Top 100 Quotes About Zoos
#1. We must educate the public. The average person has no idea of what's going on in factory farms, in laboratories, circuses, roadside zoos or rodeos.
Bob Barker
#2. What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.
Diane Ackerman
#3. We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism.
Rigoberta Menchu
#4. The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
John Berger
#5. We're in 'Jurassic Park' territory. If we go to the zoo in the future, we'll have zoos for extinct animals.
Michio Kaku
#6. I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusion about freedom plague them both.
Yann Martel
#8. The chimpanzees in the zoos do it, Some courageous kangaroos do it Let's do it, let's fall in love. I'm sure giraffes on the sly do it, Even eagles as they fly do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love.
Cole Porter
#9. The right to lead a life free of fear is a fundamental right of all living beings. But this fundamental right is being brutally violated by humans in animal testing, meat and dairy industry, circus, zoos, aquariums, and sports.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
#10. I became very critical of zoos and circuses and keeping animals in captivity. I wish it was against the law.
Christopher Walken
#11. Let us free all the animals in the zoos to show them that we are not animals!..
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#12. I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports make me feel like we're about three per cent better than ants. Especially U.S. airports. They're zoos. All civility is gone.
Douglas Coupland
#13. Stop going to the zoos! Don't take your children to the zoos! No creature ever deserves captivity without any crime!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#14. National parks, zoos, protected areas, polluted seas - using the whole world as a readymade, I thought about it as a stage set. To activate a stage set you need a drama, an actor to offset it.
Aleksandra Mir
#16. Conversely, the biophilia hypothesis, as Wilson calls it, also explains why we find natural settings so peaceful. It's in our genes. That's why, each year, more people visit zoos than attend all sporting events combined.
Eric Weiner
#17. I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
Yann Martel
#18. After counting all the sheep in the world
I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,
camels, skylarks, etc.,
then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,
country by country.
By early light I am asleep
in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,
Billy Collins
#19. Your every emotion goes right over the top with a big audience. It's either laughter or tears, with no in-between. Those tigers in zoos, they must have a big opera all the time.
Chuck Palahniuk
#20. I am personally not against keeping animals at zoos, as they serve a huge educational purpose, but treating them well and with respect seems the least we could do, and with 'we' I mean not just zoo staff, but most certainly also the public.
Frans De Waal
#21. We're feeding all these zoos. And that's getting bigger and bigger.
Dick Van Patten
#22. In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?
Patti Smith
#23. Cecelia sat and watched us drink. I could see that I repulsed her. I ate meat. I had no god. I liked to fuck. Nature didn't
interest me. I never voted. I liked wars. Outer space bored me. Baseball bored me. History bored me. Zoos bored me.
Charles Bukowski
#24. Zoos have always fascinated me. What child hasn't wondered what would happen if all the animals escaped from the zoo? Or what would happen if they got caught in an enclosure?
Matthew Reilly
#25. Their stupidity does not amaze me, its when they're smart that amazes me. It's baffling whenever you find someone who's smart - incredible. Soon you'll have zoos for such things.
Frank Zappa
#26. When I visit my brother in South Africa, I order things I've only seen in zoos. Little deers and kudu, all the mammals you would never think of eating.
Chuck Palahniuk
#27. We would consider it cruel to confine a dog permanently in a kennel. Yet we visit zoos where hundreds of wild animals are kept permanently in the equivalent of a kennel.
Virginia McKenna
#28. They parade for us
In zoos - in portraits
Of every generation.
Abigail George
#29. People forget the good that zoos do. If it weren't for zoos, we would have so many species that would be extinct today.
Betty White
#30. Every time you go to the zoo, you prolong the captivity of the animals there! If no one goes to the zoos, there will be no zoos! Destroying the evil is very simple and it is in your hand!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#31. When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.
Octavia E. Butler
#32. For example, the main reason zebras never got domesticated is that they're ultra-high-fear. Zebras may bite people and not let go. They injure more people in zoos than the tigers do.15
Temple Grandin
#33. Zoos should concentrate more on the preservation side of things.
Gerald Durrell
#34. Camels are still trained in Alice Springs for tourist jaunts and for occasional sale to Australia's zoos.
Robyn Davidson
#35. Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived ... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.
Andrew Motion
#36. All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
H.L. Mencken
#37. Newt Gingrich was campaigning at a zoo this week and he was bitten by a penguin. Newt Gingrich is always campaigning at zoos. Mitt Romney once did a photo op at a zoo. That was a big mistake, because he stood next to the chameleon, and HE changed colors.
