Reptile Quotes
It is surprising that modern textbooks teach the ridiculous idea that birds are the descendents of dinosaurs! What a silly idea! There are many thousands of anatomical differences between reptiles and birds. Reptiles have four perfectly good legs that function just fine. Birds have two legs and two wings which also work fine as they are. If a reptile were to try to evolve into a bird, at some point it would have halfleg and half-wing. Now, it can no longer walk or run; yet, it cannot fly. This creature is doomed to extinction.
Kent Hovind
What would happen to a reptile if you put him in the Garden of Eden and let him live to be 900 years old? You'd have a big lizard - a really big lizard! Dinosaurs were big lizards that lived with Adam and Eve before the Flood came. You can get these Jackson chameleons right now at the pet store. What's he going to look like at about 15 tons? Probably some kind of triceratops.
Kent Hovind
Though but ten years old he was fully as strong as the average man of thirty, and far more agile than the most practiced athlete ever becomes. And day by day his strength was increasing.
His life among these fierce apes had been happy; for his recollection held no other life, nor did he know that there existed within the universe aught else than his little forest and the wild jungle animals with which he was familiar.
He was nearly ten before he commenced to realize that a great difference existed between himself and his fellows. His little body, burned brown by exposure, suddenly caused him feelings of intense shame, for he realized that it was entirely hairless, like some low snake, or other reptile.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
The better sort here pretend to the utmost compassion for animals of every kind. To hear them speak, a stranger would be apt to imagine they could hardly hurt the gnat that stung them: they seem so tender and so full of pity, that one would take them for the harmless friends of the whole creation; the protectors of the meanest insect or reptile that was privileged with existence. And yet, would you believe it? I have seen the very men who have thus boasted of their tenderness, at the same time devouring the flesh of six different animals toasted up in a fricassee. Strange contrariety of conduct! they pity and they eat the objects of their compassion.
Oliver Goldsmith
What can be more discouraging to a man than to doubt if his soul be material, like a stone or a reptile, and subject to corruption like the vilest creatures ? And does it not prove much more strength of mind and grandeur to be able to conceive the idea of a Being superior to all other beings, by whom and for whom all things were made; of a Being absolutely perfect and pure, without beginning or end, of whom our soul is the image, and of whom, if I may say so, it is a part, because it is spiritual and immortal?
Jean de La Bruyère
I would not enter on my list of friends,
(Though graced with polish'd manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
An inadvertent step may crush the snail
That crawls at evening in the public path;
But he that has humanity, forewarn'd,
Will tread aside, and let the reptile live.
William Cowper
If the Republicans, who think slavery is wrong, get possession of the general government, we may not root out the evil at once, but may at least prevent its extension. If I find a venomous snake lying on the open praire, I seize the first stick and kill him at once. But if that snake is in bed with my children, I must be more cautious. I shall, in striking the snake, also strike the children, or arouse the reptile to bite the children. Slavery is the venomous snake in bed with the children. But if the question is whether to kill it on the prairie or put it in bed with other children, I think we'd kill it!
Abraham Lincoln
All love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God;
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Years ago, it was pretty hard to get people to empathize even a little bit with scaly, cold-blooded critters; now, thanks a lot to good PR from television, it is easier to get the message of reptile conservation and tolerance across. We have a lot to be thankful to reptiles for, not the least of which is their control of rodents.
Romulus Whitaker
But, brave,
Thou at first prompting of what I call God,
And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,
Accept the obligation laid on thee,
Mother elect, to save the unborn child,
As brute and bird do, reptile and the fly,
Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plant
And flower o' the field, all in a common pact
To worthily defend the trust of trusts,
Life from the Ever Living.
Robert Browning
What cities, as great as this, have ... promised themselves immortality Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others.... Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.
Oliver Goldsmith