Zoos Quotes - Page 4

I like to do chill things on dates. I think it would be fun to go to the zoo. I know it's really weird and random, but I love animals. It'd be like a day of doing silly things, while enjoying nature.

As you may know, some of the stereotyped behaviors exhibited by autistic children are also found in zoo animals who are raised in a barren environment.

[On public events attended by royalty:] It was the usual 'zoo tea.' You know, we eat - the others watch.

I love acting, but it's much more fun taking the kids to the zoo.

I've gone back in time to when dinosaurs weren't just confined to zoos.

[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.

Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.

What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be "aware"? The impression of a "conscious presence" is indeed very strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are "self-aware" in any strong sense (though I would guess that an element of self-awareness can be present). All I ask is that they sometimes simply feel!

The idea that we can have a new life form, what does it say about the zoo's main purpose, which is to preserve life? What does it say when the artificial and real animal can have the same attraction to people?

I don't have time for lie-on-the-beach vacations. I'm a zoo person. There's one in New Jersey where animals actually come up to your car. I love the monkeys - I used to give them bubblegum to chew.

I'm less upset with politicians than the media. I feel like politicians, there is a certain, inherent - you know, the way I always explain it is, when you go to the zoo and a monkey throws its feces, it's a monkey. But, when the zookeeper is standing right there, and he doesn't say bad monkey... Somebody's got to be the zookeeper.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

If I had my way... there wouldn't be a single lion or tiger in captivity anywhere in the world. They never take to it. They're never happy. They never settle down... You can see it in their eyes.

We are facing an enormous crisis in Africa right now in terms of illegal wildlife trafficking, which is decimating animal populations, destroying local economies, and funding armed insurgencies and terrorist syndicates. If we do not find solutions to this crisis now, there will be little habitat left beyond sparse areas of national parks that will serve as glorified zoos to small pockets of remaining animals.

Great and good men and women stirred sugar into their coffee knowing that it had been picked by slaves. Kind, good ancestors of all of us never questioned hangings, burnings, tortures, inequality, suffering and injustice that today revolt us. If we dare to presume to damn them with our fleeting ideas of morality, then we risk damnation from our descendants for whatever it is that we are doing that future history will judge as intolerable and wicked: eating meat, driving cars, appearing on TV, visiting zoos, who knows?

I live in a tough neighborhood. They got a children's zoo. Last week, four kids escaped.

We're in 'Jurassic Park' territory. If we go to the zoo in the future, we'll have zoos for extinct animals.

Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone.

We must educate the public. The average person has no idea of what's going on in factory farms, in laboratories, circuses, roadside zoos or rodeos.

I always wanted to be a zookeeper when I was growing up, and I've wound up a zookeeper! I've been working with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years! I'm the luckiest old broad on two feet because my life is divided absolutely in half - half animals and half show business. You can't ask for better than two things you love the most.

I go to movies, go out with friends, go to car shows. I have a zoo.

People go to the zoo and they like the lion because it's scary. And the bear because it's intense, but the monkey makes people laugh.

It does get old to have to always be a monkey in a zoo. I don't know what it's like any more to be anonymous.

At school, our classroom had a small rodent zoo consisting of two rabbits, three hamsters, a litter of baby gerbils and a guinea pig. At first, I’d thought the teacher was raising snack food, which impressed me, being the first sign of intelligence she’d shown. Soon, though, I’d figured out the animals’ true purpose and left them alone, though I would never understand the appeal of petting and coddling perfectly good food.

All I'm doing is photographing. When I was working on The Animals, I was working on a lot of other things too. I kept going to the zoo because things were going on in certain pictures. It wasn't a project.