#Cultures you have no relationship to get called ancient (= dead) constantly as a form of political disenfranchisement
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the problem with personally relating to a culture in a sci-fi series is people will say things slightly off color and I'll wanna gnaw on rocks about it
#cipher talk#'Ancient' about a culture that has living descendants and adherents to its religion#Implying the colonizing culture that's genocided it is a descendant culture#And tbf beta canon is inconsistent about this but most people have read one specific book!#Not about anyone I follow I just get very frustrated with how people read Hebitians because there's a cultural like#Background to what Hebitians are thar most people reading it seem to completely miss#Because to them they hear a culture get called ancient (= dead) and have no baggage about it. Why would they?#And they don't think about what descendancy means or about crypto-religions or when states weaponize race mixing#But if you have experience with this and hear the word ancient and almost have a flinch response and know it's not even just you because#Cultures you have no relationship to get called ancient (= dead) constantly as a form of political disenfranchisement#It's a popular point of view to put on people which is why it's a problem! That doesn't make it hurt less
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Witchcraft in Hellenismos
Disclaimer: This post is non-exhaustive, and though I'll try to equally spread my focus, it will inevitably lean towards the kinds of magik I personally practice.
Often, in modern pagan circles, people are under the impression that Ancient Hellenismos either didn't have or despised witchcraft. This is largely from three causes. The first is simply misreading, or failing to come across witchcraft in the Hellenism they research. Second is only reading about or adhering to branches that didn't like witchcraft (usually due to it being perceived as hubristic) and therefore assuming that's the most popular opinion. Finally, sometimes people apply their assumptions based on Christian and Germanic culture to Hellenismos, and assume it carries the same attitudes.
In actuality, the view of witchcraft was historically more neutral. Witches weren't typically seen as hags, but maidens, respectable men, priests, and more. It should also be noted that, frankly, "witch" is a slightly tonally incorrect translation usually applied to the word "pharmakis."
For historical attitudes towards witches, we can read works surrounding mainly Medea and Kirke, as well as Hekate if we go past pharmakeia.
But pharmakeia and nekromankia (necromancy) are far from the only forms of witchcraft or magik--which in Ancient Greek would be "mageia" or "goeteia" depending on time and place, but will simply be called "magik" here.
So, with that very long introduction, let's get into types of magik.
Pharmakeia - Herbal Sorcery, Witchcraft
Pharmakeia is perhaps the most recognizable form of magik in historical Hellenismos. As mentioned, it was associated with the heroine Medea, as well as the goddess/nymph/hero (it's complicated) Kirke. This was magik performed using the aid of herbs, and both historically and now blends magik and science. It includes brewing poisons, casting curses, potionmaking, transmutation, and more. Kirke, famously, used pharmakeia to transform men into swine, whereas Medea tended towards poisoning, but both had variety in their craft.
Generally, when pharmakeia is translated, it's done very broadly compared to other kinds of magik. For example, pharmakeia is usually translated, especially in the Odyssey, to "witchcraft" or "sorcery." Pharmakis--the word for a practitioner of pharmakeia--is usually translated to "witch." This often leads to misconceptions of witchcraft in Hellenismos being specifically oriented around herbs and transmutation, when that's only a small piece of the picture.
Nekromankia/Nekromanteia - Necromancy
Nekromankia is far more famous now in its Anglicized pop-culture form, but it was most certainly present in Hellenismos. It's important to clarify that in Ancient Hellas, nekromankia was magik pertaining to the dead, not things such as zombies and raising the dead. In Hellenismos, the maintenance of good relationships between the dead and the living is of great importance. There were plenty of festivals devoted to placating and celebrating the dead--not to mention the monthly Attic holiday Hekate's Deipnon, devoted to honoring Hekate, goddess of nekromankia. So, unsurprisingly, there were witches who gravitated towards this as a craft.
Multiple Hellenic deities were associated with nekromankia, the most notable of which being Hekate, but also Persephone. Though, of course, any khthonic deity--especially khthonic theoi who also had non-khthonic aspects--were relevant, such as Haides or Hermes. A practitioner of nekromankia would be referred to as a nekromanteías.
Manteia - Divination, Oracles
It should be noted that manteia is heavily contested as being a form of witchcraft or even magik in Hellenismos, but it certainly meets the qualifications. The main reason this debate exists is controversy around magik in Hellenismos in general, since as most Hellenists know manteia is so central to so much of our religion, and those who dislike magik are insulted by it being considered that. Additionally, the definition of magik is constantly in flux--it's debated in modern magik circles, and it's even harder to apply a definition we can hardly agree on to an ancient culture with its own independent definitions.
Manteia is, most simply, the power to give prophecies, divination, and the use of oracles. It's the power of the Pythia (Delphic Oracle), it's in the Olympian Alphabet Oracle, it's every single seer and prophecy and divinatory method known to us.
Someone who practices manteia is called a mantis (usually translated as "soothsayer" or "diviner") or a khresmologos ("oracle"), depending on station.
Heliomanteia - Solar Magik
Heliomanteia is hard to find detailed historical information on, but most simply, it's magikal invocation of the sun. This is generally done by attempting to harness the power of the sun, or by requesting the aid of solar deities (namely, Helios).
Interestingly, Helios had many associations with witchcraft and warding off evil. It could be assumed that, due to the qualities attributed to Helios, heliomanteia would be best used to reveal truth, ward off evil, harness the power of fire, promote life, and similar.
Presumably, a practitioner of heliomanteia is a heliomantis.
Goeteia - Magik, Charms
Goeteia (in modern times "goetia") is a term for magik that fell out of style for general magik around the 5th century BC in favor of mageia. It, additionally, was shoehorned into a dichotomy of theurgy (divine, "professional," and virtuous magik) and goeteia (low, malicious, and fraudulent magik). This was largely due to political and social overhaul. The name became associated with fraudulent and harmful magik, and talk of goeteia in Ancient Hellas is a major source most anti-witch Hellenists use.
The goes (practitioner of goetia) was maligned, seen as hubristic and either trying to go against the power of the gods or intending to scam others. Plato famously portrayed them as malicious frauds, and he was not alone. Since the term "goes" is generally translated as "witch," it's not a leap to figure out why this lead to a lot of anti-witch Hellenists.
However, before this (and technically after), "goeteia" simply meant magic, charms, and similar. As a unique practice, and not simply an umbrella term for witchcraft, it can be considered channeling, a relative of nekromankia, or baneful magik, depending how much one leans into the later definition.
Theourgía - Deity Work, Divine Magik
Theourgia (in modern times "theurgy") quite literally translates to "deity work" or "god(s) working." It is ritual, sometimes magik, done with the intent of invoking one or more of the theoi. This was the ritual magik often performed by priests. In fact, it could be considered the mainstream magik of Ancient Hellas--assuming, of course, that one considers it magik.
It's not only historic magik that was central to the religion, but sets historical precedent for the controversial phrase "deity work." The existence of theurgy as the "higher form" of magik in Ancient Hellas is singlehandedly enough evidence to prove the phrase is not and would not be considered inherently hubristic. It should be noted that this form isn't inherently superior, but if you asked Plato, he would disagree.
There are certainly more forms of mageia in Ancient Hellas--For example, I skipped over amulets (periapta), which were almost incontestably the most common magik in a lot of Ancient Hellas, since they could technically fit under some other crafts and because they're the easiest to research on your own. It's a similar case with potions, too.
One important takeaway is the hard line between magik, religion, and science is a fairly recent invention. Pharmakeia could act as medicine, not just sorcery. Many potions were also medication. Frankly, the more women were involved, the more practical it tended to be, with 'spells' often being genuine aids to childbirth and/or birth control. This didn't make them any less magikal, and the magik doesn't make it less real.
