The Human Animal Quotes

#1. The travesty of slavery wasn't physical abuse. It was the moral abuse of looking at a human being as if they are an animal.

Alan Keyes

#2. Therefore, the Negro nation are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.

Ibn Khaldun

#3. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness nor integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.

Henry Beston

#4. The roast meat the animal had snatched was only a semblance. It was more than food, it was a meal not for human witness, a tangle of viscera, a species of human sacrifice - as if Emerence were feeding the actual person to the dog, along with all her fond memories and feelings.

Magda Szabo

#5. A man wasn't equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm. "We should be dying." the judge almost wept.

Kiran Desai

#6. Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a man's brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.

H.G.Wells

#7. The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.

David Attenborough

#8. Unless we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is-whether its victim is human or animal-we cannot expect things to be much better in the world.

Rachel Carson

#9. There's no animal that sleep-deprives itself like the human.

Henri Cole

#10. Man, however, is the most courageous animal: thereby has he overcome every animal. With sound of triumph has he overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#11. Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our 'noble' traits as well?

Stephen Jay Gould

#12. Jo's whimper rose slightly but the scream she yearned for wouldn't materialise. Instead, as she looked at her hand, she began to make a gurgling, gagging noise, more animal than human.

Martin Pond

#13. Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?

Joy Williams

#14. The whole question of evolution seems less momentous than it did, because, unlike the Victorians, we do not feel that to be descended from animals is degrading to human dignity.

George Orwell

#15. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

George Bernard Shaw

#16. Will the things that are being lost - the wilderness, the plants and animals, the skills, and all the others - leave too vast a gap in the human spirit? This is the unanswerable question. In the meantime, we must live in our century and wait, enduring somehow the unavoidable sadness.

David Ehrenfeld

#17. Because pandemics almost always begin with the transmission of an animal microbe to a human, it's work that takes me all around the globe - from rain forest hunting camps of central Africa to wild animal markets of east Asia.

Nathan Wolfe

#18. [Apostol Paul's] views were translated as, "Your rule is to be kind to black people; you don't beat them." It's very much the way we treated women in the 14th and 15th centuries. A woman was not human, and you should be kind to your wife like you are to all dumb animals. That was the mentality.

John Shelby Spong

#19. The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.

Peter Singer

#20. We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature's products into hideous new forms.

Mark Fisher

#21. The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the divine.

Drew Gilpin Faust

#22. People differ in where they direct their empathy and their compassion. Many people are intensely concerned about the suffering of non-human animals, and some do not care at all. There are cultural differences.

Paul Bloom

#23. She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#24. If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

J.M. Coetzee

#25. There could conceivably be circumstances in which an experiment on an animal stands to reduce suffering so much that it would be permissible to carry it out even if it involved harm to the animal ... [even if] the animal were a human being.

Peter Singer

#26. He was not for that moment a human being, but a frenzied creature possessed by rage, turned into an animal. All that could be seen in him was the urge to hurt, and it was, as it always will be, the most dreadful sight in the world.

Susan Cooper

#27. What the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with the animals in our lives- the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat- are, likewise, more complicated than we thought.

Hal Herzog

#28. Besides the respect of the lives of human beings, all the animals and plants should be on the list too. That is the real humanitarianism.

Gautama Buddha

#29. We know from the truths of evolution and ecology that we are all related and interdependent. Anthropomorphism (crediting animals with human emotions and traits) is, however, outdated. Rather we know that we are like animals.

Michael Fox

#30. PIG, n. An animal ("Porcus omnivorus") closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it sticks at pig.

Ambrose Bierce

#31. AA 241:87 - I would argue that masturbation is the human animal's most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization.

Ernest Cline

#32. In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality ... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

George Santayana

#33. When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.

Cyril Connolly

#34. The most intelligent members of the animal kingdom are human beings; so are the most stupid

Agona Apell

#35. Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied - they don't after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else.

