Quotes About Predation

Two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch may be an example of democracy, but it hardly serves as an enduring model of liberty.

It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas.

In the animal kingdom, one of the keys to survival is to outwit your enemies. And when you're surrounded by carnivores, one of the best strategies is to fade into the background and disappear.

That's the food chain that cricket is sometimes. You have to be at the top of it otherwise you get swept away and eaten up.

The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively 'peaceful' the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.

Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries.

Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.

The ducks swallow the worms, and the foxes kill the ducks, and the men shoot the foxes, and the devil hunts the men.

This world . . . belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.

This world … belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.

The strong were always eating the weak.

Creatures which, lacking mankind's superior brain power, did not concern themselves with finding someone to blame, and instead tried to find someone to eat.

Third Fisherman:… Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.First Fisherman: Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land the great ones eat up the little ones.

As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we're getting their diseases.

Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those few remaining beasts, places, and forces of nature capable of murdering us with sublime indifference.

Most bacteriologists were trained as medical men—Burnet himself had been, before going into bacteriological research—and "their interest in general biological problems was very limited." They cared about curing and preventing diseases, which was well and good; less so about pondering infection as a biological phenomenon, a relationship between creatures, equal in fundamental importance to such other relationships as predation, competition, and decomposition.

Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.

Alberta thought for a moment, and took a live mouse out of her pocket by its tail before dropping it into Wagner's mouth. The bird wolfed the unfortunate creature whole.

A realization washed over her in that cold, dark space: this was how virtually all living things born on earth have died—with teeth tearing through their muscle and bones. We humans have computers and soap and houses but it doesn't change the fact that everything that walks is nothing but food for something else.

Plants develop poison as a protection against predation. Should I keep one out simply because it has learnt better than its brothers how to defend itself? Roses have thorns and yet no one ever thinks to ban them from a garden for being prickly.

When it comes to death, nature is much more cruel to predators than predators are to their own prey

I didn't want to see it this way, everything eating everything in the end.

part of the humor of living on this backward planet is listening to the hominids rationalize their predations.