Top 100 The Human Animal Quotes
#1. Fear is the engine that drives the human animal. Humanity sees the world as a place of uncountable threats, and so the world becomes what humanity imagines it to be. They not only live in fear but use fear to control one another. Fearmongering is their true religion.
Dean Koontz
#2. Even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.
Stephen King
#3. Survival is for the human animal; fear the motivation. For the spiritual being survival is irrelevant. Curiosity, compassion and creativity are the name of the game; unconditional love the motivation.
Peter Shepherd
#4. 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
#5. The human animal is a beast that eventually has to die. If he's got money, he buys and he buys and he buys. The reason he buys everything he can is because of some crazy hope that one of the things he buys will be life everlasting.
Burl Ives
#6. How, given the canine teeth and close-set eyes that declare the human animal to be a predator, had we come up with the notion that oat bran is more natural to eat than chicken?
Valerie Martin
#7. The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.
Sebastian Barry
#8. 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
#9. The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
George Bernard Shaw
#10. I many times encountered courage, real courage. Undeniable courage. I've heard it said that that was the highest quality of the human animal. I encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it.
Dorothea Lange
#11. For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face.
David Zindell
#12. The human animal needs a freedom seldom mentioned, freedom from intrusion. He needs a little privacy as much as he wants understanding or vitamins or exercise or praise.
Phyllis McGinley
#13. 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
#14. Is it the sheer nature of the beast within, the human animal inside the Human Being?
Gregory Maguire
#15. 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
#16. I saw humans more clearly. I saw them as exceptional creatures under the tyranny of knowledge, helpless to change their circumstances. The human animal is helpless, that is, until the mind decides to change and until knowledge has lost its supreme authority.
Miguel Ruiz
#17. The human animal needs something to aspire to, somewhere to go and something to do.
Jamey Glasnovic
#18. You can often give a better description of the fight between people, the essentials of it, by means of fantastic animals, the simple, primitive, naked instincts, than by depicting a specific situation. It is not the human animal we should describe, but ourselves as human animals.
Asger Jorn
#19. 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
#20. Intoxication, like sexual euphoria, is the privilege of the human animal.
Roman Payne
#21. A business man's conversation should be regulated by fewer and simpler rules than any other function of the human animal. They are: Have something to say. Say it. Stop talking.
George Horace Lorimer
#22. I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.
Kingsley Amis
#23. For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
Terence McKenna
#24. The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism
Charles Eisenstein
#25. It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.
Rebecca West
#26. To my mind, the chief conclusion to be drawn from Derrida's analysis is that the human-animal distinction is, strictly speaking, nonsensical. How could a simple (or even a highly refined) binary distinction approach doing justice to the complex ethical and ontological matters at stake here?
Matthew Calarco
#27. Social existence remains a dream only because the thoughts and feelings of the human animal are blocked off from the simple and obvious.
Wilhelm Reich
#28. Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp and escaped from the jungle.
Blaise Cendrars
#29. In its broad aspects, the proper feeding of children revolves around a public recognition of the interdependence of the human animal upon his cattle. The white race cannot survive without dairy products.
Herbert Hoover
#30. I think I'm very interested in people, in the way our minds work and how we navigate through the experience that is life. Very interested in people's struggles and their choices and their regrets and joys. I'm very interested in the human animal.
Victor Salva
#31. The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.
H. Allen Smith
#32. The human animal dances wildest on the edge of the grave.
Rita Mae Brown
#33. The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.
Harry S. Truman
#34. The human animal ... is ... neither male nor female ... And if I am allowed to jest a little in passing, I have a joke that is not altogether irrelevant: nothing resembles a male cat on the windowsill more than a female cat.
Marie De Gournay
#35. trilobites and Darwin and my father's talk of the 'human animal.
Nancy Horan
#36. The warding off of anxiety is central to the time-binding, action-delaying, and cerebral functions of the human animal.
Ernest Becker
#37. The primary concern of the human animal is to avoid rejection and abandonment.
Laura Schlessinger
#38. Once you wake up the human animal, you can't put it back to sleep again.
Studs Terkel
#39. Architecture arises out of our need to shelter the human animal in a spatial environment and to enclose the social animal in a group space. In this sense architecture serves our institutions and expresses the values of our culture.
Robert L. Geddes
#40. No one likes to have less than they had before. That's the nature of the human animal.
Joni Mitchell
#41. I go forward slowly, dead, and my vision is no longer mine, it's nothing: it's only the vision of the human animal who, without wanting, inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that constitute the civilization in which I feel.
Where can the living be?
Fernando Pessoa
#42. The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.
Leon Kass
#43. Often, the human animal dresses terror in rage, and expresses both in a way unlike either.
Julius Lester
#44. Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all mammals.
Ingrid Newkirk
#45. The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.
Herbert Hoover
#46. 'And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.'
Max Barry
#47. There's nothing funnier than the human animal.
Walt Disney
#49. Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.
Steve Toltz
#50. The human animal only sees what it wants to see.
Marcia Muller
#51. From ancient to modern times, the human animal knows how to find fighting.
Brad Meltzer
#52. The speculators deadly enemies are: Ignorance, greed, fear and hope. All the statute books in the world and all the rules of all the Exchanges on earth cannot eliminate these from the human animal.
Edwin Lefevre
#53. My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.
Peter Gay
#54. The human animal needs meaning as well as food and air and sex and water. The sense that life is meaningless is at the root of a great deal of depression, aggression, and addiction, which can only be addressed by a restoration of the sense that life is meaning-full.
Robert Moss
#55. If there is anything unique about the human animal, it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience.
John N. Gray
#56. The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.
Michael Pollan
#57. The human animal varies from class to class, culture to culture. In one way we are consistent: We are irrational.
Rita Mae Brown
#59. The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.
Ernest Becker
#60. The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he's dying don't give him pity for others.
Tennessee Williams
#61. But ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.
Akira Kurosawa
#62. Clothes don't make the man, but they make all of him except his hands and face during business hours, and that's a pretty considerable area of the human animal.
George Horace Lorimer
#63. I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.
Virginia Woolf
#64. Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.
Luigi Pirandello
#65. I remain too impressed with Freud's vision of the human animal's compromise with existence
the defense or deflection of our ego in knowledge of ourselves from what there is to know about ourselves
to suppose that a human life can get itself without residue into the clear.
Stanley Cavell
#66. I'm not going to lie to you and say it gets easier, because it doesn't. It's just that you get used to it. The human animal has an amazing capacity to get used to almost anything.
Andrea Speed
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. There's no animal that sleep-deprives itself like the human.
Henri Cole
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.
George Bernard Shaw
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. [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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. The most intelligent members of the animal kingdom are human beings; so are the most stupid
Agona Apell
#97. 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
#98. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.
C. G. Jung
#99. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
