Top 60 Zoos Quotes & Sayings

We would consider it cruel to confine a dog permanently in a kennel. Yet we visit zoos where hundreds of wild animals are kept permanently in the equivalent of a kennel.

Let us free all the animals in the zoos to show them that we are not animals!

Zoos should concentrate more on the preservation side of things.

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.

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.

People forget the good that zoos do. If it weren't for zoos, we would have so many species that would be extinct today.

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?

I've gone back in time to when dinosaurs weren't just confined to zoos.

In most countries, it is possible to visit zoos and see bored animals pacing back and forth in cages, with nothing to do but wait for the next meal. Circuses are even worse places for animals. Their living conditions are deplorable, especially in travelling circuses where cages have to be small so that they can go on the road.

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.

What you do in Oklahoma with tigers in these roadside zoos would be frowned on if it opened in the L.A. basin or New York. I think it's a lack of education. And people believe we should be able to have a tiger, because this is America - who should stop us?

I've never really been able to tolerate zoos.

Nick spent his first years on walks in his stroller and Snugli, playing in Berkeley parks and baby gyms and visiting zoos and aquariums. His mother and I divorced when he was 4. No child benefits from the bitterness and savagery of a divorce like ours.

In the U.K. - correct me if I'm wrong - there is a legal definition of 'not being in possession of yourself' aka 'not being a person.' That's the fun thing: someone such as a lawyer needs to define, using some empirical signal, something supposedly transcendental like 'person,' something lawyers argue and argue about regarding, say, chimps in zoos.

Newt Gingrich was campaigning at a zoo this week and he was bitten by a penguin. Newt Gingrich is always campaigning at zoos. Mitt Romney once did a photo op at a zoo. That was a big mistake, because he stood next to the chameleon, and HE changed colors.

I do love nature, but I don't suppose I'd spent more time in zoos as a child than anyone else!

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.

When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

We're in 'Jurassic Park' territory. If we go to the zoo in the future, we'll have zoos for extinct animals.

Zoos have always fascinated me. What child hasn't wondered what would happen if all the animals escaped from the zoo? Or what would happen if they got caught in an enclosure?

Great and good men and women stirred sugar into their coffee knowing that it had been picked by slaves. Kind, good ancestors of all of us never questioned hangings, burnings, tortures, inequality, suffering and injustice that today revolt us. If we dare to presume to damn them with our fleeting ideas of morality, then we risk damnation from our descendants for whatever it is that we are doing that future history will judge as intolerable and wicked: eating meat, driving cars, appearing on TV, visiting zoos, who knows?

All zoos are both beguiling and repellent.

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.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

Every time you go to the zoo, you prolong the captivity of the animals there! If no one goes to the zoos, there will be no zoos! Destroying the evil is very simple and it is in your hand!

Their stupidity does not amaze me, its when they're smart that amazes me. It's baffling whenever you find someone who's smart - incredible. Soon you'll have zoos for such things.

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.

Camels are still trained in Alice Springs for tourist jaunts and for occasional sale to Australia's zoos.

We are facing an enormous crisis in Africa right now in terms of illegal wildlife trafficking, which is decimating animal populations, destroying local economies, and funding armed insurgencies and terrorist syndicates. If we do not find solutions to this crisis now, there will be little habitat left beyond sparse areas of national parks that will serve as glorified zoos to small pockets of remaining animals.

In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.

I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

Unlike accredited zoos like the Bronx Zoo, San Diego Zoo, the Los Angeles Zoo, these are private menageries, and these people are frightened and there is an existential fear that they are going to be shut down by the government, by PETA, by HSUS, by animal rights groups. So they, generally, are very guarded.

We're feeding all these zoos. And that's getting bigger and bigger.

When I visit my brother in South Africa, I order things I've only seen in zoos. Little deers and kudu, all the mammals you would never think of eating.

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.

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.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

When I was a kid in New York I used to go to the zoo. I always liked the zoo. I grew up within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo. And then when my first two children were young, I used to take them to the zoo. Zoos are always interesting. And I make pictures.

National parks, zoos, protected areas, polluted seas - using the whole world as a readymade, I thought about it as a stage set. To activate a stage set you need a drama, an actor to offset it.

It was wrong to capture wild animals and confine them in captivity for people to go and gawk at them. And that's basically how zoos got started. But once you do that, and once you have animals that have been bred in captivity, you're really stuck with them in some sense. You can't return them to the wild.

My favorite species to study would be Cobras and King Cobras which are two different families. They're very intelligent, and they're beautiful looking animals. Where they come from are countries and regions which I spend a lot of time in - South East Asia and India, those are places I go to fairly often, and so the cobras are my main interest. It's not a snake I can maintain, but when I see them in zoos and what not, I find them interesting.

I photograph in public and semi-public spaces that date from various epochs. These are spaces accessible to everyone. They are places where you can meet and communicate, where you can share or receive knowledge, where you can relax and recover. They are spas, hotels, waiting rooms, museums, libraries, universities, banks, churches and, as of a few years ago, zoos. All of the places have a purpose, as for the most part do the things within them.

Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.

I hate zoos.

Why do men go to zoos?

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

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.

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.

I became very critical of zoos and circuses and keeping animals in captivity. I wish it was against the law.

A zoo is not an ideal place for an animal - of course the best place for a chimp is the wilds of Tanzania - but a good zoo is a decent, acceptable place. Animals are far more flexible than we realize. IF they weren't, they wouldn't have survived. But my opinion about zoos came after research. Initially I had the opinion that most people have, that they are jails.

I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports make me feel like we're about three per cent better than ants. Especially U.S. airports. They're zoos. All civility is gone.

What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.

Through PETA, we rescue animals in roadside zoos and circuses. They are some of the most abused animals in the country.

'Tiger King.' They are absolutely gone with the fairies, they're all absolutely raving out of the box, the lot of them. All those people with animals like tigers, who've got their own zoos in America, and one guy's got something like 2,000 tigers in his back garden. It's absolutely mad.

Stop going to the zoos! Don't take your children to the zoos! No creature ever deserves captivity without any crime!

In zoos, along with the animals, the humanity of man is also prisoned! No cage is humane!

We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in lots of sugar, and we'll get fat and sick. Confine our movement, and we'll get weak and antsy. Give us some manageable problems with which to grapple, and we'll cheer up.

We have wild animals in zoos, yet people rarely meet their 'food' face to face.

The solutions like freezing zygotes, fertilized eggs, of all kinds of animals and so on, or keeping them in zoos and having arboreta where we have trees, all these things have been promoted. Even getting the complete genetic code of various fishes so we can let them pass away and then we'll pull them back. That is science fiction run amok.