RICHARD ADAMS

I certainly think that 10 to 20 years from now, clearly the majority of veterinarians will be women.

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

We are all human and fall short of where we need to be. We must never stop trying to be the best we can be.

Our children's children will hear a good story.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

My heart has joined the thousand, for my friend stopped running today.

Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.

How may child bearing women be most encouraged and supported in the time of childbearing?

Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now.

One cloud feels lonely.

I've always said that Watership Down is not a book for children. I say: it's a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it.

Who knows why men do anything?

A thing can be true and still be desperate folly.

There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.

At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and cunning of a pirate. For one beat of his pulse the lame rabbit's idea shone clearly before him. He grasped it and realized what it meant. The next, he had pushed it away from him.

Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.

They're all so much afraid of the Council that they're not afraid of anything else.

Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask--perhaps more than once--where the dead person is and when he is coming back.

Bluebell had been saying that he knew the men hated us for raiding their crops and gardens, and Toadflax answered, 'That wasn't why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their way. They killed us to suit themselves.

How do they find out with the experiments?''...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.''But isn't that unkind to the animal?''Well, I suppose it is...but I mean, there isn't a dad anywhere who would hesitate, is there, if he knew it was going to make [his child] better? It's changed the whole world during the last hundred years, and that's no exaggeration.

All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.

When the man was disgraced and told to go away, he was allowed to ask all the animals whether any of them would come with him and share his fortunes and his life. There were only two who agreed to come entirely of their own accord, and they were the dog and the cat. And ever since then, those two have been jealous of each other, and each is for ever trying to make man choose which one he likes best. Every man prefers one or the other.

Dangerous thing, a name. Someone might catch hold of you by it, mightn't they?

If a rabbit gave advice and the advice wasn't accepted, he immediately forgot it, and so did everyone else.

Rabbits need dignity and above all the will to accept their fate.