Quotations about Animals

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth! ~Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist


It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons. ~Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy


Lots of people talk to animals.... Not every many listen, though.... That's the problem.~Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh


Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills. ~Voltaire, letter to Count Schomberg, 31 August 1769


I guess cows aren't into the four food groups, especially when they are two of them.~Anthony Clark


Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms. ~George Eliot


The kind man feeds his beast before sitting down to dinner. ~Hebrew Proverb


It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or dog than to any human being. ~Henry David Thoreau


I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.~Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, 1907

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals. ~Winston Churchill


If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. ~Chief Seattle of the Suwamish Tribe, letter to President Franklin Pierce


To insult someone we call him "bestial." For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult. ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988