And I hope I made it very, very clear, but witchcraft has always been in Hellenismos, and isn't inherently hubristic. That is a myth, and is rooted often in historical (and modern) classism, misogyny, xenophobia, or similar. Always consider your source's incentive to stigmatize before discounting all Hellenic witches.
#hellenismos#pharmakeia#pharmakia#nekromania#nekromanteia#manteia#mankeia#heliomanteia#heliomancy#goeteia#goetia#theourgia#theurgy#necromancy#divination#herbalism#ancient hellenismos#hellenic paganism#hellenic polytheism#kirke#hekate#magik#magik gods#theoi#ancient hellas
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What does it mean to be pagan? (Paganism 101 Ch. 1)
That’s right, y’all! With Baby Witch Bootcamp officially wrapped, it’s time to jump into our next long term series! I put out a poll on Patreon, and my patrons voted for Paganism 101 as our next series. While not all witches are pagan and not all pagans are witches, there is a lot of overlap between the two groups. Both witchcraft and paganism offer practitioners a sense of freedom, a deeper connection to the world around them, and a greater awareness of their personal power.
I identify both as a witch and as a pagan, and I get a lot of questions about paganism. In this series, we’ll go through the basics: what it means to be pagan, the difference between a neopagan and a reconstructionist, and the role of magic in different pagan traditions. We’ll also talk about some of the most popular modern pagan traditions and how to find the right tradition for you.
Let’s start off by answering the question, “What does pagan actually mean?”
Defining “Pagan”
It’s important to remember that “pagan” is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of different faiths. Someone who practices Wicca, for example, will have very different beliefs from someone who practices Hellenismos. These different faiths are linked by a shared history, rather than by shared beliefs or practices.
The word “pagan” comes from the Latin “paganus,” which literally means “area outside of a city” or, to phrase it slightly differently, “countryside.” This adjective was used to describe people and things that were rustic or rural and, over time, came to also have the connotation of being uneducated. Originally, the word had no religious association, and was even used to refer to non-combatants by the Roman military.
From this definition, we can gain some insight into what makes a religion or practice pagan. Pagans feel a kinship with the wild or rural places of the world, and are comfortable waking “off the beaten path.”
But how did “paganus” come to refer to a type of religion, anyway?
To understand the religious meaning of “paganus,” it’s necessary to understand a little bit about the religion of Ancient Rome. Rome (the city) was built inside a pomerium, a sacred boundary that formed a spiritual border around the city and its people. Paganus folks were those who lived outside the pomerium and, as such, may not have been strict adherents of the state religion — they certainly wouldn’t have been able to travel into the city for every major festival. They may have gotten a bit more creative with their worship of the gods. However, as previously stated, the word paganus did not have an explicitly religious meaning in ancient times.
The use of paganus as a religious label began after the legalization of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 313 C.E. Christianity would not be adopted as the official state religion until 380 C.E., but Constantine’s conversion and decriminalization of Christian worship paved the way for Rome’s transformation into a Christian state. It was around this time, as Christianity was quickly growing in urban areas, that early Roman Christians began using the word “paganus” to refer to those who still practiced polytheism. Rather than referring to those outside the city’s boundary or to untrained civilians, the label now referred to those outside the Church, those who were not “soldiers of Christ.”
As Christianity spread in popularity throughout the Mediterranean, Europe, and Northern Africa, the pagan label was applied to all non-Christians in those areas. The word “pagan” became a derogatory label, implying an inferior and backwards religion.
So, really, the thing that makes a religion pagan is a historical conflict with Christianity. Pagan religions are those that were suppressed or completely destroyed after Christianity became the dominant faith in the region.
This is why Norse Paganism and Kemetic (Egyptian) polytheism, which are very different, are both considered “pagan” while Shinto, a Japanese religion that shares a lot of common features with many pagan faiths, is not. Because Christianity never achieved total dominance in Japan, Shinto was never pushed aside to make room for Jesus.
In the 20th century, people who felt drawn to these old religions started to reclaim the pagan label. Like many other reclaimed slurs, “pagan” became a positive label for a community united by their shared history.
What do all pagans have in common?
This is a tough question to answer because, as stated above, paganism is a historical definition, not one shaped by belief or practice. However, there are some things most pagans have in common. Here are a few of them, although these concepts may take different forms in different traditions.
Paganism…
… is (usually) polytheistic. Most pagans do not subscribe to monotheism, the belief in a single, all-powerful divine being. Some pagans are polytheists, meaning they believe in multiple divine beings with varying levels of power. Hellenic pagans, Norse pagans, and Celtic pagans are typically polytheists. Still others are monists, meaning they believe in a single divine source that manifests itself as multiple gods. Wiccans and other neopagans are typically monists. Many pagans fall somewhere in-between strict polytheism and strict monism. We’ll talk more about polytheism in a future post, but for now just know that the idea of a single, supreme creator is not compatible with most forms of paganism.
… is based in reciprocity. This is a concept that may seem odd to those who grew up around Abrahamic religions: the idea of engaging the gods in a mutually beneficial partnership, rather than one-sided worship. When we connect with the gods, we receive spiritual, emotional, and physical blessings. The gods also benefit, as they are strengthened by our prayers and offerings. (I like to think they also enjoy the company. It has to be lonely, having your body of worshipers supplanted by an anarchist carpenter from Palestine.) The concept of reciprocity is why most pagans make physical offerings to their gods.
Reciprocity also extends to our relationships with other people. Most pagan religions have a code of ethics that includes values like hospitality, kindness, and/or fairness with others. Depending on the pagan, reciprocity may even extend to the dead! Many (but not all) pagans practice ancestor worship, the act of honoring and venerating the beloved dead.
Reciprocity may even extend to the world at large. Some (but not all) pagans are animists, which means they believe that every animal, plant, and stone contains its own spirit. Animist pagans strive to live in harmony with the spirits of the world around them, and may make offerings to these spirits as a sign of friendship.
… embraces the Divine Feminine. Paganism acknowledges and venerates both masculine and feminine expressions of divinity. Polytheist pagans worship both gods and goddesses, while monist pagans see the divine Source as encompassing all genders. In either case, the end result is the same: pagans acknowledge that, sometimes, God is a woman. (Cue the Ariana Grande song.)
Paganism also acknowledges gender expressions outside the masculine/feminine binary. Many pagan deities, like Loki (in Norse paganism), Atum (in Kemetic paganism), and Aphroditus (a masculine aspect of the Greek Aphordite) exist somewhere in the grey area between man and woman.
… is compatible with a mystic mindset. Remember how I said there’s a lot of overlap between witchcraft and paganism? Part of the reason for that is because paganism is highly compatible with magic and other mystical practices. Most pagans believe that humans have, or can attain, some level of divine power. It makes sense that this power would manifest as magic, or as other spiritual abilities. Many of the ancient cultures modern paganism draws inspiration from practiced magic in some form, so it follows that modern pagans would as well.
… draws inspiration from the ancient stories. As we discussed, “pagan” originally referred to the religious groups that were pushed out by Christian hegemony. As a result, every modern pagan is a little bit of a historian. Because paganism was pushed underground, it takes a little digging to find myths, rituals, and prayers that can be used or adapted for modern practice.
Many pagans worship historic deities that you’ve probably read about at some point. Visit any pagan pride event, and you’ll probably find worshipers of Zeus, Venus, Thor, and Isis, just to name a few. Studying and interpreting ancient mythology and archaeological evidence is a big part of modern paganism.
… is a religion with homework. If you’ve read this far, you may be beginning to realize that being pagan is a lot of work. It’s fun, spiritually fulfilling, and very rewarding work, but work all the same. Because very few modern pagans have access to temples, priests and priestesses, or an in-person community that shares their beliefs, they end up having to teach themselves, do their own research, and guide their own practice.
