Quotes About Coexistence

After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.

We may not be able to stop evil in the world, but how we treat one another is entirely up to us.

Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.

My liberty depends on you being free, too.

You can't save trees by ignoring people

Carl Sandburg poem come to life. There were inner-city kids jostling one another on a field trip, well-coiffed bankers working their flip phones, farmers in seed caps looking to widen the locks that allowed industrial barges to take their crops to market. You'd see Latina moms looking to fund a new day-care center and middle-aged biker crews, complete with muttonchops and leather jackets, trying to stop yet another legislative effort to make them wear helmets.

Why shouldn't our "great chain of being" include the other creatures with which we have shared the planet, the creatures we have martyred in service to us or driven out of their homes to make way for our expansion?

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.

In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.

The leopards will walk upright like men on our paths. The snakes will come out of the ground and seek our houses instead of hiding in their own.

this whole other life of little beings out here minding their business and not actually giving a damn about yours. It could set you back on your haunches, in a good way. Why I liked the woods.

I was still a bit appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies. We and our vermin all blossomed together out of the same humid soil in the Great Rift Valley, and so far no one is really winning.

we've got the whole rest of the world over there, other than people, which are only one thing.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which Tata Nzolo is home at the moment.

The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests.

At the heart of this story, I think, is a simple, abiding belief: it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well. And in behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.

Voglio dire solo questo: non conosciamo affatto gli animali. Non possiamo comprenderli se non in termini di nostre esigenze ed esperienze; e avvicinarci a un popolo con cui condividiamo il pianeta e il fascino per i lupi ma che proviene da una dimensione spazio-temporale differente e che, per quanto ne sappiamo, è molto più vicino ai lupi di quanto potremo mai esserlo noi.

diversity is an ineluctable component of every successful attempt to establish order.

To consider that the honeybee and the wild horse have their own integrity and perhaps even their own aspirations, and can no longer be viewed as subjects, willing to participate in the construction of a world built to serve the needs and desires of human beings alone.

But if we don't figure out the way the world works and is, and if we don't live in harmony with it, we will be miserable and no better off than the dumb animals.

There are also the Roman Catholic churches that display plaques in honor of Arthur Guinness, a Protestant, for his outspoken defense of Roman Catholic rights.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where religion seems as likely to detonate a bomb as to defuse one. So while we need idealism, we need realism even more. We need to understand religious people as they are—not just at their best but also their worst.

There's nothing you can find - … nothing you can even imagine – that doesn't originate, develop, or exist in relation to other things.

F]ocus not on ourselves as a force in charge of the manipulation of others, but on how our lives interpenetrate those of others – and … all creatures of a dynamic universe.