Bill Maher
#38. I've gone back in time to when dinosaurs weren't just confined to zoos.
Homer
#39. In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.
Susan Orlean
#40. Elephants in all the worlds zoos
in old age yearn
until one morning
they say
we will set off on a journey
carrying hidden the pain that will never return
to the places where we were happy
Mario Payeras
#41. After this, he'd probably be going to zoos, climbing the enclosure, saying, 'Here, watch this...' Famous last words, as yet another unfit human is removed from the gene pool.
Kelley Armstrong
#42. Through PETA, we rescue animals in roadside zoos and circuses. They are some of the most abused animals in the country.
Sam Simon
#43. We have wild animals in zoos, yet people rarely meet their 'food' face to face.
Elayne Boosler
#44. In zoos, along with the animals, the humanity of man is also prisoned! No cage is humane!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#47. Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing. Ah, my. How the world still dearly loves a cage.
Colin Higgins
#48. The zoos are full and the prisons overflowing. My, my. How the world so dearly loves a cage." She
Colin Higgins
#49. Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.
Michael J. Fox
#50. I do love nature, but I don't suppose I'd spent more time in zoos as a child than anyone else!
Andy Serkis
#51. For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.
Diane Ackerman
#53. What do the animals do in the zoo? That's the same thing that I do in my cell. I play with myself. I make little string dolls. I talk to roaches. I'm in jail for nine counts of murder, and I didn't do it. I'm in solitary confinement, may I add.
Charles Manson
#54. I live in a zoo I run scandals with savages
Cam'ron
#55. Those who take knowledge to be a whole zoo of sub-disciplines will react to my giving metaphysics a privileged position in that zoo or to my thinking of knowledge as a tree, with more and less fundamental parts.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
#56. Places of confinement providing free food and medical care are called prisons.
John Lilly
#58. Of course I was drawn to the sun bears, they're fascinating. But so are tigers and lots of other animals at the zoo. Probably a big part of the reason I felt so connected to them was because of their name: SUN BEAR.
Matthew Zapruder
#59. Why build a zoo when we can just put up a fence around Chapel Hill?
Jesse Helms
#60. The only creature on earth whose natural habitat is a zoo is the zookeeper.
Robert Breault
#61. It is hard to get mad at Donald Trump for saying stupid things, in the same way you don't get mad at a monkey when he throws poop at you at the zoo ... What does get me angry is the ridiculous, disingenuous defending of the poop-throwing monkey.
Jon Stewart
#62. Basketball, a game which won't be fit for people until they set the basket umbilicus-high and return the giraffes to the zoo.
Ogden Nash
#63. I can give or take elephants; I never can find the cheetah-but the zebras captivate me. They'd be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that's black or white.
Jodi Picoult
#64. I live in a tough neighborhood. They got a children's zoo. Last week, four kids escaped.
Rodney Dangerfield
#65. Writing is the main gig and teaching and performing are sidelines, an excuse for not writing more. Working on a novel and on an opera make me seriously want to retire and find a volunteer job as a docent at the zoo explaining to schoolchildren where frogs go in the winter.
Garrison Keillor
#66. Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum.
Vance Havner
#67. Film is my passion. I had no money, after Human Zoo. I was completely broke. It was horrible. My film was in Berlin on opening night, but I couldn't even get to Berlin.
Rie Rasmussen
#68. What a pity that most young people instead of seeing one animal in nature--which is worth a hundred in any Zoo--must derive their knowledge of God's creatures from their appearance in prisons. ... How do we manage to think that we know all about an animal by gazing at him penned in a cage?
Dhan Gopal Mukerji
#69. Greta Garbo: A deer in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo.
Clare Boothe Luce
#70. A good way to lose weight is to put salt on your ass and go to a petting zoo. But stay away from goats because I've seen them fornicate with a mail box.
Gary Busey
#71. If I had my way ... there wouldn't be a single lion or tiger in captivity anywhere in the world. They never take to it. They're never happy. They never settle down ... You can see it in their eyes ...
Hugh Lofting
#72. When I take my kids to the zoo in Los Angeles, they always look the longest at the creature that moves the least - especially those in the reptile house. I asked myself: 'Who are the people that are pretty cool but also very still and monotone in their expression?' and I thought of Jose Mourinho.
Julian Sands
#73. I want to spit back at a camel and ask him what he's so sour about. Maybe camels are the real 'Old Ones' on this planet ... and that what is wrong with the place.
Robert A. Heinlein
#74. I understand the people-watching, but I've never done it where people have to race to three different shows, from here to there. I mean, the biggest zoo I ever faced was Comic Con, and Comic Con takes place in one big hangar.
