Animals For Social Justice

“Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

– Jorge Luis Borges
“The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.”

– Abraham Lincoln
“A soul shines as bright as a full moon. A heart beats as fast as a cheetah. An emotional journey is nothing without guts and hope.”

― Dina Husseini
“The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.”

– Dian Fossey
“Aim to be like a rhino – to have a single purpose, to charge at obstacles and goals with total commitment and to develop a thick skin to deal with the slings and arrows that try to slow you down.”

– Bear Grylls
“Nature’s great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing.”

– John Donne
“Delicate mother kangaroo. Sitting up there rabbit-wise, but huge, plumb-weighted. And lifting her beautiful slender face… Lifting her face to nibble at a round white peppermint drop, which she loves, sensitive mother kangaroo. Her sensitive, long, pure-bred face, Her full antipodal eyes, so dark, So big and quiet and remote, having watched so many empty”

— D.H. Lawrence, in “Kangaroo” poem
“At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards.”

– Hunter S. Thompson
”Bears keep me humble. They help me to keep the world in perspective and to understand where I fit on the spectrum of life. We need to preserve the wilderness and its monarchs for ourselves, and for the dreams of children. We should fight for these things as if our life depended upon it, because it does.”

– Wayne Lynch, “Bears: Monarchs of the Northern Wilderness”
“I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”

– Alexander the Great
“You tormented a hummingbird of love between your teeth.”

― Federico García Lorca
“Sometimes, my head is just like this storm”, said the Tiny Dragon.
“If you listen carefully”, said the Great Panda, “you will ear the raindrops hitting the rock. Even in a storm it is possible to find a little peace.”

― James Norbury, “Big Panda & Tiny Dragon”
“One hand does not catch a buffalo.”

– Ewe proverb, Ghana, Africa
“In the warm, salty water,a baby seahorse swirls and somersaults like a tiny gymnast performing on an invisible mat.”

– Jennifer Keats Curtis
“One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees…”

― Leo Tolstoy
“It is not kindness, but the need for a clean mouth that makes the hippopotamus open its mouth for the river bird to peck at.”

– Nigerian proverb, Africa
“Koalas spend most of their time in eucalyptus trees. They eat almost nothing except eucalyptus leaves, back, and fruit. A koala has many adaptations that help it live this unusual life.”

– Mary King Hoff
“A chameleon that wants to survive from the burning bush must abandon the majestic walk of its ancestors”.

– Zambian proverb, Africa
“Zebra babies can flat-out run within an hour of being born, because if they can’t, they’re dead. We were like zebras, so poor we didn’t know how poor we were, and tough and independent because there wasn’t any other way to be.”

– Willie Parker
“I learn as much from a turtle as from a religious text.”

– Dalai Lama
“Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not to suffer.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli
“The swans swam ahead, always ahead, their bodies gliding so that none could see the effort of their feet beneath the surface, paddling, moving, propelling them forward, forward, to that beautiful spot far ahead, an incandescent curtain of light, a shower of moonbeams, a heavenly constellation of stars.”

― Melanie Benjamin, “The Swans of Fifth Avenue”
“The camel carries the load, but it is the tick that complains.”

– Arabic Proverb
“I dreamed about the fawn night after night. You don’t know what it’s like when a person longs so unspeakably for something”

— Magda Szabó, “The Door”
“A Fox entered the house of an actor and, rummaging through all his properties, came upon a Mask, an admirable imitation of a human head. He placed his paws on it and said, ‘What a beautiful head! Yet it is of no value, as it entirely lacks brains.'”

– Aesop
“For here in the Amazon, where unfathomable tragedies collide with unquenchable desires, the most preposterous of impossibilities come true.”

― Sy Montgomery, “Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest”
“Can a sparrow know how a stork feels?”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“It is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.”

– Francis Bacon
“Lawyers are like beavers: They get in the mainstream and dam it up”.

– John Naisbitt
“The grasshopper that was eaten by the hornbill must have been deaf.”

– Igbo proverb, Africa
“Because lobsters live for over one hundred years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives”.

– Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou, “The Lobster”, 2015
“To use the power of the bison, I had to perform that part of my vision for the people to see.”

– Black Elk
“War among grasshoppers delights the crow.”

– Shwahili Tribe, Africa
“Only in the first hour of the night can I become human, while the male dove is busy with the twelve dead.”

― Carl Gustav Jung
“The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it.”

– Mark Twain, “Roughin It”
“It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English – up to fifty words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese”.

– Carl Sagan, “Cosmos”
“I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put others and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for Eagles to be Crows.”

– Sitting Bull
‘Fifty per cent of the echidna brain is used for some of the hardest kinds of thinking. In humans, it’s not even thirty per cent.’

– Tyson Yunkaporta, “Sand Talk”
“I am not a warthog from hell.”

