Diane Ackerman Quotes

I do love nature, but I don't suppose I'd spent more time in zoos as a child than anyone else!

All zoos are both beguiling and repellent.

What's the reality of being inside a zoo, for the animals and for the people who love and care for those animals? There's a lot of joy, and there's a lot of loss.

I always wanted to be a zoologist. I'm fascinated with animals. I wanted to be a zookeeper.

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.

It was wrong to capture wild animals and confine them in captivity for people to go and gawk at them. And that's basically how zoos got started. But once you do that, and once you have animals that have been bred in captivity, you're really stuck with them in some sense. You can't return them to the wild.

Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.

I grew up near London Zoo, with which I was obsessed. I would lie in bed at night, thinking about the lions and tigers and wolves that were prowling only a few miles away.

... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.

I have spent my entire life living in a zoo, which is pretty crazy. Not many kids get to say that, and it took me until I was about three years old to realize that we didn't just come to the zoo every day, that we actually lived here.

Sea World's killer whale collection needs constant replenishing. The average life span of the animals in captivity is less than half the average for killer whales in the ocean.

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.

Marlon was more of a formal zoo director type.

Zoo animals are ambassadors for their cousins in the wild.

We're feeding all these zoos. And that's getting bigger and bigger.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

I actually wanted to be a zookeeper when I was 5.

In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.

Confining marine animals to tanks and separating them from their families and their natural surroundings, just so people can watch them swim in endless circles, teaches us far more about humans than it does about animals - and the lesson is not a flattering one.

There is no good scientific reason to bring back an extinct species. Why would one bring them back? To put them in a theme park?

We literally live right in the middle of the zoo, and it means that every day is a new experience and so much fun.

I actually taught perceptual psychology at N.Y.U. when I was younger. I was interested in the aesthetic impulse in lower primates. But what really interested me in Dian Fossey was that she made a difference - she saved the gorillas.

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

I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.

We have wild animals in zoos, yet people rarely meet their 'food' face to face.