These quotes focus on how animals are related to nature, environmentalism, and also, humanity's part in this relationship.
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
-Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Man, when living, is soft and tender; when dead, he is hard and tough. All animals and plants when living are tender and delicate; when dead they become withered and dry. Therefore it is said: the hard and tough are parts of death; the soft and tender are parts of life.
-Lao Tsu
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
-George Orwell, Animal Farm
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: "What good is it?"
-Aldo Leopold, Round River
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless, is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.
-Albert Schweitzer
We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
-Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
-Alice Walker
Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.
-Feodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Let us remember with humility the loneliness of being man in a universe we do not understand and the vulnerability of the human condition. The animals could do very well without us, but we cannot do without them.
-Gerald Carson
The combined outrage of the millions of creatures which have suffered at the hands of man may well combine to haunt us. We are all of the same family, though destiny has assigned us to different roles: in our relationship with animals, we should regard them as different, not inferior.
-Dennis Bardens
It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.
-Mark Twain
I had nixed the idea of having children when I was myself a child, having learned in the 1960s that human overpopulation was literally crowding other species off the planet. Why create another mouth to gnaw at the overburdened earth?
-Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
The woods were made for the hunters of dreams,
The brooks for the fishers of song;
To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
The streams and the woods belong.
-Sam Walter Foss
I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized. Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.
-John Muir
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
-Henry Beston, The Outermost House
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
-Milan Kundera
God had given men reason, by which they could find out things for themselves, but He had given animals knowledge which did not depend on reason, and which was much more prompt and perfect in its way, and by which they had often saved the lives of men.
-Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
-Marshall Mcluhan
My own eyes are not enough for me...I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many is not enough...I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. More gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.
-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment In Criticism
You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog as large as myself that my father bought me. They are better than human beings, because they know but do not tell.
-Emily Dickinson
It was not that I disliked people; some of them were interesting and kind. But even the nice ones were no more compelling or important to me than other creatures. Then, as now, to me humans are but one species among billions of other equally vivid and thrilling lives. I was never drawn to other children simply because they were human. Humans seemed to me a rather bullying species, and I was on the side of the underdog.
-Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Now, it never seems to occur to these far-seeing teachers that Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern civilization cry "Heresy" on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned. This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.
-John Muir
The time has come and gone when it is acceptable to regard this world as a resource to be exploited for the comfort of a single species. Animals with a central nervous system are too much like us to be treated as chattel.
-Prof. J.B. Neilands
There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.
-Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion and Other Essays
Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you - alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
-Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
If people were superior to animals, they'd take better care of the world.
- A A Milne, Winnie the Pooh
I never saw a wild thing
Sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
Without ever having felt sorry for itself.
-D.H. Lawrence, Self-pity
The disappearance of living species is not just a blow to orchid growers, butterfly collectors, and beetle buffs. It is an irremediable loss of precious information, the biological equivalent of the burning of the library of Alexandria in 641. It is the destruction of a large part of the book of life before it can be read, the irreplaceable loss of vital clues to biological evolution and our own history. Resources of potentially great practical benefit may be lost. With each daily shrinking of the biosphere, a valuable source of food or a molecule that could have cured malaria, AIDS, or some other scourge may be vanishing forever.
-Christian de Duve, "Vital Dust: Life As a Cosmic Imperative"
The fragile balance of plants and animals that share the Earth took millions of years to develop. Some life-forms have persisted in nearly their original state, surviving episodes of mass extinction. Some, like ourselves, are relative newcomers. The ones that perished will not return. Neither will the thousands of species that are disappearing each year due in large part to such human influences as habitat destruction, introduction of invasive species, and over harvesting. If we continue reducing Earth's biodiversity at this rate, the consequences will be profound. The web of life connects the smallest bacterium to the giant redwood and the whale. When we put that web in peril, we become agents of calamity.
-from the Biodiversity insert in National Geographic,
February, 1999, Vol. 195, No. 2.
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
-E.B White
Ladies and gentlemen, I do think we sometimes need to be reminded ourselves that our own species has become immensely more powerful than any that has ever existed on earth. We have transformed the face of the land and spread our pollution far and wide, but surely we have, somehow, to find the space and maintain the conditions in which a wide variety of other species can flourish and evolve. I happen to believe that technology should be the servant of mankind and not the master...Yet can we really go on behaving in such a cavalier way and still call ourselves civilized and responsible human beings?
-HRH Charles Prince of Wales, from a speech given December, 1995
quoted in Chris Howes' The Spice of Life, 1997
Man is the only animal who enjoys the consolation of believing in a next life; all other animals enjoy the consolation of not worrying about it.
-Robert Brault
Before us the creatures fall — some diminished, some wiped completely from the face of the Creators canvas. Before us is the trashed gallery of earth's Maker.
-Calvin DeWitt
Over the past half-billion years, the planet lost perhaps one species per million species each year, including everything from mammals to plants. Today, the annual rate of extinction is 1,000 to 10,000 times faster. If nothing more is done, one-fifth of all the plant and animal species now on earth could be gone or on the road to extinction by 2030. Being distracted and self-absorbed, as is our nature, we have not yet fully understood what we are doing. But future generations, with endless time to reflect, will understand it all and in painful detail. As awareness grows, so will their sense of loss.
-Edward O. Wilson, What Is Nature Worth?
...it is truly time for Western cultures to pay the price for what they covet and value. And, if they covet and value biodiversity for whatever reason - ethical, moral or plain avarice - it is essential that Western cultures wake up to the devastating genetic losses occurring day by day in the rainforests and elsewhere. When the species and their genes are lost, with them go the solutions to our questions.
-Chris Howes, "The Spice of Life: Biodiversity and the Extinction Crisis"
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently because time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life.
-Elizabeth Goudge
Biological diversity is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it... Eliminate one species, and another increases to take its place. Eliminate a great many species, and the local ecosystem starts to decay.
-Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life
I see shining fish struggling within tight nets, while I hear orioles singing carefree tunes. Even trivial creatures know the difference between freedom and bondage. Sympathy and compassion should be but natural to the human heart.
-Tu Fu
Separated from any direct knowledge of the natural world by unnatural environments, drained of any confidence in common sense by a fruitless search for "scientific answers" to their deepest questions and buffeted as they have been by successive waves of technologically induced change, modern humans have come to view members of not yet domesticated species (from bacteria to mammals) as highly unpredictable, as likely to get out of hand unless kept in check by science. Yet in nature these species control each other and, as noted earlier, life-sustaining activities that are truly essential go forward on the earth without the help of - indeed, despite - the clumsy interference of the human species. Nature's flexibility and reliability is the only thing that has enabled humans to fool around so carelessly for so long without having yet pulled their ecosystem down in ruins around them.
-Joan Dye Gussow, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce & Agriculture
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
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 is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.
I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?...
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Human relationships with predators have always been thorny. Predators are the first creatures our kind purposely eradicates. Too often, people feel humans are and should be in control; we are enraged to discover this is not true. And when other creatures share our appetites and kill our livestock (often animals we were raising to kill, ourselves), we call them vandals and murderers...Predators are the most persecuted creatures on Earth.
-Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Humanity cannot afford to acknowledge all of the blood that it spills and the destruction it inflicts on the world in its effort to perpetuate itself. Desacralization is a process that allows us to sever any relationship we might feel to other living things. By draining the aliveness out of things, we can pretend that our control and manipulation are of little consequence. Man the trapper becomes man the taxidermist, disemboweling nature of its spontaneity and movement, and stuffing it with a leaden inanimateness.
-Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny
Healing the relationship between humans and animals is crucial to restoring the health of the world.
-Susan Chernak McElroy