William Butler Yeats Quotes

There is something about seeing rhinos and lions running free that excites you. It's not that you feel afraid; it's more like you're liberated by seeing them.

Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch time.

You drew a bird that was here, a kind of sweet chanticleer. But with a terrible fear that the cage couldn't tame

If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?

Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.

There is about as much educational benefit to be gained in studying dolphins in captivity as there would be studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary confinement.

[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

As the pressure of population increasingly regiments us and crowds us closer together, an association with the wild, winged freedom of the birds will fill an ever growing need in our lives.

When we return wild animals to nature, we merely return them to what is already theirs. For man cannot give wild animals freedom, they can only take it away.

I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.

How can a bird that is born for joy Sit in a cage and sing?

A bird on a tether, no matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back.

The sight of a cage is only frightening to the bird that has once been caught.

I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.

I wouldn't steal anything because stealing is wrong. If I had to, I'd steal a caged bird and set it free.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

Like a bird, when his cage is opened, stays on his perch, dazzled by freedom, the postponed traveler does not see that his cage, with its bars of anxiety, it is open.

I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice.

Love the woods and nature and the water and animals. Stop the BS with poaching and hunting. Preservation is critical.

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

If you cage a wild thing, you can be sure it will die, but if you let it run free, nine times out of ten it will run back home.

Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation." "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.

We are like the birds. We adapt. We sing.