Rick Riordan Quotes

...In little more than a single century from 1820 to 19450, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another.... We describe these killings as men behaving "like animals," but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.

There's animals like us existing and thinking and giving interviews on Australian television.

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.

We find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was "just human".

I think we’re like farm animals before an earthquake.

You really, really have to care about animals to want to kill one. You have to learn all this stuff about them and start thinking like them.

Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew. They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers, and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming. But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking.

I've always felt that animals are the purest spirits in the world. They don't fake or hide their feelings, and they are the most loyal creatures on Earth. And somehow we humans think we're smarter-what a joke.

To understand animal thinking you've got to get away from a language.

Names which tell stories have been worth millions of dollars. So a great deal of research often precedes the selection of a name.

Think of the beginning of the story of the beginning of everything: Adam (without Eve and without divine guidance) names the animals. Continuing his work, we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys. Are these the best names we have to offer? If we can revise the notion of women coming from a rib, can’t we revise our categorizations of the animals that, draped with barbecue sauce, end up as the ribs on our dinner plates — or for that matter, the KFC in our hands?

I think we learn some of the greatest lessons in life from animals, whether it's love, suffering, or the value of silence.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter

The world of organisms, of animals and plants, is built up of individuals. I like to think, then, of natural history as the study of life at the level of the individual-of what plants and animals do, how they react to each other and their environment, how they are organized into larger groupings like populations and communities.

Christian! His parents had nine months to to think of a name, and the best they came up with was Christian!? My parents had nine months and they didn't call me Jew!

How do you have a think in pictures? Well, you have to sort the pictures into categories. You know, for example, a dog knows that, you know, there's good people and there's bad people. And I talked to a lady the other day where her dog was afraid of people with white beards because she had adopted him from an animal shelter and somebody with a white beard had abused him. And this dog was now afraid of everybody that had a white beard. That was the bad category.

To me there is a name for each person. I think it’s marvelous to have a name. A woman is not a woman. It’s either Gena or my mother or some other person.

If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction. Murder within the species on an individual or collective scale is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man, and a few varieties of ants and rats.

When people call me Sir Anthony I just think oh, that's a bit odd. But I'm not cynical about it. Um, I just feel more comfortable being called Tony or Mr. Hopkins, whatever name I'm called.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long.

Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.

I think the lion, besides the elephant, was the one animal that I just started thinking about so much.

I don't think any writer chooses what his or her work is called.

We chose it's name [Give the People What They Want] a while ago, long before the cancer. But I can't think of a more fitting title.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names.