quotes about Zoos
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What I would say to the young men and women who are beset by hopelessness and doubt is that they should go and see what is being done on the ground to fight poverty, not like going to the zoo but to take action, to open their hearts and their consciences.
-- Abbe Pierre -
They can't expect anyone to actually pay for a shirt that says, 'I (picture of an elephant) the San Diego Zoo.' What does that even mean?
-- Adam RexSource : Adam Rex (2010). “Fat Vampire: A Never-Coming-of-Age Story”, p.22, Harper Collins
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In my view this is not democracy, but a zoo.... It was exactly what we expected, but not on that scale nor in that form. In a word, it was nothing but a zoo, you can't put it better
-- Alexander Lukashenko -
Many Americans think of the rest of the world as a kind of Disneyland, a showplace for quaint fauna, flora and artifacts. They dress for travel in cheap, comfortable, childish clothes, as if they were going to the zoo and would not be seen by anyone except the animals.
-- Alison Lurie -
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Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.
-- Anais Nin -
Reverse petting zoo. You pet the animals, and they pet you back.
-- Andy Biersack -
Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
-- Angela DavisSource : Angela Davis: An Autobiography ch. 1 (1974)
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I like to do chill things on dates. I think it would be fun to go to the zoo. I know it's really weird and random, but I love animals. It'd be like a day of doing silly things, while enjoying nature.
-- Ashlee Simpson -
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To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I'd never seen anything like them. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.
-- Augusten Burroughs -
I go to movies, go out with friends, go to car shows. I have a zoo.
-- Axl Rose -
People forget the good that zoos do. If it weren't for zoos, we would have so many species that would be extinct today.
-- Betty White -
I've worked with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years, and we have this magnificent photographer, Tad Motoyama. He takes these wonderful, wonderful animal pictures. All through the years he's given me copies of these pictures. Well, I have all these gorgeous ones, so I said, 'Tad, I want to do a book with your picture on one side.'
-- Betty White -
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what sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything.
-- Bill McKibben -
My parents used to take me to the pet department and tell me it was a zoo.
-- Billy Connolly -
We must educate the public. The average person has no idea of what's going on in factory farms, in laboratories, circuses, roadside zoos or rodeos.
-- Bob Barker -
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If you're hanging around with nothing to do and the zoo is closed, come over to the Senate. You'll get the same kind of feeling and you won't have to pay.
-- Bob Dole -
I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.
-- Carl Sagan -
We live in a culture that has institutionalized the oppression of animals on at least two levels: in formal structures such as slaughterhouses, meat markets, zoos, laboratories, and circuses, and through our language. That we refer to meat eating rather than to corpse eating is a central example of how our language transmits the dominant culture's approval of this activity.
-- Carol J. Adams -
Surely one zoo in the world should have the courage to draw the ultimate conclusion about our ancestry? A cage with Homo Sapiens in all its varying forms, perhaps then we would understand ourselves better. The question of course is whether the other animals would approve of it.
-- Cees Nooteboom -
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I became very critical of zoos and circuses and keeping animals in captivity. I wish it was against the law.
-- Christopher Walken -
Greta Garbo: A deer in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo.
-- Clare Boothe Luce -
The chimpanzees in the zoos do it, Some courageous kangaroos do it Let's do it, let's fall in love. I'm sure giraffes on the sly do it, Even eagles as they fly do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love.
-- Cole Porter -
I didn't want to do a zoo show. I didn't want to do a study of someone with mental illness. I just wanted to show someone who was trying to live their life.
-- Daniel Craig -
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[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.
-- Daniel Quinn -
When I was six years old, my parents took me to this farmers market with a petting zoo. They put me on a pony and, for some reason, it took off at a run and they had to chase it down. They tell me it was kind of traumatic.
-- David SchwimmerSource : "Is this it?". The Guardian Interview, www.theguardian.com. November 28, 2008.
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A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.
-- David Sedaris -
Traveling across the United States, it's easy to see why Americans are often thought of as stupid. At the San Diego Zoo, right near the primate habitats, there's a display featuring half a dozen life-size gorillas made out of bronze. Posted nearby is a sign reading CAUTION: GORILLA STATUES MAY BE HOT. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated. CANNON MAY BE LOUD. MOVING SIDEWALK IS ABOUT TO END. To people who don't run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence.
-- David Sedaris -
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The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.
-- Desmond MorrisSource : The Human Zoo (1969) p. 8
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I like to do from racing my radio control cars to doing work at the zoo to poems to the TV show. There are a lot of things that I like to involve myself with, but I have a pretty packed schedule nine times out of ten. I have a good sense of working things in at the same time so that I can get all my hobbies in line.
-- Dhani Jones -
[My] excursions provided a unique opportunity for observing [the gorillas' behavior] in their natural habitat... Then, all too soon, the infants were demanded for their trip to the zoo. ... [H]appily the babies did not know they would never see their mountain home again
-- Dian Fossey -
Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone.
-- Donella Meadows -
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I went to the zoo one day and saw a chimp playing with a beat-up acoustic guitar in a way I had never seen before. Instead of using the pick the chimp was banging the neck and tapping it with its fingers. I knew the chimp was on to something so I practiced this new technique in my room for hours until I'd perfected it.
