James Thurber Quotes

There's nothing funnier than the human animal.

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.

The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.

Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.

We're all animals, but we're a different sort of animal. Maybe they're better than us. They're more loyal. They're more pure. They're more simple. They're not neurotic. Well, there are some neurotic dogs.

Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.

The older I get, the more individuality I find in animals and the less I find in humans.

The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.

You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.

How like us is that filthy beast the ape.

I always compare human beings to animals. It's a nice way to figure out who they are.

If you examine any aspect of the human condition long enough, you really do have to start laughing at it. Because the business of being human is kind of ridiculous.

If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.

If you make a fool of yourself in front of a cat, he will sneer at you, if you are sober; he will leave the room if you are drunk. If you make a fool of yourself in front a dog, he will make a fool of himself, too.

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men. The former are so much the freer.

Animals have always left me with a curiosity about human nature. I trust animals more than most people.

Of all the animals which fly in the air, walk on the land, or swim in the sea, from Paris to Peru, from Japan to Rome, the most foolish animal in my opinion is man.

Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared with the beasts.

Isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.