Animal Herd Quotes & Sayings

When a lion stalks a herd, he sneaks in close, lies down, and surveys them to choose his victim. He takes his time. The deer or buffalo have no idea he's near. He finds his prey and then he explodes from his hiding place and grabs it. Even if another, perfectly serviceable animal ends up within his reach, he isn't going to alter his course. He has chosen, and he would rather go hungry than change his mind. — Ilona Andrews

Married, you're basically part of the herd, and that makes life easier in a lot of ways in terms of social support. But if you're not by nature a herd animal, you start to feel like you're passing. — Mary Gaitskill

A horse perceives eye contact as provocative, as if it and its status in the herd are not being respected. If it cannot avoid eye contact, it will react in a different way, by rebelling for example. In dressage you don't get anywhere by not showing respect, however superior your species might be. Any animal trainer can tell you that. In the mountains in Argentina there's a wild horse which will jump off the nearest precipice if any human tries to ride it. — Jo Nesbo

So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct. — Carl Jung

The Almighty implanted in us these inextinguishable feelings for good and wise purposes. They are the guardians of His image in our heart. They distinguish us from the herd of common animals. — Thomas Paine

The ideal citizen of a tyrannical state is the man or woman who bows in silent obedience in exchange for the status of a well-cared-for herd animal. Thinking people become the tyrants worst enemies. — Claire Wolfe

The awe-inspiring beauty of nature is nothing more than being flabbergasted by our ignorance of it. Good art produces the same effect; and the worst thing an artist can do is to follow the herd, because domesticated art is about as dynamic as a domesticated animal. — Anthony Marais

The flag is a symbol of the fact that man is still a herd animal. — Albert Einstein

Each parasaur produced a large mound of straw-colored spoor. This was accompanied by low trumpeting from each animal in the herd - along with an enormous quantity of expelled flatus, redolent of methane. — Michael Crichton

You have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either to shine shoes, or to herd cows, or to tend pigs. Thank God, I don't want any of that! Damn it! And besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal and it's not true, a little kid, etc.. Oh! Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn! — Arthur Rimbaud

The elephant, not only the largest but the most intelligent of animals, provides us with an excellent example. It is faithful and tenderly loving to the female of its choice, mating only every third year and then for no more than five days, and so secretly as never to be seen, until, on the sixth day, it appears and goes at once to wash its whole body in the river, unwilling to return to the herd until thus purified. Such good and modest habits are an example to husband and wife. — Saint Francis De Sales

Most people don't really want to think independently or make decisions; they're herd animals with herd instincts to keep to the middle of the group where it's safest, don't stand out too much, don't move too far away from convention, etc. They want to be led and dictated to. But they're stubborn, mulish animals and they like to think they're independent and free. — Blanche Barton

Researchers studying emerging viruses have noticed an interesting phenomenon. As more human beings are born, there is a consistent spread of human habitation into once undeveloped ecoranges. The previously existing environment is removed, houses are built, people move in. The former populations of plants and animals are displaced. However, one of the major things that has been overlooked is that viruses have also lived in those regions for a very long time - in a healthy symbiotic balance with their hosts, both plant and animal. It is possible to think of them as an invisible herd or pack species, spread with the same kind of density throughout those ecoranges just as deer or birds are. — Stephen Harrod Buhner

Man is a gregarious creature, we are told, a social being. Does that mean he is also a herd animal? ... Are men no better than sheep or cattle, that they must live always in view of one another in order to feel a sense of safety? I can't believe it! — Edward Abbey

Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals
for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding. — H.P. Lovecraft

the nature of animal consciousness is such that the world we can be conscious of is only a world of surfaces and signs, a world generalized, made common - that everything that becomes conscious thereby becomes flat, thin, relatively stupid, general, a sign, a herd signal; that all coming to conscious involves a vast and thoroughgoing corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization. Heightened — Friedrich Nietzsche

Zarathustra, the first to recognize that the optimist is just as degenerate as the pessimist though perhaps more detrimental says: "Good men never speak the truth. The Good preach of false shores and false security. You were born and bred in the lies of the good. Through the good everything has become false and twisted down to the very roots". Fortunately the world is not built solely to serve good natured herd animals their little happiness ; to desire everybody to become a "good man", "a herd animal", blue-eyed, benevolent, "a beautiful soul" - or, as Herbert Spencer wished - altruistic, would mean robbing existence of its great character, to castrate mankind and reduce humanity to a sort of wretched Chinadom. And this some have tried to do! It is precisely this that men have called morality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this; an owl or a cobra would be destroyed. — Philip K. Dick

On the farm, I had chores. I had a calf. We had a herd of cattle in the pasture. We'd go and get me a calf at a cow auction with Amish people, which I would raise. I gave it a bottle every day, in this cute little coop, like a giant dog coop almost. I've always been a big animal person. — Krysten Ritter

Some people are little more than herd animals, flocking together whenever the world becomes uncomfortable ... I am not one of those people. If I had a motto, it would probably be Herd thither, me hither. — Erik Naggum

Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else ... — H.P. Lovecraft

The time I spent in the jungles held unalloyed happiness for me, and that happiness I would now gladly share. My happiness, I believe, resulted from the fact that all wildlife is happy in its natural surroundings. In nature there is no sorrow, and no repining. A bird from a flock, or an animal from a herd, is taken by hawk or carnivorous beast and those that are left rejoice that their time had not come today, and have no thought of tomorrow. — Jim Corbett

You ever watch animal planet? Women are kind of like a herd of elephants. They stick together for protection. And if one sense danger? They all stampede. — Emma Chase

All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and to the longed-for moment when all will be revealed and when the sheep will be divided from the goats, or whatever other bucolic Bronze-Age desert analogy might seem apt. (In Papua New Guinea, where as in most tropical climes there are no sheep, the Christians use the most valued animal of the locals and refer to the congregation as "swine." Flock, herd: what difference does it make?) Against this insane eschatology, with its death wish and its deep contempt for the life of the mind, atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it. Theism cannot coexist with this unexceptionable conclusion. — Christopher Hitchens

We humans are herd animals of the monkey tribe, not natural individuals as lions are. Our individuality is partial and restless; the stream of consciousness that we call 'I' is made of shifting elements that flow from our group and back to our group again. Always we seek to be ourselves and the herd together, not One against the herd. — Anna Louise Strong

It's lonely? Sure, it's lonely. That's what you asked for, didn't you? After all, if you hadn't been too superior for the gang, you wouldn't be here. And think how much more distinguished it is to be on your own, or with one or two individualists like yourself, than to be an ordinary gregarious animal going about with the herd. — Anna Kavan