This is incredibly empowering, as it means you are your own religious authority. It does, however, mean that you will occasionally have to open a book or slog through a dense academic article about the most recent archaeological find related to your favorite deity. Thankfully, there’s a growing number of accessible, beginner-friendly books, blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels to help you in your research.
… embodies a deep respect for the natural world. While not all pagans are animists, most pagans do feel some sort of reverence for the forces of nature. Many pagan deities are associated with natural forces or use the natural world to communicate with their followers. Because of this, not only do pagans respect and love nature, but they’re constantly watching it for signs and messages. (Are you really friends with a pagan if they haven’t called you crying because they found a crow feather on the ground or saw a woodpecker in their backyard?)
Some pagan groups, especially neopagan religions like Wicca, have been classified as Earth-centered religions. Personally, I dislike this term. While it is true that many pagans feel a deep spiritual connection to the Earth and may even venerate local nature spirits, to say that these religions are “Earth-centered” feels like an oversimplification. Wiccans, for example, don’t actually worship nature — they worship the God and Goddess, who they see reflected in the natural world.
… is driven by individual spiritual practice. As mentioned above, very few pagans have access to an in-person community. Because of this, modern paganism largely consists of individual practices. Even pagans who do belong to a community still typically worship on their own sometimes. These personal practices may involve prayer, offerings to the gods, meditation, divination, astral travel, performing religious rituals, or countless other practices. Many pagans have personal altars in their homes, where they worship alone or with their family.
… is a celebration of daily life. One thing I love about paganism is how it makes every aspect of my life feel sacred. Many religions emphasize the spiritual aspects of life while deemphasizing, or even demonizing, the physical or mundane aspects. This can lead to practitioners feeling like they are spiritual beings trapped in a physical body, or like their physical needs and desires are something to escape.
Paganism allows practitioners to fully enjoy being physical and spiritual beings. Pagans reach for the heights of spiritual awareness, while also enjoying earthly delights — recognizing that neither is inherently more worthy than the other and that both are needed for a balanced life.
… is only one of many paths to Truth. Most pagan groups do not claim to be the only valid religious path, and in fact several openly acknowledge the validity of other religions. This is why you rarely see pagans trying to convert other people to paganism — it’s openly acknowledged that paganism isn’t for everyone, and that those who are truly meant to practice the old ways will find them.
~~~
Hopefully, this post has given us a good working definition of “paganism.” From here, we’ll explore some of these individual concepts in more depth and discuss specific religions within the pagan umbrella. Until then, blessed be.
Resources:
Wicca for Beginners by Thea Sabin
Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham
A Witches’ Bible by Janet and Stewart Farrar
The Way of Fire and Ice by Ryan Smith
Where the Hawthorn Grows by Morgan Daimler
Temple of the Cosmos by Jeremy Naydler
A Practical Guide to Irish Spirituality by Lora O’Brien
#paganism 101#pagan#paganism#pagan witch#neopagan#wicca#wiccan#feri#reclaiming#goddess worship#celtic paganism#irish paganism#hellenismos#hellenic polytheism#religio romana#heathenry#germanic paganism#norse paganism#kemetic polytheism#kemetic paganism#animism#ancestor worship#eclectic pagan#polytheism#divine feminine#goddess#mythology#theology#history#witch
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Todoroki Enji and the Egyptian Sun God Ra
(Part Four: Mythological Influences in Boku no Hero Academia)
Note: ok, so I’m kinda nervous to post this. . . but here we are
So how did I get to comparing the Egyptian sun god Ra to Endeavor? To sum it up, this is the fourth post in a set of analysis and meta about mythological influences in BNHA, so a lot of this builds on top of the info and connections I’ve made previously.
There are quite a few references and influences to Greek mythology in BNHA and personally I was very intrigued with the Hawks and Icarus parallels that kept popping up. In the myth of Icarus, the sun melts the wax off of Icarus’ artificial wings which causes him to fall and drown in the ocean. I saw Endeavor as one of Hawks’ metaphorical “suns”. While I sat on that, I began looking at Tokoyami, since he has a mentor-student relationship with Hawks, and found how he has Egyptian influences in his character design which I wrote about in a post here.
I began researching and reading through ancient Egyptian myths and information. One of the figures that caught my attention was the ancient Egyptian’s most important god: Ra, the sun god. (He is the falcon headed figure depicted below.) I quickly found some similarities between Ra and Endeavor.
This image is from the expereince-ancient-egypt website.
Before I begin, I’d like to say I am very much aware that BNHA is a Japanese manga series and that the story is greatly influenced by Japanese culture and society. Unless there are very explicit examples (such as the case of Tokoyami) this post is not me saying that Horikoshi intentionally wrote certain characters and aspects inspired by Egyptian mythology. I just like like finding interesting similarities whether they were intentional or coincidental and writing about it.
That being stated, let’s begin.
Ra: The Egyptian God of the Sun
The original source of the image above is unknown.
So, who exactly is Ra?
Ra was the Ancient Egyptian sun god. The sun had a special place among the ancient Egyptians, they considered it the source of life. He was... the creator of the universe, one of the most famous deities...
Ancient Egyptians believed that Ra created himself, and his tears created humans. The setting of the sun means the beginning of the daily journey by Ra, in which he travels by his holy boat to the underworld every evening, to fight the forces of evil represented in a big snake called Apophis, and then returns to a brilliant triumph in the heights of the sky every morning on a new day. The ancient Egyptian saw this as a sign of human resurrection, and also evidence of Ra’s victory over the forces of chaos and evil (cleopatraegypttours).
Throughout all the websites I went through, Ra was very closely associated with the themes of the sun, life, the underworld, resurrection and victory over chaos and evil.
Let’s focus more on Ra’s journey through the underworld.
During his life he was required, as the incarnation and representative of the sun god, to maintain the cosmic and social order (ma’at) established by the god of creation. He had to repel the forces of chaos which constantly threatened the order of the world.
After his d/eath, the king united with the sun disk and his divine body merged with his creator. In his new role he continued to perform the task of subduing the powers of chaos. This active role of the king and sun god necessitated a detailed description of the d/amned, who represent the forces of evil.
Perhaps you may be starting to see the similarities and connections I began to form between Ra and Endeavor. If not, it’s okay. Sometimes II have to sit on a lot of the information I’m taking in before I see anything.
Endeavor’s Powers
Endeavor’s fire-based quirk is called “Hellflame.” The list of his named moves are: Flashfire Fist (Jet Burn, Hell Spider, Hell’s Curtain), Karmic Raze - Hellfire Storm, Raging Assault - Hell Minefield, Vanishing Fist, and Prominence Burn. As you can see, there’s a lot of mentions of the word: Hell.
While we can connect the “hell theme” back to Ra’s connections to the underworld, I would first like to point out what the Egyptian underworld was. We associate fire, suffering and other things with hell, however, this is a depiction that comes from the Abrahamic/Judeo-Christian religions.
The image above depicts a section of the Egyptian Book of the D/ead with Osiris on the left and the Weighting of the Heart taking place on the right.
There were many sources that described the extensive processes of the underworld and afterlife so I’m keeping it simple here. Anyways, the ancient Egyptians did not really have a concept of this sort of hell. Instead, after death, a part of the soul would travel through the underworld which was also known as Duat for judgement. They underwent a judgement process that had two parts and if they passed, they moved on to the Reed Fields which was Paradise. Those who failed simply ceased to be.
The “hell” that is probably being referred back to with Endeavor’s quirk and powers most likely was influenced with other cultures, again more specifically those with Abrahamic/Judeo-Christian religions. Despite this difference I do still think that there are other interesting similarities between Endeavor and Ra.