Morrissey

#36. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

C. G. Jung

#37. I have never really been fond of animals. I certainly wasn't an 'animal lover' when I became involved in the movement. I just came to be persuaded that animals should be treated as independent sentient beings, not as means to human ends.

Peter Singer

#38. How am I supposed to feed you?" Drake demanded.
"Darkness say to coyote: don't kill human. Did not say don't eat dead human."
Drake laughed with a certain delight. This Pack Leader was definitely a smarter animal than the original one.

Michael Grant

#39. Children are not entirely human. There is a lot of the animal left in them.
about the girl who needed her foot amputated. p170

Frank Huyler

#40. Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

Graham Greene

#41. 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

#42. Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up.

The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

John N. Gray

#43. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.'

Michael Crichton

#44. I don't understand all the fuss. If any creature is in danger, you save it, human or animal.

Diane Ackerman

#45. The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. The rest of the animals pay only once for every mistake they make. But not us. We have a powerful memory. We make a mistake, we judge ourselves, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves.

Miguel Ruiz

#46. The barriers between animal and human come down very easily. We belong to a single great family, and if we are lonely and unhappy we gladly accept the friendship of our distant relations.

Marlen Haushofer

#47. The human is the only guilty animal.

John Steinbeck

#48. The aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought ... The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful.

Aristotle.

#49. If she'd known him better, she might've tried to explain to Will that life never lets you hide. Plant, animal, or human - life forced them all to grow and learn. The more you tried to run, the harder your path got, and you'd still have to travel it.

Cornelia Funke

#50. The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever.

George Orwell

#51. Human beings are the most successful of animals because of their capability to learn, and an abused animal learns very quickly to defend itself. It also learns very quickly to trust very few people - if any.

Brad Thor

#52. Man is the only animal that strives to be more than he is....it is the indomitable spirit within that makes him human.

Steven Lang

#53. What does the blessing of heaven mean? We know the kirin is just an animal, not a mythical creature.
It has become a symbol now ... That is the way human beings deal with the world.

Lian Hearn

#54. The equation of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life.

George Perkins Marsh

#55. I like people. I like animals, too-whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating.

Linus Pauling

#56. He wasn't an animal. He was the most intelligent, complicated person I'd ever met. He may not be good or virtuous, but he was human, flawed and powerful. And I cried because he needed me too.

Skye Warren

#57. Oh, yes, let's bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let's bless the visionary power of the human - the only animal that's got it - , bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go.

Philip Levine

#58. Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smoldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils?

Ian Fleming

#59. Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.

Simone De Beauvoir

#60. I know that I'm an animal that displays bilateral symmetry. I understand that one side should be the mirror of the other, and that human perceptions of beauty are intimately associated with symmetry. For example, I am very handsome.

Mark Rippetoe

#61. Sometimes I watch myself fly. For in the history of human flight it is not yet so very late; and a man may still wonder once in a while and ask: how is it that I, poor earth-habitituated animal, can fly?

Wolfgang Langewiesche

#62. Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.

Stephen Jay Gould

#63. Let them be spattered in humiliation, be spattered in corruption; let them hear the dirge that spills from my lips, once those of a human being but no longer. The angel who deceived me, the men who treated me like an animal. you've all made me into a Phantom.

Mizuki Nomura

#64. It was our Creator who led us through the stages of evolution, from the animal state to the human. His purpose was to make us intelligent and aware, so that we might know Him.

Rumi

#65. Earth allows several levels for Soul to gain experience in life, including the mineral, plant, fish, animal and human stages.

Harold Klemp

#66. The human being is an animal who has received the vocation to become God.

Saint Basil

#67. There cannot be found in the animal kingdom a bat, or any other creature, so blind in its own range of circumstance and connection, as the greater majority of human beings are in the bosoms of their families.

Helen Hunt Jackson

#68. She screamed, the high scream that was neither human nor animal but something terrible in between, the sort of sound that you never forget no matter how many beautiful things you hear afterward.

