Seth Shostak Quotes

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

The wolf asketh not how many the sheep may be.

The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.

Take, for example, the African jungle, the home of the cheetah. On whom does the cheetah prey? The old, the sick, the wounded, the weak, the very young, but never the strong. Lesson: If you would not be prey, you had better be strong.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

We do not just fear our predators, we are transfixed by them. We are prone to weave stories and fables and chat endlessly about them.

If worms carried pistols, birds wouldn't eat 'em.

These are the animals that are the reason why you don't see old animals in the wild. You don't see sick animals in the wild. You don't see lame animals in the wild, and its all because of the predator: the lion, the tiger, the leopard, all the cats.

You're a good example of why some animals eat their young.

I think that's still the most primal fear of all humans: to be eaten.

It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep may be.

I have an odd theory on happiness, and it bothers people. My general theory is that happiness is a reward for an animal doing what it should be doing. So if a horse runs, it feels happy. Or if you are too thin, you can't be happy, because evolution wants you to be tense and anxious, trying to wake up in the morning looking for food.

Big fish eat little fish.

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.

Unlike your fish tank, in nature, fish eat each other. When the population of a species gets too low, it will die out.

Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.

The Deer don't dineWhen a Wolf's about,And the PorcupineSticks his quill-points out.

Creatures which, lacking mankind's superior brain power, did not concern themselves with finding someone to blame, and instead tried to find someone to eat.

This world belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn't challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?

Buzzards got to eat, same as the worms.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended.

Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.

It was a pretty good year for predators.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten.