The literary critic and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch put it this way: Thus though man has never before been so complacent about what he has, or so confident of his ability to do whatever he sets his mind upon, it is at the same time true that he never before accepted so low an estimate of what he is. That same scientific method which enabled him t

our mainstream culture’s self-congratulatory obsession with humaniqueness blinds us to the vast amount of animate intelligence we share with our fellow creatures.

Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal. And it is doubly important to remember our origins at a time when we seek to turn ourselves into gods.

If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an expla

You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is.