#l

There can be no question that parrots have more intellect than any other kind of bird, and it is this that makes them such favourite pets and brings upon them so many sorrows. ...Men will buy them ... and carry them off to all quarters of the native town, intending, I doubt not, to treat them kindly; but "the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel", and confinement in a solitary cell, the discipline with which we reform hardened criminals, is misery enough to a bird with an active mind, without the superadded horrors of ... life in a tin case, hung from a nail in the wall of a dark shop... Why does the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals never look into the woes of parrots? ... However happy you make her captivity, imagination will carry her at times to the green field and blue sky, and she fancies herself somewhere near the sun, heading a long file of exultant companions in swift career through the whistling air. Then she opens her mouth and rings out a wild salute to all parrots in the far world below her. ↗

— E.H. Aitken

#captivity #intelligence #parrots #imagination

Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval! ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#cats #men

How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds. ↗

— Richard Yates

#clouds #crew-cut #desperate #hurrying #indifferent

Someone heroic and valiant, not merely skilled in speech; someone who is kind and pure in heart. Someone who does not play with white roses that belong to others. ↗

— Sarah Mally

#godly-men #heroic #purity #roses #speech

"The She of the dragon will return and ascend When the cycle of twelve draws to an end..." "The She of the Dragoneye will restore and defend When the Darkforce is mastered with Hua of All Men. ↗

— Alison Goodman

#dragoneye #eona #hua #prophecy #men

It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#ethics #evil #morality #renunciation #stoic

Finally, I wish to remember the millions of Allied servicemen and prisoners of war who lived the story of the Second World War. Many of these men never came home; many others returned bearing emotional and physical scars that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. I come away from this book with the deepest appreciation for what these men endured, and what they scarified, for the good of humanity. It is to them that this book {Unbroken} is dedicated, ↗

— Laura Hillenbrand

#veterans #world-war- #men

Emancipated' women found out that the honesty, generosity, and camaraderie of men was a lie. ↗

— Shulamith Firestone

#men

Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious. ↗

— José Saramago

#philological #men

They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy--for their patrons and themselves. ↗

— Marilyn Johnson

#men