– Flannery O’Connor
“A flock of flirting flamingos is pure, passionate, pink pandemonium—a frenetic flamingle-mangle-a discordant discotheque of delirious dancing, flamboyant feathers, and flamingo lingo.”

– Charley Harper
“You can’t teach a giraffe to run.”

– African Proverb
With flowing tail and flying mane,
Wide nostrils never stretched by pain,
Mouth bloodless to bit or rein,
And feet that iron never shod,
And flanks unscar’d by spur or rod,
A thousand horses – the wild – the free –
Like waves that follow o’er the sea,
Came thickly thundering on.”

— Lord Byron
“If a rabbit defined intelligence the way man does, then the most intelligent animal would be a rabbit, followed by the animal most willing to obey the commands of a rabbit.”

– Robert Brault
“Wild ducks and tomorrow both come without calling.”

– Russian proverb
“There she blows!-there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!” 

― Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”
“When wombats do inspire/I strike my disused lyre.”

― Christina Rossetti
“A frog in a well cannot discuss the ocean, because he is limited by the size of his well.”

– Zhuangzi
“The ears were large, flaring forward, the eyes limpid amber, in which the pupil floated like a glittering jewel, changing color with shifts of the light: obsidian, emerald, ruby, opal, amethyst, diamond.”

― William S. Burroughs, “Ghost of Chance
“Appreciation has become my destiny in life. Perhaps it’s the instinct of a polar bear enjoying hibernation in the vast snows.” 

– Liu Xiaobo
“I have seen Tasmanian devils battle over a carcass. I have seen lionesses crowding a kill, dingoes on the trail of a feral piglet, and adult croc thrashing its prey to pieces. But never, in all the animal world, have I witnessed anything to match the casual cruelty of the human being.”

― Terri Irwin, “Steve & Me”
“Walking through your past is like navigating a war-torn city…we look for the parrot. Where is the parrot? We still hear its voice; but all we can see is a bare wooden perch. The bird has flown”.

– Julian Barnes, “Flaubert’s Parrot”
“In the third month, the sun rising, the Boar and the Leopard on the field of Mars to fight; The tired Leopard raises its eye to the heavens, sees an eagle playing around the sun”.

– Nostradamus
“Adorn the bird with feathers so it may soar.”

– Māori proverb
“No other member of the whole class of mammals is coloured in so extraordinary a manner as the adult male mandrill.”

– Darwin, “The Descent Man”
“August is the month of the high-sailing hawks. The hen hawk is the most noticeable. He likes the haze and calm of these long, warm days. He is a bird of leisure and seems always at his ease. How beautiful and majestic are his movements!”

– John Burroughs
“’The Path of the Anaconda’ is the beginning of humanity because it represents the symbol of life in the Amazon.”

– Wade Davis
“The eland features heavily in the folklore of many African tribes, especially the San people of southern Africa, who frequently included paintings of the animals in their rock art. There are several myths involving the eland, which often represent good fortune, freedom, courage and self-sacrifice”.

– Africa Geographic
“All day long the red squirrels came and went and fed on my corn. There they were, in full possession of the field, from morning till evening. The smaller ones were the most active in the work, running up and down, as it were, to see if there was any corner of the field where they could not get in.”

– Henry David Thoreau
“Native forests, trees so widely spaced, / That natural creatures did enjoy the place, / Such as the Capercallzie and his mates”.

– M.T. Buchanan, “Childhood”
“Orca typically live in complex
societies and the lives that they
cad can teach us about love,
loyalty and the power of community, They are amazing animals that should be respected and protected.”

– Ingrid Visser
“Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.”

– Malcolm de Chazal
“The panther is sleek. The panther is sneaky. The panther is covert. Meanwhile, the gorilla will show up and bang on his chest and make noises to warn you about what is about to happen if you continue to cross the line.”

– Winston Duke
“For me, a penguin was romantic, was in a movie, and was a bird. No, he has a spirit. He can communicate with me. I can work with him. And the story of the movie is a true story. They had a relationship for eight years. The penguin came back and came back again, which is amazing. There’s a little magic in there.”

– Jean Reno, for “My Penguin Friend” movie, 2024
“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”

― John Keats, “Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne”
“A sense of humor is good for you. Have you ever heard of a laughing hyena with heart burn?”

– Bob Hope
“A robin red breast in a cage, Puts all Heaven in a rage.”

– William Blake
“’The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.”

– Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and The Carpenter”
“The meerkats looked away. They did it like one man, all of them turning in the same direction at exactly the same time. I pulled myself out to see what it was. It was Richard Parker. He confirmed what I had suspected, that these meerkats had gone for so many generations without predators that any notion of flight distance, of flight, of plain fear, had been genetically weeded out of them. He was moving through them, blazing a trail of murder and mayhem, devouring one meerkat after another, blood dripping from his mouth, and they, cheek to jowl with a tiger, were jumping up and down on the spot, as if crying, “My turn! My turn! My turn!”