-- Eddie Van Halen -
Because we have put ourselves in our own zoo, we find it difficult to break out.
-- Edward T. Hall -
If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo - but zebras were a rare legendary creature that had finally been decided to be mythical - then there's a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. Which is rather setting ourselves up for eternal disappointment, eh? If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed.
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky -
Welcome to Hollywood, a land just off the coast of planet Earth. I am never quite certain if I am visiting the zoo, or if I'm one of the animals in a cage.
-- Elinor Glyn -
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I bet it breaks your heart to have two of your friends pine for me the way they do," he said proudly. "Luna...and now Scarlet. They can't keep their hands off of me." "It's just because you are foreign to them. It's like if they went to the zoo and stared at the monkeys. You are the monkey.
-- Ellen Schreiber -
Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.
-- Evan Esar -
The quizzical expression of the monkey at the zoo comes from his wondering whether he is his brother's keeper, or his keeper's brother.
-- Evan Esar -
I am personally not against keeping animals at zoos, as they serve a huge educational purpose, but treating them well and with respect seems the least we could do, and with 'we' I mean not just zoo staff, but most certainly also the public.
-- Frans de Waal -
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It is not only visitors to the zoo who are fascinated but uneasy in the presence of chimpanzees; the same is true of scientists. The more they learn about these great apes, the deeper our identity crisis seems to become. The resemblance between humans and chimpanzees is not only external. If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent, self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?
-- Frans de Waal -
A good way to lose weight is to put salt on your ***** and go to a petting zoo. But stay away from goats because I've seen them fornicate with a mail box.
-- Gary BuseySource : "Gary Busey On Piranha 3DD" by Helen O'hara, www.empireonline.com. November 25, 2011.
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Your own space, man, it's so important. That's why we were doomed because we didn't have any. It is like monkeys in a zoo. They die. You know, everything needs to be left alone.
-- George Harrison -
Zoos should concentrate more on the preservation side of things.
-- Gerald Durrell -
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We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.
-- Germaine Greer -
Sometimes you think they must have come out of the chimp cages at the Bronx zoo.
-- Gerry Cheevers -
If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.
-- Harry Crews -
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And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find.
-- Haruki Murakami -
Traveling with a big band is like being an inmate in a traveling zoo.
-- Hoagy CarmichaelSource : Hoagy Carmichael, Stephen Longstreet (1999). “The Stardust Road & Sometimes I Wonder: The Autobiography of Hoagy Carmichael”
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I've gone back in time to when dinosaurs weren't just confined to zoos.
-- Homer -
If I had my way... there wouldn't be a single lion or tiger in captivity anywhere in the world. They never take to it. They're never happy. They never settle down... You can see it in their eyes...
-- Hugh LoftingSource : Hugh Lofting (1922). “The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle”, p.62, Frederick A. Stokes
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So, not only am I panicking over the weekend if I need to know my lines, but also if can I get the kids to the zoo. Can I even go to church? I was asking for certain things that would allow me to plan my life a little better.
-- Hunter Tylo -
A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.
-- Igor Stravinsky -
There seems to be a general impression that to be known as normal in Hollywood is akin to being labeled as rare animal in a zoo.
-- Irene DunneSource : "How Do I Stay Normal in Hollywood". Movie Radio Guide, April 25, 1942.
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Zoo animals are ambassadors for their cousins in the wild.
-- Jack Hanna -
The voice of the natural world would be, 'could you please give us space and leave us alone to get along with our own lives and our own ways, because we actually know much better how to do it than when you start interfering''
-- Jane Goodall -
Nobody in the city of Los Angeles knows how to catch an alligator, ... We have no experience in recreation and parks, the zoo or animal control.
-- Janice Hahn -
You have city centre pubs where men go to meet girls, not realising that all girls in city centre pubs have thighs like tug boats and morals that would surprise a zoo animal.
-- Jeremy Clarkson -
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Hollywood movies are designed for 15-year-old youths from North Dakota who, intellectually speaking, are on equal terms with a British zoo animal.
-- Jeremy Clarkson -
When I was a kid, I said to my father one afternoon, 'Daddy, will you take me to the zoo?' He answered, 'If the zoo wants you, let them come and get you',
-- Jerry Lewis -
Why build a zoo when we can just put up a fence around Chapel Hill?
-- Jesse Helms -
If you want to understand how a lion hunts, don't go to the zoo. Go to the jungle.
-- Jim Stengel -
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The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
-- John Berger -
This is an extremely foolish and stupid and idiotic kind of attitude - to expect theatres to make money. Do the public schools make money? Do libraries make money? Does the zoo make money? D o the sewers make money? It's a community service.
-- John Hirsch -
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
-- John Updike -
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It is hard to get mad at Donald Trump for saying stupid things, in the same way you don't get mad at a monkey when he throws poop at you at the zoo... What does get me angry is the ridiculous, disingenuous defending of the poop-throwing monkey.
