Jesteśmy społecznością, która kocha książki

Panel discussions are like rabbits - usually what happens during such a session is that further sessions are declared necessary - and if nothing is done to prevent this, they multiply so quickly and become so numerous that it is no longer possible to provide a sufficient number of participants, even if we all devote most of each day to these sessions.

I was afraid of being annihilated on account of saying no: those who refuse to fulfil their duties lose their right to exist.

In life, we don't have a choice because everything we are capable of is still not very much compared with life itself, not nearly as much as we imagine. And if we don't get this not-very-much exactly right, we will not survive. This fundamental principle can't be terribly different even for spoiled young people in a prosperous society.

At the time there was a protest movement in West Germany against the exploitation of circus animals. The movement's spokespersons argued that taming wild animals for the circus violated their human rights.

Someone told me once that illness was a traditional form of theater practiced by office workers, who were allowed to put on these performances only on Mondays when they didn't want to come to work. I'd never been sick in my life.

It struck me as the pinnacle of apishness to not only want to become human but to tell the story of one's own transformation. [...] But if you asked me, I'd lose no time telling you I don't consider it progress to walk on two legs.

Who made this foolish creatures? Some humans claim to be made in God's image - what an insult to God. There are, however, in the northern reaches of our Earth, small tribes who can still remember that God looked like a bear.

My ancestors were no doubt unacquainted with insomnia. Compared to them, I ate too much and slept too little. My evolution was clearly a regression.

Listening carefully to the conversation between Matthias and Christian, it was immediately clear that Matthias never referred to himself as Matthias. He didn't use his own name - as if his name had nothing to do with him - and left its use up to the other humans. What a strange phenomenon! And what did Matthias call himself? "I." What was even stranger was that Christian too referred to himself as "I." Why didn't they get confused if they all kept using the same name?

In fact, the main character is never an animal. During the process by which an animal is transformed into a non-animal or a human into a non-human, memory gets lost, and it's this loss that is the main character.

The concept of human rights had been invented by people who were thinking only of human beings. Dandelions don't have human rights, and neither do reindeer, raindrops, or hares. At most a whale. I remember a text i had once read for a conference on the topic Whaling and Capitalism. It averred that larger mammals enjoyed more rights than smeller animals, like mice for example, and attributed the discrepancy to the tastes of a certain group of people, who valued larger things more then small ones.