animals

People see the cleverness of nature and suppose it's the cleverness of the animal itself but it was obvious to me that each and every segment of the animal isn't aware. How much I'd hate to live totally unaware of myself, I thought. What would be the point of living, of existing, if you weren't ever to know about it? I looked at the Fox Moth and pitied it, poor unconscious creature. But then, I supposed, at least it wouldn't be disappointed. It would never find out.

We are beasts, you know, beasts risen from the savannas and jungles and forests. We have come down from the trees and up out of the water, but you can never, ever fully remove the feral nature from our psyches.

People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience_ but we__ be getting rid of a life, a lot of lives_ because we didn__ like them. If pollution was a person would we still be trying to get rid of it? Would we have environmentalists still complaining and protesting and trying to get rid of all pollution?

Man is the cruelest animal.

When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left?

The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first, allowing the other's colors to dominate, for how long. The design grows, the overlay deepens. The beaders have no other order at the heart of their being. Do you know that the beads are sewn onto the fabric of the earth with endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair? We are as crucial to this making as other animals. No more and no less important than the deer.

...a world where a sparrow's fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat's eye, such is the true measure of time.

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

And I thought kitty liter was the unlawful practice of discarding small felines along the roadside.

Fighting with tangles,fighting with curls,the poor barber yanked,the poor barber pulled,until with one last effort(and to the wonder of us all)a GINORMOUS Polar Bearlanded on the floor.

People who think animals have expressionless faces are like people who can ignore an open package of Oreos. Not quite human.

He has been mad for you these many months, ever since you prodded him in the nether regions with a hedgehog.

The stork is voiceless because there is really nothing to say.

We all know interspecies romance is weird.

Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now.Let it teach you Being.Let it teach you integrity _ which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real.Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.

The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value and humans sick from industrial concentration is illuminating. (...) Against the industrial organization of death, animals have no other recourse, no other possible defiance, except suicide.

We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

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.