Elephants And Friendship Quotes

When man chooses to develop his innate power of communication with nature and therefore hear the voice, all will be right with the world – we will be as one. What you have been able to do with your Modoc is what man has been seeking for a long time. To communicate with nature through animals.

It is a wonderful quirk of our species that the incentives of social life don’t reward strictly ruthless behavior. Leaders who are too domineering are often penalized. Rampant lying and cheating are often caught and punished. Freeloaders frequently get the boot. At the same time, people are often positively rewarded—with friendship, social status, a better reputation—for their service to others. As if our oversized brains and hairless skin didn’t make us an uncanny enough species, our genes long ago decided that, in the relentless competition to survive and reproduce, their best strategy was to build ethical brains.

The first Embassy to Afghanistan by a western power left the Company's Delhi Residency on 13 October 1808, with the Ambassador accompanied by 200 calvary, 4,000 infantry, a dozen elephants and no fewer than 600 camels. It was dazzling, but it was also clear from this attempt to reach out to the Afghans that the British were not interested in cultivating Shah Shuja's friendship for its own sake, but were concerned only to outflank their imperial rivals: the Afghans were perceived as mere pawns on the chessboard of western diplomacy, to be engaged or sacrificed at will. It was a precedent that was to be followed many other times, by several different powers, over the years and decades to come; and each time the Afghans would show themselves capable of defending their inhospitable terrain far more effectively than any of their would-be manipulators could possibly have suspected.

That’s right. It’s about contact. In my view, the whole thing is in essence extremely simple. Contact means an exchange of experiences, concepts, or at least results, conditions. But what if there’s nothing to exchange? If an elephant isn’t a very large bacterium, then an ocean can’t be a very large brain. Of course, various actions can be performed by both sides. As a result of one of them I’m looking at you right now and trying to explain to you that you’re more precious to me than the twelve years of my life I devoted to Solaris, and that I want to go on being with you. Perhaps your appearance was meant to be torture, perhaps a reward, or perhaps just a test under a microscope. An expression of friendship, a treacherous blow, perhaps a taunt? Perhaps everything at once or—as seems most likely to me—something entirely different. But what can you and I really care about the intentions of our parents, however different they were from one another? You can say that our future depends on those intentions, and I’d agree with you. I can’t predict what’s to come. Nor can you. I can’t even assure you I’ll always love you. If so much has already happened, then anything can happen. Maybe tomorrow I’ll turn into a green jellyfish? It doesn’t depend on me. But in what does depend on us, we’ll be together. Is that not something?

an elephant, an elephant if you please, that I loved this man – this airman, this enemy, whom I had not known even for twenty-four hours – that I knew I would love him till the day I died. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that was how I felt, and when you are sixteen you feel things very immediately, very strongly, very certainly. “How wicked is that, Marlene?” I said. “How wicked is that, to love someone who should be my enemy, who has just bombed my city, killed my friends? How wicked is that?” I looked up into her weepy eye. For an answer she wafted her ears gently at me, and groaned deep inside herself. It was enough to tell me that she had listened, and understood, and that she did not judge me. I learned something that day from Marlene, about friendship, and I have never forgotten it. To be a true friend, you have to be a good listener, and I discovered that day that Marlene was

On a hike in East Africa 2 million years ago, you might well have encountered a familiar cast of human characters: anxious mothers cuddling their babies and clutches of carefree children playing in the mud; temperamental youths chafing against the dictates of society and weary elders who just wanted to be left in peace; chest-thumping machos trying to impress the local beauty and wise old matriarchs who had already seen it all. These archaic humans loved, played, formed close friendships and competed for status and power – but so did chimpanzees, baboons and elephants. There was nothing special about humans. Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and write history books. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.

For some reason I could not visit him as usual the next day, but at about nine o’clock on the morning of the fourth day, I went to see him again, along with the Karumbas and the sugar cane. But he was not there. However, we knew well enough where we would find him. He would be at the ‘Big Pool’, half a mile upstream, the ‘place where the elephants come to die,’ as the Karumbas call it in their own language. And we found him there, right enough. He was dead. The weather had been dry and the pool was only four feet deep. But the tusker had deliberately lain down in it on his side and placed his head and trunk beneath the surface of the water to drown. His flank protruded above and that was how we found him. There lies the answer to the great secret: where do the elephants go, and how do they die, when they become too old to live? They drown themselves in a river. I had solved the mystery and at the same time had enjoyed a unique friendship with a full-grown wild tusker, although it was but a brief one.

Every man worthy of the name,” Orsini repeated, almost with despair, with a last outburst of rage and scorn; and he was silent for a long time, as if to emphasize the enormity of such a claim. It proclaimed, also, he then went on, after taking a deep breath, that "the time for pride is finished, and that we must turn with far more humility and understanding toward the other animal species, “different, but not inferior” "Different, but not inferior,” Orsini re- peated again, with a kind of exasperated relish. And it went on like that; “Man on this planet has reached the point where really he needs all the friendship he can find, and in his loneliness he has need of all the elephants, all the dogs and all the birds . . Orsini gave vent to a strange laugh, a sort of triumphant sneer, entirely devoid of gaiety. “It is time to show that we are capable of preserving this gigantic, clumsy, natural splendor which still lives in our midst . . . that there is still room among us for such a freedom” He fell silent, but they could feel his voice lurking in the blackness, ready to hurl itself on the first prey that offered. There you had a man, he resumed, who for months had been«going about the bush, who penetrated to the remotest villages and who, having learned several dialects while he fraternized with the natives, was devoting himself to an obstinate and dangerous work, undermining the good name of the white man. Western civilization was obviously being represented to the Africans as an immense bankruptcy from which they must at all costs try to escape. They were not far from being begged to go back to cannibalism as a lesser evil than modem science with its weapons of destmction, or from being encouraged to worship their stone idols, with which indeed, as if by chance, people like Morel were stuffing the museums of the world. No, mademoiselle, I don't capture elephants. I content myself with living among them. I like them. I like looking at them, listening to them, watching them on the horizon. To tell you the truth, I’d give anything to become an elephant myself. I’ll convince you that I’ve nothing against the Germans in particular: they’re just men to me, and that’s enough. . . . Give me a rum.