For example, I’ve already established in a previous post that I like to associate Endeavor to the sun. A lot of this post will rely heavily on what happened during the High End vs Endeavor fight. The move he is using above is called “Prominence Burn.” According to NASA:
a solar prominence (also known as a filament when viewed against the solar disk) is a large, bright feature extending outwards into the Sun’s hot outer atmosphere
This is the finishing move that helps Endeavor defeat the High End and this is very significant because it is the only move with a name that relates back to the sun.
In Chapter 188 during the High End fight, Endeavor is even depicted as a fiery sphere of fire and light high up in the sky, very visually similar to the sun.
If you need more evidence for sun related themes surrounding Endeavor, Ending, the criminal who kidnaps Natsuo describes him as “A fierce solar flare that shines bright.”
One of Ra’s main duties is to keep order and defeat the “forces of chaos and evil.” Endeavor and the heroes in general sort of view themselves as this force of good and see the “villains” as enemies that have to be taken care of. I don’t agree with the ideas that “all heroes are good, and all villains are bad” and that is definitely not the message that Horikoshi is trying to send. It is because that sort of belief exists that hero society is flawed. Typically, when reading through mythology or religious texts, the themes of absolute good and absolute evil are common. Those are the contexts in which gods and other figures that exist. Humans are flawed and tend to stand somewhere in the in between.
That being stated, Ra and Endeavor are similar in their ties to the sun, underworld and sense of duty that they must defeat the “forces of chaos and evil” for the sake of everyone else.
High End vs Endeavor
Endeavor greatest ambition in life was to become the number one hero. He may act like a hero in the public’s eye but he does not have a “heroic nature” or “character.” He failed and broke his own family for the sake of his ambitions, and arguably, the Todoroki family came in to existence to serve a certain purpose. If he could not become the number one, then he’d make sure that someone with his blood and name would achieve that one day. However the unexpected happened. All Might had to retire and Endeavor was given the title as number one hero. He didn’t earn it. He was given it purely because he was the number two hero.
Let’s revisit the High End fight. This conflict happens shortly after the Hero Billboard Chart event. Japan is uneasy as their symbol of peace has retired and they do not know whether they can rely on the new number one hero. His family also is conflicted with his new position and how it was given to him. Throughout the fight we take a step in to Endeavor’s thoughts and inner monologue.
The manga panel above is from Chapter 188.
The High End is incredibly powerful and even with his powerful Hellflame quirk, Endeavor is having a hard time fighting against it. One of the weaknesses with having a fire related quirk is that it overheats his body so he’s had to rely on using his flames properly and cooling down afterwards. Because of this, he thinks about his family. The family that began because of this very weakness. His memory goes back to Rei when she is young, perhaps at the beginning of their arranged marriage or shortly before. Touya, Natsuo and Fuyumi are young as well. Standing far away and unhappy, maybe even nervous. And lastly, Shouto, the child he wanted to continue his legacy in, activating both his ice and hellflame quirks. He is the only one depicted in his actual current age.
On top of the very next page we get a scene with the High End Nomu speaking as seen below.
This Nomu came to fight and defeat whoever was the strongest. Despite it’s ability to speak, it is still mindless, declaring on and on about its power and strength. It does not care about who it is fighting and the destruction that is occuring along the way. The High End has multiple quirks that were chosen specifically to make it as powerful as it could be. Perhaps it was in this moment that something clicked in Endeavor’s mind.
Soon after, the High End strikes Endeavor multiple times, with one strike later leaving him with the scar that runs down the left side of his face. He falls to the ground and in to the rubble. Chapter 188 ends on this page with the manga panel seen below and everyone is left to wonder whether Endeavor is dead or alive.
In Chapter 189 we see the effects of the void All Might left due to his retirement.
If the “villains” can’t be kept in check the public becomes chaotic with fear. A quiet night fell over Japan after All Might retired. People felt like the light was taken away. Then Endeavor gets up. With Hawks’ help he rises in to the air with wings on fire.
And in Chapter 190 he defeats the High End Nomu with Prominence Burn.
Endeavor and the Dawning Sun
There’s a lot of things going on here. Endeavor basically follows the journey Ra takes every single day to complete his duty. Similar to how Ra “dies” as he travels through the underworld, at one point we are led to believe that Endeavor has been killed by. As most of the battle took place up in the air, Endeavor physically falls when he “dies.” Leading up to the fall, he is thinking about his family and the past.
While Ra and Endeavor “resurrect” at different points in their journey, they both rise back again in order to fulfill their duty to bring back “order and balance.”
I’ve already written about the falcon/hawk headed Egyptian god Horus and Hawks, however I have yet to address the relationship between Ra and Horus. At some point, Ra was combined with Horus and became known as Ra-Horakhty which means “Ra, Horus of the Horizon.” Ra-Horakhty is most often thought of as the god of the rising sun. It is in this form that Ra rises in the sky to bring the dawn when he arises from the underworld.
The original source of this image is unknown.
There is a deity (seen above) that appears a lot throughout architecture from ancient Egypt called “Horus-Behdity” who is depicted as a winged sun disc:
The winged sun disc is highly symbolic representing the Union of Horus the falcon God, and Ra the sun god, the union of the Two-Lands of Egypt, and becomes a symbol of rebirth for the kings (British Museum).
Although it is Endeavor who ultimately defeats the High End, it is with the aid of Hawks’ quirk that he is able to land the finishing blow. He rises in to the sky like the winged sun disc: Endeavor as the sun, and Hawks as the wings. I think the depiction of Hawks with his back towards he audience and Endeavor burning them with his flames on the cover of Volume 21 says a lot of things (including the Icarus parallels!).
Taking a couple steps back, the wording on the pages where Endeavor addresses the nomu and then before uses the finishing move Prominence Burn on the High End is important.
“Modified human... Noumu! Manufactured one. . . Holder of multiple quirks. . . Obesessed with the pursuit of strength!” (Chapter 190)
“You are... Just like me! From the past, or perhaps from an alternate future. Now burn, and rest for all eternity!” (Chapter 190)
Endeavor is a controversial character that because of his past and the horrible things he did to his family. However, we can not ignore what has been written in the manga. I’m not going to argue or talk too much about my own thoughts and opinions here, but I think it is important to address what happened during this High End fight.
He identifies himself with the Nomu: the power hungry and mindless creature. It’s interesting that he uses the phrases of “manufactured” and “holder of multiple quirks,” and “pursuit of strength” which are words that are heavy with meaning to him: the arranged marriage he purchased, the children he neglected and the “perfect” child he sought after for the sake of strength.
The train of thoughts that had begun in his mind is expressed outwards. He shouts them out in to the sky. He acknowledges the past (however to what extent is debatable), and even addresses the future. I’m not sure if he’s acknowledging that he may fail to change or that he hopes that he can change what he can.
He then defeats the High End. Endeavor had been given the number on hero position but this victory is what “establishes” him with the title in the eyes of the public. With the bright light of All Might gone, the public is inspired by a new light, the sun that Endeavor represents bringing a dawn to the night. His victory pose is reminiscent of All Might’s however it is with his other arm that is in the air, he’s slumped over and his legs are barely keeping him up. The flames that usually cover his face and body are gone as well. This is the victory of Endeavor the hero but it could also be Todoroki Enji as a father making a statement.
I’m not sure if this is him symbolically k/illing the monster he was, or if this is symbolic as to where Endeavor’s journey will ultimately head towards, or if its a representation of hopes that never come true later on. I’m not trying to paint this piece from a pro-Endeavor stance or an anti-Endeavor stance but merely trying to explain how I interpreted the events of the High End fight and the thematic meanings it had as it unfolded. At the end of the day, we all have different opinions and interpretations and you have all the right to disagree with everything I’m writing in this post.
