One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.
We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man’s nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.
There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other – by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.
Please take care of this pretty earth. Do it for the generations to come. And if you don’t like humans, do it for the animals.
Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.
Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals — for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.
It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.
He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.
Animals whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals.
