Quotes About Termites

Like the mouse creeping out of the scarlet crack, the sunset gnaws hungrily the electric cheese of the outskirts, erected by those who clearly trust their knack for surviving everything: by termites. Warehouses, surgeries. Having measured there the proximity of the desert, the cinnamon-tinted earth waylays its horizontality in the fake pyramids, porticoes, rooftops' ripple, as the train creeps knowingly, like a snake, to the capital's only nipple.

The bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren't even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman's conception of a giant intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive.

I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there'll be no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we forge too deeply into the planet there will be a reckoning—who knows?

aardvark; aardwolf. Both these animals dig in the earth for termites and ants, the former somewhat resembling a pig, the latter looking a little like a striped wolf. Thus the Boers in South Africa named them, respectively, the aardvark (from the Dutch aard, "earth," plus vark, "pig") or "earth pig," and aardwolf, or "earth wolf.

Wood," explained Nancy, "that's been treated with Wolman solution so termites—tropical wood-eating ants—won't touch it. Jim was shipping over five million feet

Sycophants are like termites that eat from inside even a tree bearing fruits & flowers and they are often in the guise of supporters and followers only.

The first time you buy a house you see how pretty the paint is and buy it. The second time you look to see if the basement has termites. It's the same with men.

I want to save lives, including my own, but Cambodians believe we just rent this body. It is just a house for the spirit, and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave.

Now it would obviously be absurd to press this analogy too far; it breaks down at many points. But I put it to you for this reason: What degree of co-operation or understanding would ever be possible between human beings and termites? When there is no conflict of interest, we tolerate each other. But when either needs the other's territory or resources, no quarter is given.

Why do the animals, kin to ourselves, not manifest any such cultural struggle? Oh, we don't know. Very probably certain of them, bees, ants, termites, had to strive for thousands of centuries before they found the way to those state institutions, that division of functions, those restrictions upon individuals, which we admire them for today.

Shakespeare's naturalness is attested to by the strange fact that he is the only classical author who remains popular. The critical termites are massed and eating away at the foundations, trying to topple him. Whether they will succeed will be a test of his robustness.

The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world

The foundations of some formerly strong lands became so riddled with termites of diminished purpose, so decayed with the decadence of smug moderation, and so emaciated with the vacillating aims of appears, that even when they saw the enemy coming and did resist, they were easily toppled when the Imperial Order finally pushed.

Anger is to marriage what termites and rot are to trying to rebuild a home.

Another readily detected biomarker is Earth's sustained level of the molecule methane, two thirds of which is produced by human-related activities...[including] burps and farts of domestic livestock. Natural sources...include decomposing vegetation in wetlands, and termite effluences. At this very moment, astrobiologists are arguing over the exact origin of...the copious quantities of methane on Saturn's moon Titan, where cows and termites we presume do not dwell.

Our skyscrapers are not separate from nature; they are nature, as much as a termite colony's cathedral mound or a chaffinch nest or a bee hive. As are our iPhones and washing machines and bathyscaphe research submarines that take us to the depths of the Mariana Trench.

The first time you view a house, you see how pretty the paint is and buy it. The second time you look to see if the basement has termites. It's the same with men.

The Trump Tower War Room of 2016 would turn out to be of no small consequence for the 2020 campaign. This is because many of the worker bees in 2016 would wind up in key roles in the Trump White House, and later on in the Trump 2020 campaign. While some of these worker bees would make outstanding contributions to the administration, far too many would wind up as Never-Trump termites in the White House of Trump.

Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers, and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot, and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down.

In terms of sustainability and what we eat and what its footprint is on the environment and the consequences of eating one thing versus another, obviously it makes a lot of sense to be eating insects. They're incredibly plentiful. They've got a very short turnover rate. You could be eating termites.

Millions of infiltrators have entered our country and are eating the country like termites. Should we not uproot them?

The first time you buy a house you see how pretty the paint is and buy it. The second time you look to see if the basement has termites. It's the same with men.

But let it be clear that I consider human cities as a fully natural phenomenon, on a par with the mega-structures that other ecosystem engineers build for their societies—the only difference being that whereas ants, termites, corals, and beavers have been maintaining their roles at a stably modest level for millions of years, the scale of human ecosystem engineering has grown by several orders of magnitude over just a few thousand years.