(The case with Endeavor is very complicated and I don’t want to get to deep in to it here however) We definitely should not forget what Endeavor did in the past but at the same time we should not ignore the efforts and progress he has tried to make. While we must hold people accountable for their actions, it is not wrong for someone to want to change or become better. Endeavor may “fail” or he may be able to “succeed,” whatever either entails or looks like. However even though we do get the depiction of a rising sun, you have to remember that the sun also sets.
Anyways, what has been established was that this fight is where Endeavor explicitly expressed his acknowledgement of the past (maybe not in its entirety but it is a big first step). And it is directly after this step that we take a deep dive in to what facing the past will look like for Endeavor.
#endeavor#todoroki enji#hawks#takami keigo#bnha analysis#mha analysis#mythological influences#bnha meta#mha meta#dabi#todoroki touya#todoroki family#todoroki shouto#luna writes#my post
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Sayelle of Bizatena
art by @ia-bi-tia
The adventurous disciple with a rare gift
Other bios: Ximena | Deirdra | Heloisa | Cibela
Full name: Sayelle bint Zahir (”Sayelle, daughter of the Magician”)
Meaning of name: Amalgation of “Sayid” and “Elle”; Arabic for “patient” and French for “she”
Family:
Faarooq al-Rashid and Balqis bint Oaisara: Sayelle’s biological parents. They died when their child was only a baby in an earthquake that was part of what would later be called “The Cataclysm that almost was”, during which both an earthquake as well as a tsunami devasted parts of Bizatena.
Farida bint Zahir: Sayelle’s mentor and adoptive mother. She along the other apprentices of age helped raise the children brought to the Magician’s temple and later on took on the role of tutor in all affairs of life for Sayelle. She is supportive of her ward and protects her affinity for umbramancy as soon as it manifests.
Khentkawes: A dodo and Sayelle’s familiar. During a trip to an island north of Prakra, Sayelle got lost and injured but was guided back to the village by a perceptive and helpful bird. She decided to leave her peers behind to travel with Sayelle and see the rest of the world like only very few flightless birds living on an island could. Khentkawes is very clever and an equal partner in running Sayelle’s magic shop, responsible for cataloguing the goods kept and sold.
Nickname: Sally
Favourite meal: Tabbouleh, heavy on the spring onions and mint
Favourite drink: Pomegranate juice
Favourite flower: Hibiscus
Favourite color: Turquoise
Birthday: 27th of April
Age: 33 during the events of the game
Zodiac: Taurus
MBTI: ENFJ
Patron Arcana: Wheel of Fortune and the Seven of Cups
Upright: The Wheel turns endlessly with the passage of time, changing fortunes as if by whim.
Reversed: The Wheel must return all to its beginning- life cannot remain in the sun forever.
Upright: In dreams possibilities seem endless, but the waking world won't wait for you forever.
Reversed: Sometimes an offer is too good to be true. Be wary of false promises in the coming days.
Gender: Trans female
Sexuality: Bisexual
Height: 1,70 m // 5′6″
Appearance:
Sayelle is of slender build. Her skin is light brown with a cold undertone and she has an angular face. There are freckles on her cheekbones and nose, which is of aquiline shape. She has dark gray eyes and slightly full lips. Her wavy lilac hair is usually braided with some streaks being loose and in her face and her eyebrows are rather thin.
She usually wears small black glasses on her nose, a golden nostril ring and a golden necklace with a small turquoise pendant. She wears brown lipstick and dark brown winged eyeliner.
She carries herself with ease, a certain light-footedness and confidence.
Visual inspirations:
Golshifteh Farahani
Languages spoken: Bizateni, Zadithi, Prakran, the Common Tongue of the People of the Drylands, Firentian, Kerusksch and the Common Tongue
Magical abilities:
Air-based magic, the ability to conjure storms and manipulating temperatures
Umbramancy; shadow magic that requires a lot of discipline and focus. She can travel faster through darkness, is able to communicate with “the shadows” and has a connection to nocturnal animals and everything that primarily lives in in the dark.
Astral magic; the ability to separate her mind from her body even within the mortal realm, and having her conscience pass into the realms of the dead
Love interests:
Nadia
Deirdra: They were together for a brief time, broke up due to realizing they weren’t in the right headspace to be in a relationship, and during the events of the game have to work through some issues that happened while Vesuvia was a victim of the plague.
In general, like with most of my characters; if they’re compatible sexuality-wise as well as personality-wise, feel free to ship them with your OCs or MCs. Hit me up with a message and we can discuss the details!
Backstory:
After the death of her parents, the young Sayelle was like most children without parents or potential guardians taken to one of many temples where the Magician was revered and his craft taught. Her mentor, a Bizateni magician who herself had grown up at the temple named Farida, taught the young apprentice everything she knew, coming to see her as someone with immense talent, drive and also like she was her own child.
Shortly after her arrival at the temple, Sayelle proved herself to have a great interest in all things that had to do with magic, something she had in common with her late parents but other than them who didn’t show any signs of being able to use magic, Sayelle turned out to be a prodigy. By the time she was ten, children her age paled against her magicks and spell work and she became a peer to many older children who were on her level of knowledge. She found both good friends, admirers of her talents as well as rivals amongst her fellow magicians, and yet grew to see them as siblings, and the adult magicians that taught them the ways of their creed as mentors and in a sense aunts and uncles.
At the age of 17, she symbolically shed the name given to her birth by her parents and took on one of her own choosing, as well as officially binding herself to the Magician with a name, like it happens to all adult residents of the temples. Now legally of age, Sayelle was let into the secret arts of umbramancy - shadow magic - after Farida felt the affinity within her during the many years of training her and soon enough she mastered the spells so well that she was already on Farida’s level. It was sometime after that when the magician Soraya, who was in direct service to the Emir, came to visit the temple to look for potential acolytes to train at the Palace and was immediately drawn towards Sayelle and her master. Umbramancy was a highly revered form of magic, especially because there were very few who didn’t fear it due to its bad reputation or have bothered to get attuned to it - Farida being one of the few who had successfully done so but kept it a secret.
Sayelle and Farida were invited to come to the Palace and vouch for themselves in front of the Emir with Soraya’s help. The ruler was clearly impressed by Sayelle’s talents and thus she and Farida left their life at the temple behind and moved into their chambers at the Palace, now with Sayelle as the resident umbramancer and Farida as her assistant to uphold the lie that Farida had learned umbramancy from Sayelle as her mentor could have very well been executed for keeping these sorts of secrets from the Emir’s eyes and ears at the temple and the magicians at court. Other than Farida, who constantly felt unwell at the Palace and grew annoyed with the nobility’s antics, Sayelle came to enjoy the attention, the ability to buy whatever she desired and be able to live a life she had never even dreamt of.
Years passed but Sayelle came to realize how selfish the Bizateni nobles truly were, but she didn’t think she’d be able to leave as she was the resident umbramancer who technically was upheld more as a symbol of status – having a magician with a very rare specialty and affinity gave a lot of fame to the Bizateni city-state. Yet Farida committed a selfless sacrifice to grant her adoptive daughter and protégée freedom from the court; by claiming as herself as the more powerful umbramancer, she took Sayelle’s place, who from then on returned to the temple in which she grew up on but her abilities still made her highly desirable. She took a leave from Bizatena and ever since worked as an adventurer, exploring ancient ruins and learning from the cultures that used to live there and the ways they utilized magic.
