Domestication Quotes

“Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote.”
― Gary Steiner, Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship

“The bee is domesticated but not tamed.”
― William Longgood

“Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: “He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture.”
― Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

“It speaks to the very nature of our domestication that we only choose resistance so long as it feels like something we can win.”
― Serafinski, Blessed is the Flame: An Introduction to Concentration Camp Resistance and Anarcho-Nihilism

“Now domestication and sophistication of men by women are the norm and acceptable by society, but they are terrible for manhood.”
― Debasish Mridha M.D.

“The exchange between plants and people has shaped the evolutionary history of both. Farms, orchards, and vineyards are stocked with species we have domesticated. Our appetite for their fruits leads us to till, prune, irrigate, fertilize, and weed on their behalf. Perhaps they have domesticated us. Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants—a kind of mutual taming.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indulgences of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarised himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates.

The wolf, disarmed of ferocity, is now pillowed in the lady's lap. The cat, the little tiger of our island, whose natural home is the forest, is equally domesticated and caressed. The cow, the hog, the sheep, and the horse, are all, for a variety of purposes, brought under his care and dominion.”
― Edward Jenner, Vaccination Against Smallpox

“More often than not, a statist's argument against Anarchism boils down to an unwillingness to take control and responsibility for their own lives, actions, and communities. The sad truth is that the human animal has been domesticated to the point where it actually fears Liberty.”
― Dane Whalen

“Music and symbols, they're older than human race.
Prehuman beings used them to teach early mankind.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Dogs and roses. All these suburban houses bespangled with roses and bristling with dogs. A dog behind every rose bush. For people and their hellish imaginaries, dogs are as ornamental as roses. In reality, the roses are just as vicious as the dogs or an electrified fence. There are too many of them, they are too red, their carnivorous petals close on a forbidden space. The pleasantness of the residential suburbs, the pleasantness of the sarcophagi of greenery where the television aerials gleam. The pleasantness of aphanisis in the death-laden detached houses, set in a bower of lilacs and hollyhocks. The only sign of the frenzied urge to bite and fight, the only sign of the vitrified and howling passions beneath the film of plastic is the beast of the Apocalypse, barking on the horizon beyond the flower beds.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Perhaps if zoologists would contemplate the wide variations presented by many plants of indubitably one and the same species, and the still wider diversities of long cultivated races from an original stock, they would find more than one instructive parallel to the case of the longest domesticated of all species, man.”
― Asa Gray

“შენ ჩემთვის ჯერჯერობით მხოლოდ ერთი პატარა ბიჭი ხარ, ისეთივე, როგორიცაა ასი ათასი სხვა პატარა ბიჭი, და სრულებით არა მჭირდები. არც მე ვარ შენთვის საჭირო. შენთვის მე მხოლოდ ისეთი მელია ვარ, როგორიცაა ასი ათასი სხვა მელია. მაგრამ, თუ მომიშინაურებ, ჩვენ საჭირონი გავხდებით ერთმანეთისთვის. შენ ერთადერთი იქნები ამქვეყნად ჩემთვის და მეც ერთადერთი ვიქნები შენთვის...”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“In terms of "quiet" bourgeois democracy two fundamental possibilities are open to the industrial worker: identification with the bourgeoisie, which holds a higher position in the social scale, or identification with his own social class, which produces its own anti-reactionary way of life. To pursue the first possibility means to envy the reactionary man, to imitate him, and, if the opportunity arises, to assimilate his habits of life. To pursue the second of these possibilities means to reject the reactionary man's ideologies and habits of life. Due to the simultaneous influence exercised by both social and class habits, these two possibilities are equally strong. The revolutionary movement also failed to appreciate the importance of the seemingly irrelevant everyday habits, indeed, very often turned them to bad account. The lower middle-class bedroom suite, which the "rabble" buys as soon as he has the means, even if he is otherwise revolutionary minded; the consequent suppression of the wife, even if he is a Communist; the "decent" suit of clothes for Sunday; "proper" dance steps and a thousand other "banalities," have an incomparably greater reactionary influence when repeated day after day than thousands of revolutionary rallies and leaflets can ever hope to counterbalance. Narrow conservative life exercises a continuous influence, penetrates every facet of everyday life; whereas factory work and revolutionary leaflets have only a brief effect.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“Looking at him she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or more were effaced, and there he was, the alert and predatory sub-human, further from what she believed man should be like than the naked savage, because the savage was tractable, while this creature, wearing the armor of his own rigid barbaric culture, consciously defied progress. And that was what Stenham saw, too; to him the boy was a perfect symbol of human backwardness, and excited his praise precisely because he was “pure”: there was no room in his personality for anything that mankind had not already fully developed long ago. To him he was a consolation, a living proof that today’s triumph was not yet total; he personified Stenham’s infantile hope that time might still be halted and man sent back to his origins.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“Of all the animal species alive in the world now or in the past, only a relatively few have been domesticated by humans, most of them in just the last few thousand years of human history. The dog was the first, by a wide margin—the only animal believed to have been domesticated by itinerant human hunter-gatherers, long before the development of farming and permanent settlements.”
― Kay Frydenborg, A Dog in the Cave: The Wolves Who Made Us Human

