Such is the economy of nature," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken." When, as Presi...
I've worked with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years, and we have this magnificent photographer, Tad Motoyama. He takes these wonderful, wonderful animal pictures. All through the years he's given me copies of these pictures. Well, I have all these gorg...
We can no more justify using nonhumans as human resources than we can justify human slavery. Animal use and slavery have at least one important point in common: both institutions treat sentient beings exclusively as resources of others. That cannot b...
Veganism is about nonviolence. It is about not engaging in harm to other sentient beings; to oneself; and to the environment upon which all beings depend for life. In my view, the animal rights movement is, at its core, a movement about ending violen...
I wrote for years before I was ever published, and I don't think I could ever stop. That said, I was also a veterinarian before I sold my first book, and I still volunteer my time to help with animal welfare causes. So that is a career I would be hap...
Narrator: [as McKay explores even further with his hand] It was not Grace's pride that kept her going during the days when fall came and the trees were losing their leaves, but more of a trance like state that descends on animals whose lives are thre...
Wilson: [reading from an encyclopedia] "P O O K A - Pooka - from old Celtic mythology - a fairy spirit in animal form - always very large. The pooka appears here and there - now and then - to this one and that one - a benign but mischievous creature ...
James T. Kirk: Stardate: 2258.42... or, uh, 4... Whatever. Acting Captain Spock has marooned me on Delta Vega, in what I believe to be a violation of Security Protocol 49.09 governing the treatment of prisoners aboard a star... [Kirk breaks off abrup...
[On "Woody's Roundup" TV show, Jessie's animal friends run to Woody to come to her rescue] Rabbit: [incoherent chatter] Woody: What's that? Jessie and Prospector are trapped in the old abandoned mine and Prospector just lit a stick of dynamite thinki...
[first lines] Newsreel Announcer: Movietown News presents, "Spotlight on Adventure." What you are now witnessing is footage never before seen by civilized humanity: a lost world in South America. Lurking in the shadow of majestic Paradise Falls, it s...
Lord Summerisle: I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another or...
Robert Graysmith: I knew it! "Man is the most dangerous animal of all." I knew that I heard that from somewhere before. "The Most Dangerous Game." Paul Avery: The most what? Robert Graysmith: It's a movie about a count who hunts people for sport. Peo...
[Flounder has just fired a blank cartridge near Neidermeyer's horse, and the horse has dropped dead] Bluto: Holy shit! D-Day: There were blanks in that gun! Flounder: I didn't even point the gun at him! Bluto: Holy shit! [D-Day checks the gun] D-Day:...
Dean Vernon Wormer: Have you boys seen your grade point averages yet? [the Deltas are silent] Dean Vernon Wormer: Well, have you? Hoover: I have, sir. I know it's a little below par... Dean Vernon Wormer: It's more than a little below par, Mr. Hoover...
These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great neces...
I've told you, there's no point keeping those. They're not tax-deductible,' my dad thundered. 'I think you'll find they are,' raged my mum like some sort of feral animal (a badger with TB perhaps). 'They're not. You only get VAT back on lunches outsi...
The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has no...
Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, ...
In comparison with capitalism, which reconstituted man as an economic animal; in comparison with Marxism, which found man an object made up of organized matter; in comparison with catholicism, which saw him as the unwitting plaything of an imperious ...
I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art. When you read some books they are fantastic, the writer touches something in you that you know you would not have brought out of yourself. He makes you discov...
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with. Scruples are alien to the black panther. Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions. The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations. The self critical jackal doesn’t exist. The locu...