It was during those extensive travels that she not only met her familiar Khentkawes, but also various other wandering magicians and scholars, one of them Asra Alnazar and his then-girlfriend Ximena Rubalcaba. With them she struck up a close friendship which ultimately convinced her to set foot in Vesuvia where she opened a shop for magical utensils and worked as a professional medium and made the acquaintance of Deirdra Margalit, a teacher living in South End, with whom she had a brief relationship and continued to be friends with. When the red plague claimed many lives in the city, she volunteered in helping fight the disease but was powerful when it claimed patients, some of which had been friends and colleagues. She broke off contact to Asra when finding out about him wanting to aid Lucio in a sinister ritual and continued to run her business as usual after the plague ran its course.
More art:
feat. Nadia by @joeyhazell-art | post
feat Deirdra by @missrabbitart | post
#the arcana#the arcana OC#the arcana original character#sayelle of bizatena#FINALLY! this one took so long to make esp w rewriting the bio a bit#but sayelle lovers... come get your backstory
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This is a tricky religious question, but I'll try to encapsulate it in an ask. I feel a strong connection to Odin, but I also want to make that spiritual connection more firm in the landscape I /already/ inhabit, if that makes sense? Unfortunately, as a white person in a land that was never my own, I feel it would be disrespectful. My "ancestors" are from across the sea and I cannot claim to know them, either. Whiteness has colonised and homogenized culture. So I'm unsure how to proceed.
Imma be upfront here: What you want and feel doesn’t automatically have primacy when dealing with other beings. We don’t own the land, the land owns us.To think otherwise is a manifestation of that same colonial, homogenising, reflex which has married itself to rapacious capitalism and set about obliterating nuance and intimacy and depth.So, listen, I’m assuming you’re White here, but - Hwaet!: The land has its own needs, its own desires. The beings that populate it have theirs, and you don’t get to decide what’s respectful, and what’s not. To do that, you have to go and find out. You have to put yourself out there and say: “Hello. Here I am. Are you up for maybe building a relationship? A relationship that’s between us, even with all the shit people with my shade of skin have pulled?”They may very well say no. And, in the spirit of being up front? That. May. Be. Easier. If they say no, then you’re done.But if they say yes? That’s when the hard bloody work begins. Because you have to cobble together something from the ground up. And you have to do that, situated within the horror of Whiteness, because Whiteness actually homogenised and destroyed many of the vast number of differing and rich variations that North West Europeans and their descendants had for interacting with the world. It was deliberately constructed by those in power to level internal resistance and then turn that animus on POC and indigenous peoples. It created an ‘US’ to pit against ‘THEM’.As White folks, we and our ancestors have perpetuated, and continue to implicitly take part in a set of systems which have perpetuated atrocities across the planet, and continue to do so.And it is the absolute right of those beings, human and non, to hate us on sight. It hurts, and is upsetting, and if we’re decent people, we want to make it right. But we don’t get to decide how and whether that’s possible.Having said all this - the crimes perpetuated by folks with our shade of skin do not automatically disqualify us from anything - unless we’re told otherwise. But neither do they qualify us in advance.
This is the lie (some) of our ancestors bought, the one bearing the rubric of Whiteness. Whiteness, the lie goes, is a thing to aspire to - because Whiteness is better, being White makes you better automagically.(And yes, I more-than-half-believe that Whiteness is an imperialist magic spell. Seriously.) Because there was a time when ‘white’ was merely a simple descriptor of skin colour. And then it was made into something else.; I’d equate it with the ancient and very real magic of Roman citizenship, except for the fact that the Roman Empire was, at least at beginning, a polytheist culture.I’ve said above that Whiteness doesn’t automatically disqualify us unless we’re told, but I want to emphasise that ignorance is not an excuse either. Seek out those qualified. Do your research.Whiteness may have once only been a skin descriptor - but now it’s so, so, much more complex. We do not get to complain building healthy and fruitful relationships is hard, that Whiteness makes things difficult, and so we can’t do anything.That’s the lie speaking, trying to persuade us to leave Whiteness-as-is, as a monolith that can never be pulled down and replaced with a memorial to all those whose lives and lands it oppressed - just as say, Germany pulled down the statues of the Reich, and erected holocaust memorials.Germany has not absolved itself - it is flawed, and imperfect as an example. Yet, it has acknowledged what was done and moved forward, but not on. Those memorials are meant to stand as moral checkpoints. Thing that exist as reminders, as-never-again.Leaving Whiteness-as-monolith is simply ignoring the shadow it casts. Instead, we should blow it up, reconfigure, deconstruct it - whilst at the same time never forgetting where it comes from.Whether we acknowledge them or not, we are our ancestors, emanating their genes, the products of their actions, here and now. Even if we seek to deliberately excise them, that very excision is relation to them. If we cut out a family member due to their behaviour, they influence us in terms of what-not-to-do.Negative space, emptiness, is still a phenomenon, and everything is connected.
So when I say deconstruct, I mean not simply demolish, not simply raze-as-if-it-never-was. I say use it as fuel, transmute it; look for the cracks in its homogeneity - the things buried beneath - the green vitality that survives despite paving, steal and glass. The way birds fly, flock, wheel, and dive - and most importantly the spaces between.Focus - narrow, and so, so deep. Beneath Whiteness, there is Blood - and though these things are so beloved by white supremacist arseholes? Look at Blood Again. Do not see it as one thing, but note how many cells rush by - notice how many substances, hormones, surge through your veins, how very many things it is.Blood is never pure.And beneath that? Glistening, shining Bone - not white at all, shaded and stained ivory, all honeycombed and filled with marrow. Each heartbeat a rhythmic pulse.For your ancestors are Many, and you see them everytime you look in the mirror, Perhaps you have your Father’s mouth, your Mother’s jaw, your Grandfather’s eyes?But where did they get them?You know them, but you don’t know you know them. Known knowns and unknown knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.The spell of Whiteness says it is homegenous, because it homogenizes. But it’s a lie, and dig underneath it and you will find white-skinned variety - mixedness, shadowed memory - old ways, localised cultus based on village, town, terroir, field and forest. Mixed races and traditions.
Which of these is supreme? None. They are contextual. They are local. The landscape is not levelled, not concretized. Monoculture has its propaganda. Its siren-song that it it is the only option.But: Things are not gone - their roots remain, buried deep, ready to emerge in new forms.The knowledge of them may be held already, kept sacred by indigenous or closed groups, and if so, so be it. Or, it may lie waiting to be discovered again
And these new-old forms can only come forth if we risk ourselves. If we dedicate ourselves to reconnection, to respect and research, to wholeness and to wilfully acknowledging that we Know Nothing.
And the spell, the Imperial magic of Whiteness is failing, but it’s not dead. It’s cunning, shape-shifting into notions of silos and ideological purity. It says you are either Enough, or Not Enough.Enough is better, Enough is pure.And you are not pure, not clean. None of us are. So Whiteness uses that - creates both White guilt and White Pride - enhancing the sense of helplessness, which breeds sorrow and anger, and thus increasing US vs THEM.It creates toxicity which further perpetuates itself - and the individual can do little to change it, and virtually nothing to change the world. reaching towards purity is good, because purity is a beacon, a nice clear reference point by which we can make sense of the world.
