Tropical Quotes - page 2
It was for the purpose of guarding against another outlet of expenditure that he exhorted the Committee to pause before they recognised the principle of extending their possessions in tropical climates. He said tropical climates, because there was a great difference between acquiring territory where the race might become indigenous, so as to extend commerce and to spread the principle of self-government over the world, and taking possession of tropical territory, where their own race was not indigenous, where Government must be upheld by force, and where there was no prospect of being able to disembarrass themselves of the responsibility of governing the people.
Richard Cobden
Santo Domingo is fertile, and upon its soil may be grown just those tropical products of which the United States use so much, and which are produced or prepared for market now by slave labor almost exclusively, namely, sugar, coffee, dyewoods, mahogany, tropical fruits, tobacco, etc. About 75 per cent of the exports of Cuba are consumed in the United States. A large percentage of the exports of Brazil also find the same market. These are paid for almost exclusively in coin, legislation, particularly in Cuba, being unfavorable to a mutual exchange of the products of each country.
Ulysses S. Grant
Giant predator lizards can't evolve in the presence of big mammal predators. So the lesson is that mammals suppress much of the evolutionary potential of modern lizards. Is the Komodo dragon a good working model of how dinosaurs succeeded? Absolutely not. Dinosaurs suppressed the evolutionary potential of mammals, not the other way around. And dinosaurs carried out this supression everywhere, on all the continents, not merely on a few tiny tropical isles. Dinosaurs succeeded where Komodo dragons fail.
Robert T. Bakker
I live in Scotland, have you been to Scotland? [a few of the audience whoop and cheer] See that's the exact same number of people, as answered that question in the affirmative when I asked it in England... and erm, people... English people, don't go up there, it's nearly half the country, and you say "Why don't you go?" and they go "Ahh, well, you know, it's very dark and dreary"... 'cos they get so used to the crocodiles and the tropical storms down there in England. "Dark and dreary, you can't understand the accents, the food's disgusting, and a lot of violence, a lot of drugs, people injecting temazepam into each other's stumps... other wise I'd go, you know?"
Dylan Moran
As I wanted to suggest a luxuriant and untamed type of nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it, I was obliged to give my figures a suitable setting.It is indeed the outdoor life - yet intimate at the same time, in the thickets and the shady streams, these women whispering in an immense palace decorated by nature itself, with all the riches that Tahiti has to offer. This is the reason behind all these fabulous colors, this subdued and silent glow."But none of this exists!""Oh yes it does, as an equivalent of the grandeur, the depth, the mystery of Tahiti, when you have to express it on a canvas measuring only one square meter."Very subtle, very knowing in her naïveté is the Tahitian Eve. The riddle hiding in the depth of her childlike eyes is still incommunicable to me.
Paul Gauguin
The idea that we can just keep growing forever on a finite planet is totally imbecilic.... Julian Simon, a professor of junkmail marketing, and his kind, think technology will solve everything.... We can use up the Earth then we can just jump into spaceships and fly somewhere else.... Technology does nothing to solve problems of biodiversity or living space or arable cropland.... Fresh water and arable cropland are finite resources.... We are already far beyond what we can support sustainably.... The provincial view you get from someone living in some wealthy American East Coast city is wildly different from reality. Most of the world is tropical, hungry and poor. Visit the developing world and southern hemisphere and you get a very different view of reality.
Paul R. Ehrlich
Sometimes, my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run away from this. You cannot run from it. Wherever you run, it waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there, where you have run to. It waits for you, to ambush you. It is like those vines called lianas, those tropical creepers that grow around you and strangle you. You cut off one branch, but there is another that grows. You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto.
Klaus Kinski
The East knows a true lucidity, but to be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens out onto a space of comprehensive ruin. This has never been understood, nor can it be. The foulness of our fate only deepens with the centuries, as the tracts of insanity sprawl. From bodies gnawed by tropical fevers we swim out through collapse to inexistence in forever, destined for Undo.
Nick Land
I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass. "The architectural simplicity” – whether of a platonic idea or greek temple – I far prefer to no idea at all, or no temple at all, or, for instance, to most of the complicated and too tropical structures of India. Nothing could ever convince my EYE – even if my intelligence were otherwise overcome – that anything that did not possess this simplicity, conceptual quality, hard exact outline, grand architectural proportion, was the greatest art. Bergson is indeed the arch enemy of every impulse having its seat in the apparatus of vision, and requiring a concrete world. Bergson is the enemy of the Eye, from the start; though he might arrive at some emotional compromise with the Ear. But I can hardly imagine any way in which he is not against every form of intelligent life. (p. 338)
Wyndham Lewis
The world economy is pumping trillions of dollars into the accounts of a few thousand people. These riches should be directed first and foremost to end the millions of needless deaths caused by extreme poverty, and to educate the hundreds of millions of children who lack schooling. The billionaires would still have enough left over to indulge their longing for mega-yachts, personal space ships, private tropical islands, and other conspicuous consumption.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
In the entire circuit of the globe those races which have developed under a tropical sun are found to be indolent and fickle. From the standpoint of survival of the fittest, such vices are virtues, for severe and continuous exertion under tropical conditions bring prostration and predisposition to disease. Therefore, if such races are to adopt that industrious life which is a second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion. The negro could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man.
John R. Commons
Why would the omnipotent creator of the entire universe be so deeply attached to a bipedal, tropical ape? Why would He take on the bodily form of one of these peculiar tailless primates? Why would such a magnificent being be so obsessively, nit-pickingly preoccupied with trivial matters such as the dress code and sexual behaviour of one mammalian species, especially its female members?
Steve Stewart-Williams
Once in a generation, a Wallace may be found physically, mentally, and morally qualified to wander unscathed through the tropical wilds of America and of Asia; to form magnificent collections as he wanders; and withal to think out sagaciously the conclusions suggested by his collections: but, to the ordinary explorer or collector, the dense forests of equatorial Asia and Africa.
Thomas Henry Huxley