Quotes from Farley Mowat

Stephen Harper is probably the most dangerous human being ever elevated to power in Canada.

I believe in God the way my dog does

We're under some gross misconception that we're a good species, going somewhere important, and that at the last minute we'll correct our errors and God will smile on us. It's delusion.

Without a function, we cease to be. So, I will write till I die.

I write better in Cape Breton... too many people around in Ontario. Down there I meet all sorts of non-human people, but they don't bother me, and I don't feel I have to apologize on behalf of my species quite so often.

It is in our nature to travel into our past, hoping thereby to illuminate the darkness that bedevils the present.

Originally tasked with finding out why wolves were slaughtering caribou, Mowat instead discovered that wolves are family-oriented creatures with complex behaviors, not the bloodthirsty beasts they were thought to be. Never Cry Wolf is credited with changing the public perception of wolves and challenging the hunter and government

Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destroy; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign of vilification. Antiwolf feelings at Brochet (the northern Manitoba base for my winter studies) when I arrived there from Wolf House Bay were strong and bitter.

We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be –the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourself.

And this is what happened, ands this is why the caribou and the wolf are one; for the caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf that keeps the caribou strong.

Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destroy; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign for vilification.

Inaction will cause a man to sink into the slough of despond and vanish without a trace.

It is to this new-found resolution to reassert our indivisibility with life, to recognize the obligations incumbent upon us as the most powerful and deadly species ever to exist, and to begin making amends for the havoc we have wrought, that my own hopes for a revival and continuance of life on earth now turn. If we persevere in this new way we may succeed in making man humane ... at last.

Somewhere to the eastward a wolf howled; lightly, questioningly. I knew the voice, for I had heard it many times before. It was George, sounding the wasteland for an echo from the missing members of his family. But for me it was a voice which spoke of the lost world which once was ours before we chose the alien role; a world which I had glimpsed and almost entered...only to be excluded, at the end, by my own self.

You never know when the devil might come calling.

I wonder now… were my tears for Alex and Al and all the others who had gone and who were yet to go? Or was I weeping for myself…and those who would remain?

And so the pact of timelessness between us was broken and I went from him into the darkening tunnel of the years.

There was no other wanderer on that road, yet I was not alone, for his tracks went with me, each pawprint as familiar as the print of my own hand. I followed them, and I knew each thing that he had done, each move that he had made, each thought that had been his; for so it is with two who live one life together.

the free rights of men to destroy themselves through ignorance.

the most blood thirsty animals in the Artic are not wolves, but the insatiable mosquitoes.

As the Siberian saying goes: One hundred versts (roughly a hundred miles) is no distance. A hundred rubles isn't worthwhile money. And a hundred grams of vodka just makes you thirsty.

The new plan looked like the answer.

Death will find me long before I tire of contemplating an evening spent in his company during which he enthralled a mixed audience consisting of a fur trader, a Cree Indian matron, and an Anglican missionary, with an hour-long monologue on sexual aberrations in female pygmy shrews. (The trader misconstrued the tenor of the discourse; but the missionary, inured by years of humorless dissertations, soon put him right.)

The frozen fish were later put in deep holes in the moss and covered over to keep until they were needed.