And the Old Man is about as ambiguous and impure as they come. He emanates double and triple meaning - poetry as magic, as weapon, as entertainment, as blood and fury and iron. Knowledge as poison, as drug, as psycho-active substance.In some ways, I think he may find it darkly funny the way neo-nazi scumbags constantly use his name to justify purity and fitness. This one-eyed wanderer who self-harmed and submitted himself totally to the Kosmos because he wanted to Know itAnd not on his terms. On Its.He deliberately put aside all methods of control. He neither ate nor drank. He bled for it, probably even died for it. He sacrificed himself to himself because there was nobody else. Only by being completely Himself, in that environment, and letting whatever happened, happen, was he able to go down to the depths and receive and perceive the runes.Be prepared for the necessity of that. Of setting yourself apart, not as pure or better - but different. Empty your cup, as they say in Zen.Understand that he is the strife-bringer and its soother.If you want to find him in the landscape, first you have to meet him, it - on its terms. The lore says he gave humans breath.So breathe. Realise your Whiteness is not something you can help - you cannot stop being White, and you are enmeshed in the monoculture, but that the monoculture is not what it says it is. It is not the Only One.There are many different ways, and as master interpreter - the hermes in the hermeneutics, the Wanderer has travelled most, if not all of them.His answer to the Seeress’ question is YES. Forever and always YES. And knowing more is not just intellectual knowing, but meeting, knowing someone, carrying them, or a place with you.There’s a reason we call the World Tree what we do. It has roots no man knows, And this? This is the Old Man’s Horse - a tree is his method of travel, is the Great Tree which holds all worlds. The ancestral tree, just as humans were made from wood.The runes are risted with red, stained well with the power of blood and breath; the power of a magic alphabet filled with the rhythms of life and death.The poetry can crack a world. the root can break stone .A return to new-old ways can acknowledge and suborn your Whiteness, forcing it to undergo a detournement which will never grant some distant absolution, but just may allow the usage of that magical spiritual potency of that spell to benefit you, and others.In honouring Odin, you have the appearance of honouring the same god as some neo-Nazi scum. And yet, you are not, because of the relationship which is (may come to be) betwixt you. And it is that which contains life, death, health and wholeness. That is not theirs, but yours.In doing so, in living a connected life you illustrate, you render a way which was hidden, open. A way which may shift and change - for though the Whiteness was laid upon you at birth, its meaning may change in an unexpected way. You become a thing which is different, and Odin will be in your land, just as he came to be in mine.As to how that happens, only you can tell, but for me, it came to pass with a realization that he has always been there. He was just waiting for me to see his shape in the world - a piece of negative space, which once I discovered it, has become a roaring source of gnosis, a quiet whisper that raises the hair on the back of the neck.A thing to be lived with, and died with, and borne and lifted up and cast down.You are an enforced descendant of a vast criminal syndicate which killed millions, destroyed thousands of cultures, infected its own people with a thought-virus to keep them compliant, and keeps insisting it’s the only game in town.Its not. Be open. Live with who you are, as you are.But who you are is not who you have been told.Good luck.
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My Super Special Awesome Sauce Supernatural Re-Watch -- Season 2 Episode 2, Everybody Loves a Clown
Welcome to my Supernatural Re-Watch project in which I'm re-watching every episode of Supernatural. Why? Because I want to. I've kind of made a name for myself in the Shadowhunters fandom for my love-hate relationship with the Freeform show. So I thought, hey, since I'm reviewing a sub-par show that constantly disappoints me (Shadowhunters), I should also review a show that I love. This way, when I'm critical of Shadowhunters, my audience can get an understanding of where I come from. What it is I look for in good story telling. Or they could think I'm a hypocritical idiot. Either way, I'm doing this. And also, I love Supernatural and I'm really just looking for an excuse to watch the show and then talk about it. Here we have season 2 episode 2, Everybody Loves a Clown.
RECAP
Our teaser opens up with a young girl and her family enjoying their time at a circus. The daughter has a weird fascination with clowns and as they're leaving the fair she sees a clown she hasn't seen before. We skip to driving down the road with this family and the young girl sees the same clown waving at her from the side of the highway. Later on that night, the girl peers out of her bedroom window and sees the clown again. She invites him inside and that's where the teaser ends. I'm sure we can all surmise that letting a strange clown into your home probably isn't going to do much for your longevity.
We cut over to our boys who are giving their father what will later be known as a hunter's funeral in which you burn the body of the deceased. Not only is this an honorable funeral (it's been practiced in many cultures) but it also lessens the chance of a hunter coming back as a ghost or other supernatural creature. So the boys are giving their father the proper burial rites and while they're standing there, Sam asks Dean if John said anything to him. Dean, lying through his teeth, says no. We skip to one week later where Dean is working on fixing the impala. Sam asks to help but Dean refuses knowing that Sam's mechanical skills would be more of a hindrance than a help. Sam is trying to get Dean to open up about their father's death but Dean snarkily shoots him down. Sam reveals that he found a message on one of their father's old friends named Ellen. A friend they have never met so they decide to go off and find out who this woman is. However, with the impala out of commission, they're forced to take a minivan much to Dean's chagrin. He feels quite emasculated by it.
They track this message down to a roadhouse (which is kind of like a truck stop for hunters) where they meet Ellen and her daughter Jo. And we immediately find out that both these women can take care of themselves. Ellen realizes that Sam and Dean are John's children. Ellen reveals that the reason she contacted their father is because she had a lead on the demon. Dean is a little skeptical of this but Ellen reveals that she runs the Roadhouse so she's privy to all sorts of information. She then realizes from the boys' reaction that John Winchester is dead. Ellen tells the boys that their friend Ash can help them track down the hunter. And Ash is a walking billboard for the phrase, “don't judge a book by its cover.” Ash may look like someone who just emerged from a trailer park but he quickly reveals he's more than a pretty face. He's a genius and asks the boys to give him 51 hours to figure out John Winchester's notes on the demon.
While they're waiting, Sam sees an article for a possible hunt he's interested in. Dean chats up Jo but is unwilling to go all the way in flirting with her. His heart's just not in it which works out for him when Jo reveals that she doesn't fall into bed with just anyone who chats her up. Which makes Dean feel bad because that's exactly what he was trying to do.
The boys head off onto this hunt where it's revealed that the parents were killed by supposedly a killer clown. The girl claims that it was a clown. It's also here we find out that Sam is afraid of clowns. There also appears to be a long string of murders linked to the circus that creeps up every now and then. Dean wants to know why Sam wanted to take this job and Sam reveals that he feels it's what their father would've wanted which makes Dean question Sam's real motives for this hunt.
We cut over to another scene where a boy and his father are at the circus in the haunted house. Nothing seems to phase the kid until he sees a clown. The father tells the boy he shouldn't be afraid of clowns. Later that night, the boy reveals that he has let the clown into their house and that the clown really is his friend. The scene ends with the man screaming.
The boys arrive at the circus and quickly realize they're going to need to get a job their to do some snooping around. They eventually get their jobs and while the circus is in session, they overhear a little girl talking about how she saw a clown that just disappeared. Sam and Dean quickly realize this family could be the next victims and so they follow the family home. They see the girl let the clown in and they enter the house too. They shoot at the clown expecting it to be a ghost but are shocked when they find out it has a corporeal form. The clown then makes itself invisible and gets away.
The boys, because the family saw their faces and potentially their license plate, abandon the van and walk back to the circus. While walking, they have a talk about their father. Dean doesn't want to talk about it but after Sam urges him, Dean forces Sam to look at the real issue. That Sam is the one that's not dealing with their father's death. Sam used to hate hunting but now he's volunteering for a hunt. Sam has decided to not go back to school. All because he feels guilty that his last words to John was a fight. The confrontation ends with Sam walking away from Dean and Dean feeling guilty that he might've gone too far with Sam.
Sam receives a call from Ellen who tells them they're dealing with an ancient corporeal monster. He eats human flesh and sleeps on a bed of vermin basically. He disguises himself as a clown because he can't enter a house uninvited. So he charms the children into letting him in. He then eats the parents but leaves the kids probably because they don't have a lot of meat on their bones.
