John Vaillant Quotes & Sayings

In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: 'Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov. — John Vaillant

The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first. — John Vaillant

The tiger will see you a hundred times before you see him once. — John Vaillant

He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish. — John Vaillant

And this is precisely where the tension lies: Panthera tigris and Homo sapiens are actually very much alike, and we are drawn to many of the same things, if for slightly different reasons. Both of us demand large territories; both of us have prodigious appetites for meat; both of us require control over our living space and are prepared to defend it, and both of us have an enormous sense of entitlement to the resources around us. If a tiger can poach on another's territory, it probably will, and so, of course, will we. A key difference, however, is that tigers only take what they need. — John Vaillant

Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey
even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior. — John Vaillant

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees ... to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929 — John Vaillant

To say a tiger is an "outside" animal is an understatement that is best appreciated when a tiger is inside. — John Vaillant

Witnesses, native and Russian alike, agree that there is something almost metaphysical about the tiger's ability to will itself into nonbeing - to, in effect, cloak itself. In the Bikin valley, it is generally believed that if a tiger has decided to attack you, you will not be able to see it. With the exception of the polar bear, which also hunts by stealth, there is no other land mammal this big whose survival depends on its ability to disappear. — John Vaillant

Our listeners asked us:
"What is chaos?"
We're answering:
"We do not comment on economic policy. — John Vaillant

What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language? — John Vaillant

Like Trush, Sheriff Gorunov is a born Alpha, a handsome, fire-breathing dragon of a man who smokes with an alarming vigor: cigarette clamped between his canines at the point where filter and tobacco meet, the act of inhaling fully integrated into breath and speech such that there is no discernible pause, only billowing smoke that seems to be a natural by-product of a voice that booms even in the confines of his quiet kitchen. — John Vaillant

The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning. — John Vaillant

By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book. — John Vaillant

I've read a tiger's not dangerous,
They say the tiger won't attack
But one thing's not clear to me.
Has he read this, too? Does he know? — John Vaillant

There is a saying among the peoples of the Northwest Coast: "The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife," and Robert Davidson, the man responsible for carving Masset's first post-missionary pole, imagines this edge as a circle. "If you live on the edge of the circle," he explained in a documentary film, "that is the present moment. What's inside is knowledge, experience: the past. What's outside has yet to be experienced. The knife's edge is so fine that you can live either in the past or in the future. The real trick," says Davidson, "is to live on the edge. — John Vaillant

The tiger is a bellwether
one of thousands of similarly vulnerable species, which are, at once, casualties of our success and symbols of our failure. The current moment is proof of our struggle to evolve (perhaps "mature" is a better word) beyond outmoded fears and attitudes, to face the fact that nature is neither our enemy nor our slave. — John Vaillant

British Columbia has been described as a banana republic, only with bigger bananas, — John Vaillant

It is an eccentric and uniquely human approach to resources: like plowing under your farmland to make way for more lawns, or compromising your air quality in exchange for an enormous car. — John Vaillant

Since well before the Kung's engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men
some more fluently than others. — John Vaillant

Nothing exists now but the tiger, filling his field of vision like a bad accident, like the end of the world: a pair of blazing yellow lanterns over a temple door framed with ivory columns. — John Vaillant

Markov died while trying to fit a small, slippery shotgun shell into a narrow gun barrel, in the dark, at thirty below zero - with a tiger bearing down on him from ten yards away. — John Vaillant

He takes two tea bags in a four-ounce cup and he doesn't mince words: when a pair of earnest British journalists once asked him how he thought the tigers could be saved, his answer, "AIDS," caught them off guard.
"But don't you care about people?" one of them asked.
"Not really," he replied. "Especially not the Chinese. — John Vaillant

The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation," he explained. "A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself - who is he really? — John Vaillant

Their houses are the size of small airplane hangars; their carved — John Vaillant