animal quotes

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

— George Orwell

“For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.”

— Terry Pratchett

“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

“Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.”

— Plato

“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.”

— Aristotle

“Man is by nature a political animal.”

— Aristotle

“It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.”

— Mark Twain

“If you call a cat, he may not come. Which doesn't happen with dogs. They're different types of animals. Cats are very sexy I think too in the way they move.”

— Antonio Banderas

“God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man.”

— Arthur Young

“Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society. ”

— Honore de Balzac

“As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. ”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

“I'm a hard guy to live with. I'm like a caged animal. I'm up all night walking around the living room. It's hard for me to come down from what I do. ”

— Jim Carrey

“The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals. ”

— Clint Eastwood

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”

— Immanuel Kant

“Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.”

— Rudyard Kipling

“Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.”

— Clive Staples Lewis

“A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.”

— Groucho Marx

“The person who thinks I worship the devil and kill animals is just as important as someone who makes an interpretation that's closer to what I intended.”

— Marilyn Manson

“I do remember how it was to be poor. I do remember that in my early years, we had to grow and raise all of our food, even our animals. And I remember in my early life, we didn't even have electricity. So it was very, very hard times then.”

— Dolly Parton

“Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.”

— Ayn Rand

“When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.”

— Ayn Rand

“It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic.”

— Richard Dawkins

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

— Charles Darwin

“Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.”

— Charles Darwin

“Studying cows, pigs and chickens can help an actor develop his character. There are a lot of things I learned from animals. One was that they couldn't hiss or boo me.”

— James Dean

“I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.”

— Ellen DeGeneres

“If we're destroying our trees and destroying our environment and hurting animals and hurting one another and all that stuff, there's got to be a very powerful energy to fight that. I think we need more love in the world. We need more kindness, more compassion, more joy, more laughter. I definitely want to contribute to that.”

— Ellen DeGeneres

“I'm not an activist; I don't look for controversy. I'm not a political person, but I'm a person with compassion. I care passionately about equal rights. I care about human rights. I care about animal rights.”

— Ellen DeGeneres

“People love their animals so much so that they put little clothes on them and necklaces and booties and things like that. And if you love your animal, then you should feed them something that's not dangerous for them. There's a lot of poisonous stuff that they're putting in a lot of that food, those by-products.”

— Ellen DeGeneres

“We have two dogs, Mabel and Wolf, and three cats at home, Charlie, George and Chairman. We have two cats on our farm, Tom and Little Sister, two horses, and two mini horses, Hannah and Tricky. We also have two cows, Holy and Madonna. And those are only the animals we let sleep in our bed.”

— Ellen DeGeneres