James Wolcott
#75. Politics is the best show in America. I love animals and I love politicians, and I like to watch both of 'em at play, either back home in their native state, or after they've been captured and sent to a zoo, or to Washington.
Will Rogers
#76. Met someone who works at the zoo. Apparently the panda is a nasty animal.
Dov Davidoff
#77. You have city centre pubs where men go to meet girls, not realising that all girls in city centre pubs have thighs like tug boats and morals that would surprise a zoo animal.
Jeremy Clarkson
#78. When I was a kid, I said to my father one afternoon, 'Daddy, will you take me to the zoo?' He answered, 'If the zoo wants you, let them come and get you',
Jerry Lewis
#79. My father never cheated on my mother. He used to cheat on me. He used to pick other kids after school. Take them to the zoo. Take them to play ball. One day he came to me. He says, Look I got to level with you. I met another kid.
Dom Irrera
#80. This really isn't a game we really should be proud of. This game is liking taking your kids to the zoo. You're supposed to take your kids to the zoo. You're a father. So a team like that, we're supposed to beat them like this.
Shaquille O'Neal
#81. I've actually gone to the zoo and had monkeys shout to me from their cages, "I'm in here when you're walking around like that?"
Robin Williams
#82. I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo.
Wyndham Lewis
#83. Oh, I was an ugly kid. My old man took me to the zoo. They thanked him for returning me.
Rodney Dangerfield
#84. A peacock escaped from the Central Park Zoo and wandered around the city. Either that or I just saw a pigeon on his way to a gay pride parade.
Jimmy Fallon
#85. The newspapers do little better. Their coverage of nonhuman animals is dominated by "human interest" events like the birth of a baby gorilla at the zoo, or by threats to endangered species; but developments in farming techniques that deprive millions of animals of freedom of movement go unreported.
Peter Singer
#86. I'm also not an avid watcher of the show ['Walking Dead'] for no good reason. I think it's obviously a great show. I think it's a good comparison [to "Zoo"], because it is this apocalyptic world we're living in Season 2 of "Zoo."
James Wolk
#87. Boys and girls need chances to be around their father, to be enjoyed by him and if possible to do things with him. Better to play fifteen minutes enjoyably and then say, 'Now I'm going to read my paper' than to spend all day at the zoo crossly.
Benjamin Spock
#88. I still haven't gotten over this thing of walking down the street and somebody recognizing you because you've been in a movie. There's this illusion that movie stars only exist in the movies. And to see one live is like seeing a leopard let out of the zoo.
Sam Shepard
#89. They used to have a smoking section at most airports. No more. They now have these glass-encased rooms. You're not just a smoker, you're an example to other people. You're an exhibit at a futuristic zoo.
Marc Maron
#90. There seems to be a general impression that to be known as normal in Hollywood is akin to being labeled as rare animal in a zoo.
Irene Dunne
#91. Many Americans think of the rest of the world as a kind of Disneyland, a showplace for quaint fauna, flora and artifacts. They dress for travel in cheap, comfortable, childish clothes, as if they were going to the zoo and would not be seen by anyone except the animals.
Alison Lurie
#92. Most people are really nice but some stare, like you're some kind of zoo exhibit and not a real person with real feelings.
Emma Watson
#93. I'm not going to / let a little thing like the world stand in my way. / Why should I? I understand it / as much as I understand penguins / and I still go to the zoo.
Matthew Dickman
#94. Welcome to Hollywood, a land just off the coast of planet Earth. I am never quite certain if I am visiting the zoo, or if I'm one of the animals in a cage.
Elinor Glyn
#95. It has got to the point in this country where men believe they are men, just because that is their birthright. If that is true, then, by the same logic, an animal held captive in a zoo is still a free wild beast.
William Powell
#96. [On public events attended by royalty:] It was the usual 'zoo tea.' You know, we eat - the others watch.
Princess Margaret
#97. The quizzical expression of the monkey at the zoo comes from his wondering whether he is his brother's keeper, or his keeper's brother.
Evan Esar
#98. I don't have time for lie-on-the-beach vacations. I'm a zoo person. There's one in New Jersey where animals actually come up to your car. I love the monkeys - I used to give them bubblegum to chew.
Missy Elliot
#99. For me, "Zoo" has always been a fable. It has nothing to do with realism. It's a fable about what man is doing to the world, and the animals have retribution. But in the real world, this would not happen. But in the world of 1984, this kind of thing can happen in a story.
James Patterson
#100. When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what's going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it's trouble. Monkeys make trouble.
Gore Vidal