Maggie Stiefvater

#69. Chins are exclusively a human feature, not to be found among the beasts. Ithey had chins, most animals would look like each other.

Malcolm De Chazal

#70. This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals

Edwin Land

#71. But the fact of the matter is that all scientific evidence would show, based upon what we know about this disease, that muscle cuts - that is, the meat of the animal itself - should not cause any risk to human health.

Ann Veneman

#72. Often, the human animal dresses terror in rage, and expresses both in a way unlike either.

Julius Lester

#73. People have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize their pets, to ascribe human perceptions and intentions to the animal where none exist

Dean Koontz

#74. To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

P. J. O'Rourke

#75. Humans are a great survivor species but our survival will be pretty grim if all of the plants and animals we depend on die out. That's why any human survival strategy has to include a plan to maintain our environment roughly in the state that it's in now.

Annalee Newitz

#76. The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is, and always will be, a wild animal.

Charles Galton Darwin

#77. Look son, the Human Pig.

(shocked)Mother, y-you're inhuman!

(deadpan)Another animal could do this?

Larry Gonick

#78. Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.

Georges Bataille

#79. The only consistency in the way humans think about animals is inconsistency.

Hal Herzog

#80. The closeups of pornography make human genitals look like undiscovered prehistoric animals.

Mason Cooley

#81. I take it hard when an animal in my care suffers or dies. I take it even harder when the animal's suffering is the result of human exploitation or carelessness.

Linda Bender

#82. But public works, economic protectionism, cheap money, 'deficit-financed government spending,' and 'the animal spirits of the spendthrift' in the service of boosting 'consumption demand' ... Doesn't Keynesianism simply appeal to the worst in human nature?

Ilana Mercer

#83. We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what binds us as human beings.

Terry Tempest Williams

#84. Being a thoughtful vegan makes our time on this Earth more peaceful and joyous, because you get to have a hand in promoting and increasing the happiness, good health and well-being of others
both animal and human
rather than being an instrument of their suffering and death.

Russell Simmons

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

H.L. Mencken

#86. Accustomed, as it is, to think of man as a dualism of mind and body, and to regard the former as "sensible" and the latter as a "dumb" animal, our cultture is an affront to the wisdom of nature and a ruinous exploitation of the human organism as a whole.

Alan W. Watts

#87. [...] the primal, animal sense of 'the other,' which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religious passion and conviction, where the 'other,' the 'presence,' becomes the person of God.

Oliver Sacks

#88. Now that he was navigating, his celestial mood was shattered. Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with homesick longing for the free airs and the sights and smells of earth-for grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice-awoke in him.

C.S. Lewis

#89. No animal ever has an ugly body until it is domesticated. It is the same with the human body.

Martha Graham

#90. The human animal varies from class to class, culture to culture. In one way we are consistent: We are irrational.

Rita Mae Brown

#91. Everyone is capable of hate, of wanting to hurt, even kill another person. But when those hatreds manifest themselves out of the mind and into real life, a line is crossed. The line between human and animal.

Kate Kerrigan

#92. We are part animal, part human, and part divine, and the moment we forget the possibility of any one of those, we are lost.

T. Thorn Coyle

#93. Man is the "ethical animal" ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being is based upon his consciousness of himself.

Rollo May

#94. The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he's dying don't give him pity for others.

Tennessee Williams

#95. The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.

Wendell Berry

#96. Because different cultures see a particular animal as representing a certain human virtue or vice, the use of animal imagery also allows for more colorful commentary on the human condition.

Larry Herzberg

#97. All growth is from within. This is evident in all nature. Every plant, every animal, every human is a living testimony to this great law, and the error of the ages is in looking for strength or power from without.

Charles F. Haanel

#98. The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from observing them.

John Desmond Bernal

#99. It is so basic. A human being is an innocent part of nature. Our civilization has distorted this universal quality that allows us to feel at home in our skin. Other animals have coats that they accept, but the human race has yet to come to terms with being nude.

Ruth Bernhard

#100. Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes.

Timothy Garton Ash