“...there is the fable, Chinese I think, literary I am sure: of a period on earth when the dominant creatures were cats: who after ages of trying to cope with the anguishes of mortality---famine, plague, war, injustice, folly, greed---in a word, civilized government---convened a congress of the wisest cat philosophers to see if anything could be done: who after long deliberation agreed that the dilemma, the problems themselves were insoluble and the only practical solution was to give it up, relinquish, abdicate, by selecting from among the lesser creatures a species, race optimistic enough to believe that the mortal predicament could be solved and ignorant enough never to learn better. Which is why the cat lives with you, is completely dependent on you for food and shelter but lifts no paw for you and loves you not; in a word, why your cat looks at you the way it does.”
― William Faulkner, The Reivers

“Civil wars, just like the reign of terror, are but the accelerated domestication of a people by the covert powers. - On Domestication”
― Lamine Pearlheart

“I wonder,' Trull said as he watched the momentary stand-off, 'if this is how domestication first began. Not banding together in a hunt for prey, but in an elimination of rival predators.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“Many animals flourish not in spite of the fact that they are "animals" but because they are "animals"—or even more precisely, perhaps, because they are felt to be members of our families and our communities, regardless of their species. And yet, at the very same moment, billions of animals in factory farms, many of whom are very near to or indeed exceed cats and dogs and other companion animals in the capacities we take to be relevant to standing (the ability to experience pain and suffering, anticipatory dread, emotional bonds and complex social interactions, and so on), have as horrible a life as one could imagine, also because they are "animals."

Clearly, then, the question here is not simply of the "animal" as the abjected other of the "human" tout court, but rather something like a distinction between bios and zoe that obtains within the domain of domesticated animals itself.”
― Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame

“She pitied these women trapped in this semblance of happiness. She pitied their daughters being raised in this modernized cult of domesticity.”
― Wiss Auguste, The Illusions of Hope

“Abuse had no color and no gender.”
― Laika Constantino

“The origins of domestication have been traced to diverse parts of the world using archaeological evidence which clearly shows that several important wild species from deserts and semi-deserts were among the first to undergo this process. Some of the earliest food crops to be cultivated were wheat and barley, two desert annuals, in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East around 7,000 to 9,000 years ago. Natural adaptations of these species for life in drylands made them particularly suitable for agriculture. They thrive on ephemeral supplies of water and respond by growing rapidly and producing an abundance of seeds, constituting the grain we eat.”
― Nick Middleton, Deserts: A Very Short Introduction

“In addition to selecting for infantile physical features in many of our pet breeds, we have carefully cultivated an infant-like dependency in many of them. Excessive demonstrations of affection have turned our dogs into eternal children, hyperdomesticated, docile, and servile to the extreme.”
― Charles Danten, Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale

“As our bullying culture expanded and our human population grew out of control, we designed more powerful and intricate systems to control ourselves, just as we had developed enclosures and slaughterhouses for the use and control of other animals we were breeding. We developed the ideas of Kings & Queens, governments, armies, policing (and police dogs), different classes of humans, and dungeons & prisons for those who might challenge the bullies at the top or the entire system. We were fully domesticated and fully controlled. We were fully civilized. We had become both the bullies and the bullied.”
― Danny Nichols , Cops Don't Kill K9 Cops, Do They?: The Deadly Bad Habit Cops Don't Want You to Read About