He was convinced that if the attack on Omando had caused such interest in the world it was not so much because of the victim’s importance, but because fear, resentment and repeated disillusion in the age of slavery and radiation death had in the end branded the hearts of millions of human beings with an edge of misanthropy, which made them follow with sympathy, and perhaps some feeling of personal re- venge, the story of '‘the man who had changed species.” He turned toward Laurent with sympathy. It was difficult not to like that generous, slightly sing-song voice, not to like that black giant who spoke so frankly about himself when he thought he was speaking only of the African fauna. inclined to a gentle skepticism which usually sufficed to protect him both against excessive illusions about human nature and against excessive doubt of it a sort of Saint Francis of Assisi, only more energetic, more dashing, more muscular he had the greatest respect for humor, because it was one of the best weapons ever forged by man for the struggle against himself. devoured by some ravenous dream of hygiene and universal health who desperately pursue a certain ideal of human decency, call it tolerance, justice or liberty The idea, too, that people who have suffered too much aren’t any longer capable of ... of complicity with you, for that’s what it amounts to. That they aren’t any longer capable of playing ball with us. The idea that they’ve somehow been spoiled once for all. It was partly on account of this idea that the German theorists of racialism preached the extermination of the Jews; they had been made to suffer too much, and therefore they could not be anything after that but enemies of the human race. A man can’t spend his life in Africa without acquiring something pretty close to a great affection for the elephants. Those great herds are, after all, the last symbol of liberty left among us. It s something that’s fast disappearing, from more points of view than one. Every time you come upon them in the open, moving their trunks and their great ears, an irresistible smile rises to your lips. I defy anyone to look upon elephants without a sense of wonder. Their very enormity, their, clumsiness, their giant stature, represent a mass of liberty that sets you dreaming. They’re . . . yes, they’re the last individuals. a trace of superiority, of condescension toward me, as though to point out to me that this was obviously something I could not understand, a private and secret world which I was not permitted to enter. Yes, there are some among us who are fighting for the independence of Africa. But why? To protect the elephants. To take the protection of African fauna into their own hands. Perhaps for them elephants are only an image of their own liberty. That suits me: liberty always suits me. Personally, I have no patience with nationalism: the new or the old, the white or the black, the red or the yellow. They aim between the eyes, just because it’s big, free and beautiful. That’s what they call a fine shot. A trophy. people have been seized by such a need for friendship and company that the dogs can’t manage it. We’ve been asking too much of them. The job has broken them down— they’ve had it. Just think how long they’ve been doing their damnedest for us, wagging their tails and holding out their paws— they’ve had enough . . .’ It’s natural: they’ve seen too much. And the people feel lonely and deserted, and they need something bigger that can really take the strain. Dogs aren’t enough any more; men need elephants. ‘Look here, my friend, for three years I was a bus conductor in Paris. I recommend it during rush hours; it gave me what you might call a knowledge of human nature— a good, solid knowledge which prompted me to change sides and go over to the elephants. there was around him an air of authenticity impossible to disregard: the authenticity of sheer physical nobility

That girl in the mirror wasn't me. that girl in the mirror had devoured me. Swallowed me whole.

The Elephant on the Train” is a heartwarming and adventurous book about a baby elephant's journey to reunite with his mother, filled with themes of love, friendship, fun , adventure, emotion and courage.

In 2013, science writer Natalie Angier gave the centrality of female friendship a zoological boost, pointing out that, "In animals as diverse as African elephants and barnyard mice, blue monkeys of Kenya and feral horses of New Zealand, affiliative, long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships between females turns out to be the basic unit of social life.

It appears that very few women can just move through the end of a friendship, without a struggle. Most appear to need to consciously put together a game plan to recover from the breakup and help them to move on. Terry Miller Shannon, a journalist, writes in an article titled “Friends Forever?”: “If you’re not the one ending the friendship, it feels like an elephant stomped your heart into a billion bleeding pieces.

But because ivory was the first thing we were after when we came here at the turn of the century and because we’re the only ones to hunt with modem weapons, you’ve thought it smart to make elephant hunting the symbol of capitalist exploitation. [...] As long as the protection of the elephants was only a humanitarian idea, only a question of decency, of generosity, a margin of freedom to be preserved at all costs, his campaign had no chance of going very far with the governments concerned. But as soon as it threatened to turn into a political movement, it became explosive, and the authorities had to do something about it, take a real and active interest in the protection of the African fauna, forbid elephant hunting in all its ugly forms, ensure the threatened giants with all the protection and friendship they needed so much. He was convinced that some clever strategists among the governments concerned would do precisely this — and it was all he asked.