-- Jon Stewart -
When I take my kids to the zoo in Los Angeles, they always look the longest at the creature that moves the least - especially those in the reptile house. I asked myself: 'Who are the people that are pretty cool but also very still and monotone in their expression?' and I thought of Jose Mourinho.
-- Julian Sands -
A good zoo," Stella said, "is a large domain. A wild cage. A safe place to be. It has room to roam and humans who don't hurt." She pauses, considering her words. "A good zoo is how humans make amends.
-- Katherine Applegate -
As an actor, to go and see those shows - great plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and Clifford Odets's 'Golden Boy' - it's so exhilarating. I'd personally love to perform the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story.' He's a transient, lost soul, and an example of humanity at its rawest.
-- Keegan AllenSource : Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.
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It does get old to have to always be a monkey in a zoo. I don't know what it's like any more to be anonymous.
-- Kevin Bacon -
We don't understand the power of nature and the world because we don't live with it. Our environment is designed to sustain us. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo called civilization.
-- Laurence Gonzales -
People go to the zoo and they like the lion because it's scary. And the bear because it's intense, but the monkey makes people laugh.
-- Lorne Michaels -
They used to have a smoking section at most airports. No more. They now have these glass-encased rooms. You're not just a smoker, you're an example to other people. You're an exhibit at a futuristic zoo.
-- Marc Maron -
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The problem with the alphabet is that it bears no relation to anything at all, and when words are arranged alphabetically they are uselessly separated. In the OED, for example, aardvarks are 19 volumes away from the zoo, yachts are 18 volumes from the beach, and wine is 17 volumes from the nearest corkscrew.
-- Mark ForsythSource : Mark Forsyth (2013). “The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language”, p.9, Penguin
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He was very concerned about his children potentially being kidnapped or attached, and that's why they were covered up. When he went to Berlin zoo, there were 200 photographers.
-- Martin Bashir -
I'm not going to / let a little thing like the world stand in my way. / Why should I? I understand it / as much as I understand penguins / and I still go to the zoo.
-- Matthew Dickman -
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When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.
-- Melvin Burgess -
I think she is going to find you too old... Yes that was it, the moment she said it I knew it was true, and the revelation caused me no surprise, it was like the echo of a dull, not unexpected shock. The age difference was the last taboo, the final limit, all the stronger for the fact that it remained the last and had replaced all the others. In the modern world you could be a swinger, bi, trans, zoo into S&M, but it was forbidden to be old.
-- Michel Houellebecq -
We're in 'Jurassic Park' territory. If we go to the zoo in the future, we'll have zoos for extinct animals.
-- Michio Kaku -
The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
-- Nadine Gordimer -
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I love zoo sanctuaries.
-- Nancy TravisSource : Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.
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Betty took him for a walk in the zoo and he was amused by her evident belief in the curative power of animals. She seemed to think that it must steady him to look at a buffalo.
-- Nathanael WestSource : Nathanael West, Jonathan Lethem (2009). “Miss Lonelyhearts: & the Day of the Locust”, p.36, New Directions Publishing
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I love acting, but it's much more fun taking the kids to the zoo.
-- Nicole Kidman -
My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else.
-- Oliver Sacks -
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In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?
-- Patti Smith -
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
-- Peter De VriesSource : Peter De Vries (2014). “The Vale of Laughter: A Novel”, p.86, Open Road Media
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If zoos are like arks, then rare animals are like passengers on a voyage of the damned, never to find a port that will let them dock or a land in which they can live in peace. The real solution, of course, is to preserve the wild nature that created these animals and has the power to sustain them. But if it is really true that we are inevitably moving towards a world in which mountain gorillas can survive only in zoos, then we must ask whether it is really better for them to live in artificial environments of our design than not to be born at all.
-- Peter Singer -
[On public events attended by royalty:] It was the usual 'zoo tea.' You know, we eat - the others watch.
-- Princess Margaret -
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The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
-- Rachel CarsonSource : Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.19, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism.
-- Rigoberta Menchu -
Today the governments of Latin America should be ashamed of not havingexterminated the indigenous, at the end of the twentieth century, because weexist at the end of this century. We are not myths of the past, ruins in thejungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims ofintolerance and racism.
-- Rigoberta Menchu -
The only creature on earth whose natural habitat is a zoo is the zookeeper.
-- Robert Breault -
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I remember once reading that it is still not understood how the giraffe manages to pump an adequate blood supply all the way up to its head; but it is hard to imagine that anyone would conclude tht giraffes do not have long necks. At least not anyone who had ever been to a zoo
-- Robert Solow -
The zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. I wanted to see an oyster-catcher, so I was no better than the people who caged the oyster-catcher for me to see.
-- Russell HobanSource : "The Turtle Diary".
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I still haven't gotten over this thing of walking down the street and somebody recognizing you because you've been in a movie. There's this illusion that movie stars only exist in the movies. And to see one live is like seeing a leopard let out of the zoo.
-- Sam Shepard -
Through PETA, we rescue animals in roadside zoos and circuses. They are some of the most abused animals in the country.
-- Sam SimonSource : "Terminally Ill 'Simpsons' Co-Creator Vows to Give Away Fortune". Interview with Gary Baum, www.hollywoodreporter.com. July 25, 2013.
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