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Quotes

Alas! We are ridiculous animals.

—Horace Walpole, 1777

I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.

—John Ruskin, 1860

Who sleepeth with dogs shall rise with fleas.

—John Florio, 1578

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.

—Erich Fromm, 1947

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

—Alexander Pope, 1709

A good dog, sir, deserves a good bone.

—Ben Jonson, 1633

Every creature in the world is like a book and a picture, to us, and a mirror.

—Alain de Lille, c. 1200

A dog starved at his master’s gate / Predicts the ruin of the state.

—William Blake, 1807

The righteous know the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.

—Book of Proverbs, c. 500 BC

An ape will be an ape, though clad in purple.

—Erasmus, 1511

Of all the creatures that breathe and creep on the surface of the earth, none is more to be pitied than man.

—Homer, c. 750 BC

When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.

—Winston Churchill, 1945

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.

—William Hazlitt, 1819