and decomposition. ~ David Quammen

If people's night fears of sorcery - which negatively influences their decision to use mosquito nets - fail to impress the outsider, the brute everyday reality remains; in a number of rural African villages it is still much too common for very real hyenas to snatch people, especially children, out of their own homes as they lie sleeping at night, because of the lack of a good front door. ~ T.K. Naliaka

There is no lie. The world is presented as it is. Nothing is concealed, except for perhaps the identity of the Creator, which is not so much a lie as it is a reasonable omission. No view is, however, disguised. No composition of the natural landscape is purposefully twisted or deformed so as to deliberately deceive, and no function of the natural world is dressed in sweet deception. No scream is muffled, no laceration sanitised, and the pain of hunger and thirst are naked for all to see and be sickened by. Diseases of every ghastly flavour are on loathsome display, the blights of parasitism are laid bare, and the crippling agonies of old age are public property. The terror of predation is revealed in every anguished look, the fear of infanticide written on every mother's face, and the misery of earthquakes, landslides, cyclones, floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, heat waves, and wild fires conferred uncensored upon stunned and appropriately intimidated audiences. ~ John Zande

I eat you, life; you make me living eat.

- The Word ~ William Kean Seymour

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative - to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception - is worse. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ... Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate. ~ Daniel Dennett

I don't know any woman who hasn't experienced some level of sexual predation, from catcalls, to unwanted advances at bars, to emotional manipulation, to violent rape. I certainly have - even "unrapeable" me. All women do need to worry about rape. ~ Lindy West

Plants develop poison as a protection against predation. Should I keep one out simply because it has learnt better than its brothers how to defend itself? Roses have thorns and yet no one ever thinks to ban them from a garden for being prickly. ~ Deanna Raybourn

Modern value-neutral society (Gesellschaft rather than Gemeinschaft) is systematized predation tempered not by conscience or values but rather merely by a system of law, which is no less corrupt with private interests and its own forms of predation. In modernity sophism is the order of the day, and this obliges its most adept practitioners to learn how to develop the art of appearing to be other than one actually is. ~ Kenny Smith

Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a "social contract"; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

You didn't build that' will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host. ~ Ilana Mercer

Our deep irrational feelings of death anxiety have been attributed to multiple sources. In part, they may arise from evolved self-protection mechanisms or survival responses of being a victim of predators. They might, conversely, stem from unconscious fear (or guilt) of retribution resulting from our own acts of harming or predation. According to existential psychologists, the most powerful form of death anxiety comes from our general ability to anticipate the future, coupled with conscious anticipation of inevitable personal demise. ~ Richard J. Borden

The land of opportunity", "The American dream", "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness": these are the sounds of the great sucking mechanism of the American parasite. The reliance of seduction and persuasion over coercion that sold democracy to the American people eventually sold it to the rest of the world. Although there are a minority of examples of the direct parasitism of involuntary immigration, especially slaves from Africa and the "legal" incorporation of Native Americans, voluntary immigration through the lure of freedom and and equality is only a more indirect form of parasitic predation. What is voluntary can be no less predatory than coercion, just as capitalism can be no less predatory than military imperialism. From the point of view of competition among nations, the point is not whether a citizen or their ancestor originally arrived voluntarily or involuntarily, but whether a nation or ideology is successful in harnessing its human resources towards its national interest or way of life. American parasitism works because it offers the secular Judaism of liberalism rather than the secular Christianity of communism. Communism could never compete with the immigrant American hope that they themselves might one day be a filthy rich capitalist. ~ Mitchell Heisman

Predation is part of the everyday life of capitalism, in sectors as mainstream as pharmaceuticals, software and oil - where people's money, their data, their time and their attention are routinely taken in fundamentally asymmetrical exchanges. ~ Geoff Mulgan

Remember that even just watching animals has an impact. Intrusion into their living space can expose them to predation, keep them from feeding or other essential activities, or cause them to leave their young exposed to predation or the elements. No photo or viewing opportunity is worth harassing or stressing wildlife. In appreciating and watching them, we have a responsibility to protect and preserve the animals that share our state. ~ Mary Taylor Young

at least some paleontologists believe that the demise
of the dinosaurs was accelerated by nocturnal predation on reptilian eggs by the early mammals. Two chicken eggs for breakfast may be all-at least on the surface-that is left of this ancient mammalian cuisine. ~ Carl Sagan

[..] neoproletariat caste, the future cybercattle of neurocracy, joyous sophisticate of the always-incomplete chain of predation, primed by silos of soya, stocks of onions, pork bellies…and completed by the global apotheosis of the Great Futures Market of neurolivestock, more volatile (and more profitable) than all the livestock of the Great Plains. Neurolivestock certainly enjoy an existence more comfortable than serfs or millworkers, but they do not easily escape their destiny as the self-regulating raw material of a market as predictable and as homogeneous as a perfect gas, a matter counted in atoms of distress, stripped of all powers of negotiation, renting out their mental space, brain by brain. ~ Gilles Châtelet

The family tree of each of us is graced by all those great inventors: the beings who first tried out self-replication, the manufacture of protein machine tools, the cell, cooperation, predation, symbiosis, photosynthesis, breathing oxygen, sex, hormones, brains, and all the rest-inventions we use, some of them, minute-by-minute without ever wondering who devised them and how much we owe to these unknown benefactors, in a chain 100 billion links long. ~ Carl Sagan

The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation. Woman have been chattels to man as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of woman. He owns you - he fucks you. The fucking conveys the quality of ownership - he owns you inside out. ~ Andrea Dworkin

the First Salmon Ceremony, in all its beauty, reverberates through all the domes of the world. The feasts of love and gratitude were not just internal emotional expressions but actually aided the upstream passage of the fish by releasing them from predation for a critical time. Laying salmon bones back in the streams returned nutrients to the system. These are ceremonies of practical reverence. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

The culture of the Epic Fail, in its rituals of comic sacrifice, is a culture of sublimated predation. ~ Mark O'Connell

I eat you, life; you make me living eat. ~ William Kean Seymour

I pictured the mother whale, exhausted from labor, pushing her calf up to the skin of the water. The miracle of breath in the face of predation, life in the wake of whaling ships. ~ Megan Mayhew Bergman

The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

All the explanations proposed seem to be
only partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic change to mammalian predation to the extinction of a plant with apparent laxative properties, in which case the dinosaurs died of constipation. ~ Carl Sagan

Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State - the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility) - must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.8, 9 Of ~ Murray N. Rothbard

The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest. ~ Steven Pinker