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"You only blinched inside," said Pooh, "and that's the bravest way for a Very Small Animal not to blinch that there is."
--
Chapter Nine

 

A. A. Milne

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"I'm giving this to Eeyore," he explained, "as a present. What are you going to give?"
"Couldn't I give it too?" said Piglet. "From both of us?"
"No," said Pooh. "That would not be a good plan."

 

A. A. Milne

 

The attitude of the average person to the world they live in is completely selfish. When I take people round to see my animals, one of the first questions they ask (unless the animal is cute and appealing) is, "what use is it?" by which they mean, "what use is it to them?" To this one can reply "What use is the Acropolis?" Does a creature have to be of direct material use to mankind in order to exist? By and large, by asking the question "what use is it?" you are asking the animal to justify its existence without having justified your own.

 

Gerald Durrell

 

"Excellence," besought Kai Lung, not without misgivings,"how many warriors, each having some actual existence, are there in your never-failing band?"
"For all purposes save those of attack and defence there are fifteen score of the best and bravest, as their pay-sheets well attest," was the confident response. "In a strictly literal sense, however, there are no more than can be seen on a mist-enshrouded day with a resolutely closed eye."

 

Ernest Bramah

 

MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine?
When I say "animal," I do not mean anything bad, cruel or "base"; I am stating a biological fact. Man has developed the peculiar concept that he is not an animal at all, but, well — man; a creature which long since has shed that which is "bad," which is "animal." He demarcates himself in all possible ways from the bad animal and points, in proof of his "being better," to culture and civilization which distinguish him from the animal. He shows, in his whole behavior, his "theories of values," his moral philosophies, his "monkey trials" and such, that he does not want to be reminded of the fact that basically he is an animal, an animal, furthermore, which has much more in common with the "animal" than with that being which he asserts to be and dreams of being. The theory of the German Übermensch has this origin. Man shows by his maliciousness, his inability to live in peace with his kind, his wars, that what distinguishes him from the other animals is only his unbounded sadism and the mechanical trinity of the authoritarian concept of life, mechanistic science and the machine. If one looks at the results of civilization as they present themselves over long periods of time, one finds that these contentions of man are not only erroneous; more than that, they seem to be made expressly for the purpose of making man forget that he is an animal.

 

Wilhelm Reich

 

I have been with the Court all my life, travelling with the King's Progress.
I didn't know how to go on. I sat and stared at this sentence, until Grundo said, "If you can't do it, I will."
If you didn't know Grundo, you'd think this was a generous offer, but it was a threat really. Grundo is dyslexic. Unless he thinks hard, he writes inside out and backwards. He was threatening me with half a page of crooked writing with words like "inside" turning up as "sindie" and "story" as "otsyr".

 

Diana Wynne Jones