― Yann Martel, “Life of Pi”
“Consider orangutans. In all the worlds graced by their presence, it is suspected that they can talk but choose not to do so in case humans put them to work, possibly in the television industry. In fact they can talk. It’s just that they talk in Orangutan. Humans are only capable of listening in Bewilderment.”

— Terry Pratchett, “Men at Arms”
“There is no Scorpion like a guilty mind— No sting so terrible as he must bear.”

– Percy Bysshe Shelley
“In ancient times, the ibex was revered for its power and resilience. People believed it was connected to the gods, explaining its survival in such hostile environments. Hunters sought the ibex for its medicinal properties—from its powdered horn, which was thought to treat poisoning, to its heel bones, believed to be aphrodisiacs. This mysticism led to intensive hunting, and by the 17th century, the Alpine ibex was almost extinct in the Alps. However, thanks to conservation efforts, the species has made a remarkable comeback.”

– European Wilderness Society
“True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.”

– William Shakespeare
“Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups! They swim the huge fluid freedom”.

– Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
“Crows remember human faces. They remember the people who feed them, who are kind to them. And the people who wrong them too. They don’t forget.”

– Leigh Bardugo
“The jaguar is the most feared animal in the rainforest.”

– Amazonian tribesman
“Woman’s honor is nice as ermine; it will not bear a soil.”

– John Dryden
“Do not approach an emu, the bird does not esteem you. It wields a quick and wicked kick. That’s guaranteed to cream you.”

– Jack Prelutsky
“You cannot teach a crab to walk straight.”

– Aristophanes
“The blame of the antelope is on the hunter.”

– Kenyan proverb
“The grizzly radiated potency. He carried the physical strength and thorniness of disposition that allowed him to attack or kill most any time he cared. But, almost always, he chose not to. That was power beyond a bully’s swaggering. It was the kind of restraint that commands awe—a muscular act of grace.”

– Doug Peacock, “Grizzly Years”
“The beauteous dragonfly’s dancing By the waves of the rivulet glancing; She dances here and she dances there, The glimmering, glittering flutterer fair.”

– Heinrich Heine
“What creature lives in the desert, has huge ears, and walks or furry feet? It rarely drinks water, and it stays up all night. This special animal is the fennec fox.”

– Kristin Petrie
“Gecko is already squealing away from the curb, grooving on the burst of acceleration. It’s his favourite feeling—that boost of pure power, like a titanic hand propelling him forward.”

– D.J. MacHale, “The Juvie Three”
“And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

― Ernest Hemingway
“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”

– Archilochus
“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance…”

– John Ruskin
“He could see the dingo immediately above him, its coat a deep gold in the sunlight, its head cooked curiously to one side. Its eyes, he notices, conveyed a sense not of alarm, but of trust.”

– Victor Kelleher, “Taronga”
“In a world filled with darkness… We are the fireflies…We make our own light…”

– Ingrid E. Langley
“On Painting Rats, and the Glorification of Them. They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant, and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.”

― Banksy, ”Wall and Piece”
“To this day, cranes carry the strands of our fate. They say that each time two people’s paths cross, so do their strands. When they become important to one another or make a promise to one another, a knot is tied, connecting them.”

— Elizabeth Lim, “Six Crimson Cranes”
“I see the extinction of a species as an assault against the evolutionary history of this planet,” Tom Jefferson of VIVA Vaquita once told me. “For a species that has been evolving for millions of years to be snuffed out by our stupidity and greed, to me that is like the worst crime that can be committed.”

― Brooke Bessesen, ”Vaquita: Science, Politics, and Crime in the Sea of Cortez”
“A wisp haired judge whose law would punish beak and claw.”

– Gwen Harwood, “Barn Owl”
“Cougars teach us to use and balance our own power, to be confident and strong. Although Cougar’s are of a solitary nature in the wild, those who have the spirit of the cougar with them are called to become leaders in some way.”

― Eileen Anglin
“Even an otter picks up a rock once in a while to open a clam.”

– Chuck Lorre
“And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.”

― Dylan Thomas
“Octopus can fish for prey while deciding what color and pattern to turn, what shape to make their bodies, be on alert for predators and aware how far away their dens are.”

– Sy Montgomery
“The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me.”

― H. G. Wells, “The Time Maschine”
“Red pandas are the only species remaining in their taxonomic family — a living relic of the past. Saving them is important to the preservation of the world’s natural heritage and global biodiversity”.

– Red Panda Network
“The sea lions felt it and their barking took on a tone and a cadence that would have gladdened the heart of St. Francis”.

– John Steinbeck, “Cannery Row”
“You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”

― Richard Bach, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”