Top 244 Ants Quotes & Sayings

Ants in the house seem to be, not intruders, but the owners.

While ants exist in just the right numbers for the rest of the living world, humans have become too numerous. If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plants and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land ecosystems almost everywhere.

Liberals, communists, socialists, look at people as workers. They look at 'em as ants, worker ants, worker bees and so forth, and they just plug 'em in to do jobs that need to be done.

We're all ants. I'm a glittery little ant.

The lancet fluke (Dicrocoelium) infects the brain of ants by taking control and driving them to climb to the top of a blade of grass where they can be eaten by a cow. The ingested fluke then lays eggs in the cow gut. Eventually, the eggs exit the cow, and hungry snails eat the dung (and fluke eggs). The fluke enters the snail's digestive gland and gets excreted in sticky slime full of a seething mass of flukes to be drunk by ants as a source of moisture.

I told them my system was based on the "ant plan," that I'd gotten the idea watching a colony of ants in Africa during the war. A whole bunch of ants working toward a common goal.

Do not kill ants. They are your best friends.

I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants.

A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and a landscape; but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles leaves, grasses, ants, legs of ants and so on to infinity. All this is subsumed under the name of landscape.

Ants, fighting together, will vanquish the lion.

This is the principle of Universal Brotherhood of man with one another, with all life down to the little ants.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.

When you are a child, you often stare too closely at the wrong thing. I remember the first time I was taken to Yankee Stadium. Someone had spilled something sweet earlier in the day and the ground was covered with ants. I spent the whole game staring at the ants, and that was more fascinating than the game.

I'm pretty sure I ate ants in Mexico.

People, chained by monotony, afraid to think, clinging to certainties... they live like ants.

Naw, it's like ants up there, man. Like ants that sound like lions!

Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

If army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule:Just do what the ant in front of you does. The ants eventually end up in a circle. There's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days; the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died.

Ants and savages put strangers to death.

Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, and the stars themselves are scattered no more widely than the seed of Adam, even then we shall still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth. The ants have covered the world, but have they conquered it - for what do their countless colonies know of it, or of each other?

Some people are like ants. Give them a warm day and a piece of ground and they start digging. There the similarity ends. Ants keepon digging. Most people don't. They establish contact with the soil, absorb so much vernal vigor that they can't stay in one place, and desert the fork or spade to see how the rhubarb is coming and whether the asparagus is yet in sight.

The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

My childhood was elegant homes, tree lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there’s this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow – and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.

Ants are a curious race

Ants are good citizens, they place group interests first.

I ate ants. They weren't that bad.

We are human beings, not ants.

We know of no behavior in ants or any other social insects that can be construed as play.

When giants fought, ants were crushed.

I am a critic - as essential to the theatre as ants to a picnic.

I always look at everyone when we're on the street and think, 'We're like sheep or ants.'

when there's an elephant in the room, you can't pretend it isn't there and just discuss the ants.

We feed upon each other's mouths and minds like ants with social stomachs.

Refreshing failures roll off the travel easel like ants from a picnic blanket.

I’ll affect you slowly as if you were having a picnic in a dream. There will be no ants. It won’t rain.

Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants' civilization, you are part of the group; you don't live for yourself alone.

The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.

I wonder what ants do on rainy days?

Ants are good citizens: they place group interests first.

If ants are such busy workers, how come they find time to go to all the picnics?

No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.

If I have to worry about the ants I crush beneath my feet, I couldn't even walk around

A whale out of water is over-run by ants.

There is no need for ants to have the ability to fly

Do ants get headaches?

Kings may see their palaces fall, but the ants will always have their dwellings.

I think the 'Terminator' idea is a reasonable one - that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you're making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It's not that you don't like the ants, it's not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.

The fact that we can't easily foresee clues that would betray an intelligence a million millennia farther down the road suggests that we're like ants trying to discover humans. Ask yourself: Would ants ever recognize houses, cars, or fire hydrants as the work of advanced biology?

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.

I want you to think back to when you were a kid. Remember the day you learned you could burn ants with a magnifying glass? Oh, what a great day that was! You got to be God. You decided who lived, who died. I must've burned ants for an hour, just laughing. Then I saw one on my arm. Let me tell you something, when you burn yourself with a magnifying glass, you're on your own. You can't even tell your mom, because she gives that face, Oh, he is that stupid.

The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants .