Animals Quotes

We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.

Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, 1877

Man... is a tame or civilized animal; never the less, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill - Educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures.

Plato

Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.

Joseph Addison

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals nay it is treachery to comrades.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Man is an animal which, alone among the animals, refuses to be satisfied by the fulfilment of animal desires.

Alexander Graham Bell

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

Froude

Animals are such agreeable friends - They ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

George Eliot

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

Sir William Osler, In H. Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler (1925)

We lavish on animals the love we are afraid to show to people. They might not return it or worse, they might.

Mignon McLaughlin

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.

Isaac Bashevis Singe

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice.

Aristotle

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell

Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.

Samuel Butle

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

Voltaire

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

Maurice Masterlinck

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

Wystan Hugh Auden

When the Earth is sick, the animals will begin to disappear, when that happens, The Warriors of the Rainbow will come to save them.

Chief Seattle

Books have the same enemies as people fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Paul Valery

Our land is more valuable than your money. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals; therefore, we cannot sell this land. It was put here for us by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us.

Blackfoot chief, (c. 1880)

Animals are always loyal and love you, whereas with children you never know where you are.

Christina Foyle, The Times (1993)

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky, In Observer 8 Oct. 1961

All animals except man know that the ultimate of life is to enjoy it.

Samuel Butle

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but now, as yet, intelligent enough.

Aldous Huxley

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals.

H. L. Mencken

Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.

Alfred Victor Vigny

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

G. C. Lichtenberg

Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.

Rudyard Kipling

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imaginations, we learned to talk.

Stephen Hawking

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.

Henrik Ibsen

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

Mahatma Gandhi, 1869 - 1948

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Paul Valery

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to a mate with, beat, run away from, and rocks.

Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

Humankind differs from the animals only by a little, and most people throw that away.

Confucius, Roots of Wisdom 4th edition

Every women needs at least 4 animals. A mink in her closet, a jaguar in her garage, a tiger in her bed, and a jackass that pays for everything.

Paris Hilton

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

Voltaire

Noah must have taken into the Ark two taxes, one male and one female. And did they multiply bountifully! Next to guinea pigs, taxes must have been the most prolific animals.

Will Rogers

Men as well as animals do whatever makes them happy, differences lie in what makes them happy.

B. J. Gupta