A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

We slander the hyena; man is the fiercest and cruelest animal.

Henry David Thoreau

Quote Topics

Animal Hyena Man Slander

Quote Author

Henry David Thoreau
American - Author
July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862

Man is the cruelest animal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Man is a thinking animal, a talking animal, a toolmaking animal, a building animal, a political animal, a fantasizing animal. But, in the twilight of a civilization he is chiefly a taxpaying animal.

Hugh MacLennan

Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.

Friedrich Nietzsche

When a man confines an animal in a cage, he assumes ownership of that animal. But an animal is an individual; it cannot be owned. When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act.

Tom Robbins

I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason - as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

He said that man’s heart was the only bad heart in the animal kingdom; that man was the only animal capable of feeling malice, envy, vindictiveness, revengefulness, hatred, selfishness, the only animal that loves drunkenness, almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness and a filthy habitation, the sole animal in whom was fully developed the base instinct called patriotism, the sole animal that robs, persecutes, oppresses and kills members of his own tribe, the sole animal that steals and enslaves the members of any tribe.

Mark Twain

When a mean wretch cannot vie with another in virtue, out of his wickedness he begins to slander. The abject envious wretch will slander the virtuous man when absent, but when brought face to face his loquacious tongue becomes dumb.

Saadi

MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine?

Wilhelm Reich

Slander-mongers and those who listen to slander, if I had my way, would all be strung up, the talkers by the tongue, the listeners by the ears.

Plautus

There was a man who sold a hyena skin while the beast still lived and who was killed in hunting it.

Winston Churchill

To restate an old law - when a man bites a fish, that's good, but when a fish bites a man, that's bad. This is one way of saying it's all right if man kills an animal, but if an animal attacks man, the act is reprehensible.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

When we hold it (amber) in our hands, we hold also that furious epoch where rioted all monsters and poisons, where death fecundated and life destroyed, where superabundance demanded such existences, no souls, but fiercest animal fire - just for that I hate it!

Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford

Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.