The boys hunt the monster, kill it, and return to the Roadhouse. With the 51 hours up, Ash reveals he's set up an alert system that will go off if it detects that the demon is active. Dean continues working on the impala and Sam reveals that Dean was right. Sam does feel guilty about his treatment of his father. You never realize how much you love someone until you lose them. Sam also reveals that whereas he might not be alright, neither is Dean and Dean should stop trying to ignore it. When Sam leaves, Dean takes a crowbar to the car and starts hitting. Very telling on his current feelings towards his father.
Thoughts
This is one of those, in the middle, formulaic episodes. We've got a monster hunt and then there's a bit of season plotting and Winchester drama sprinkled in. It's still a good episode though. I enjoy it.
I really like how the boys are kind of dealing with their father's death in their own way but also not realizing that they're two separate people so they can't be expected to grieve the same way the other does. Sam is the person who sorts through his shit by talking it out but Dean is someone who prefers to just suffer quietly. He really doesn't want to talk about it and doesn't understand that the reason why Sam is pushing it is because Sam needs it. I also really like at the end of the episode, how Dean finally loses it and starts beating up the impala. It's his way of letting out his anger and frustration towards his father. He's very angry about what his father told him and he needed to let it out. That his father has put him in the situation he’s in. So the impala was this metaphor for his father.
Also, we learn of Sam's fear of clowns which I 100% relate to. Clowns are creepy as fuck. I think it has to do with the face paint. They’re covered in paint with one expression so you can't really gauge what they are which I find very disconcerting about them. This episode does nothing to alleviate my apprehension towards clowns. And also, I just love that this show incorporates these small little fears with Dean and Sam. It makes our heroes feel much more human and much more relatable. Something Shadowhunters should think about incorporating. Their characters are a little too perfect and it feels as if they have no human fear.
Favorite Quotes
DEAN: Oh god, please let that be a rifle. JO: No, I'm just real happy to see you. What a great way to introduce Jo. I love Jo so much. And I love the twist on this wordplay.
ASH: All business up front, party in the back. I just like this line.
DEAN: So, I guess I got 51 hours to waste. Maybe tonight we should, uh...you know what? Never mind. JO: What? DEAN: Nothing. Just wrong place, wrong time. JO: You know, I thought you were going to toss me some cheap pick-up line. Most hunters think they can get in my pants with a pizza, six pack.... DEAN: What a bunch of scumbags. I love this interaction between them. Jo is revealing she's not easy while at the same time subtly calling Dean out on his shit. Which marks the beginning of their flirtation which tragically is all that will ever come out of it. Makes you wonder if it hadn't been for his father's death, would things have gone differently between Jo and Dean?
DEAN: I know what you're thinking. Why did it have to be clowns? SAM: At least I'm not afraid of flying. DEAN: Planes crash. SAM: And apparently clowns kill. I love Sam and Dean banter.
DEAN: I'm looking for a Mr. Cooper. Have you seen him around? BLIND MAN: Is that some kind of joke? You think I wouldn't give my teeth to see Mr. Cooper or a sunset or anything at all? DEAN: (to Sam) Wanna give me a little help here? SAM: Not really. SMALL PERSON: Hey, Berry, is there a problem? BLIND MAN: Yeah, this guy hates blind people. DEAN: No, I don't it's just a little misunderstanding. SMALL PERSON: Little? (Sam laughs uncontrollably) I love this exchange so much. Its one of those great exchanges that has such great comedic timing and it keeps on escalating. But probably the best part is Sam's laugh. Jared Padalecki has a great laugh and sadly we don't get to see it that often on this show.
DEAN: (to Sam) What's the matter? You sound like you just saw a clown. I just like it when the boys make fun of each other. Very reminiscent to how I am with my brothers. And once again, it makes them relatable.
That's all I have for this episode. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have any. Just remember these are my opinions. You don't have to agree with them but you should still respect them. And as always, please no spoilers for Season 13. Although to be perfectly honest, I may eventually just give in and start watching season 13 despite it not finished airing yet. Certain things pop up on my Youtube feed and it's really hard to ignore it. If I just buck up and watch everything that's aired, I'll finally be able to click on those videos. Haven't decided yet if I'm going to do it but I'm getting dangerously close to convincing myself. I'm really curious about Jack, Cas, The Empty, Wayward Sisters, Lucifer, alternate dimensions. Honestly, this season sounds like it's fucking fantastic.
#supernatural#spn#supernatural rewatch#spn reawatch#supernatural review#spn review#supernatural season 2#spn season 2#supernatural season 2 episode 2#spn season 2 episode 2#supernatural 2x02#spn 2x02#supernatural everybody loves a clown#spn everybody loves a clown#everybody loves a clown
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Elephants Quotes
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• A camel makes an elephant feel like a jet plane. – Jackie Kennedy • A closed mouth gathers no foot. A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking. A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. – David Gries • A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. – George Bernard Shaw • A lot of my dreams have to do with animals I think because I’m such a huge animal lover. I have so many pets. I always have crazy dreams where I’m like riding an elephant through the jungle or hanging out with a bunch of monkeys. – Paris Hilton • A true philosopher is like an elephant; he never puts the second foot down until the first one is solidly in place. – Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle • Abrams’s Advice: When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time. – Paul Dickson • All the religions are true, they just see a different part of the elephant. – George Lucas • Always drawn to the theatric, Bowie also performed in stage productions of “The Elephant Man” and just recently collaborated on “Lazarus,” an off-Broadway musical that’s a sequel to his 1976 role in the film “The Man Who Fell To Earth.” – David Bowie • Americans should never underestimate the constant pressure on Canada which the mere presence of the United States has produced. We’re different people from you and we’re different people because of you. Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is effected by every twitch and grunt. It should not therefore be expected that this kind of nation, this Canada, should project itself as a mirror image of the United States. – Pierre Trudeau • Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked. – Anna Quindlen • And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze About a star of deathless and painless peace But no astronomer can find where it is. – Ted Hughes • Animals are indeed more ancient, more complex and in many ways more sophisticated than us. They are more perfect because they remain within Nature’s fearful symmetry just as Nature intended. They should be respected and revered, but perhaps none more so than the elephant, the world’s most emotionally human land mammal. – Daphne Sheldrick • As big as an elephant is, a whale is still larger. Everything’s relative. Even gods have their spot on the food chain. – Jim Starlin • Awake. Be the witness of your thoughts. The elephant hauls himself from the mud. In the same way drag yourself out of your sloth. – Gautama Buddha
jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Elephant', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_elephant').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_elephant img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Band of Skulls is joining Cage the Elephant as my new musical caffeine. – Michael Koryta • Be humble as the blade of grass that is being trodden underneath the feet. The little ant tastes joyously the sweetness of honey and sugar. The mighty elephant trembles in pain under the agony of sharp goad – Sivananda • Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure. – Georg C. Lichtenberg • But as the work proceeded I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was not more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable. – Bertrand Russell • But if you do not find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go on your way alone, like a king abandoning a conquered kingdom, or like a great elephant in the deep forest. – Gautama Buddha • But my mother loved The Elephant Man, and my father gave David Lynch a scholarship to study in Rome. – Isabella Rossellini • But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves. – Lawrence Anthony • But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant – Jeffrey Eugenides • China cares about its reputation and doesn’t want to be known as the nation whose preferences drove the extinction of elephants. – Wayne Pacelle • Consider the biggest animals on the planet: elephants, and buffaloes, and giraffes. These are vegetarian animals. They grow to thousands of pounds of muscle and bone without ever eating cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas. – Michael Klaper • Currently poaching threatens the very existence of the African Elephant, and my worry is that if we do not act NOW, we could be looking at a future in which this iconic species is wiped out. – Yaya Toure • Dealing with the State Department is like watching an elephant become pregnant. – Franklin D. Roosevelt • Dear God. Not only am I unemployed and homeless, but I also have a pregnant woman, bereaved dog, elephant, and eleven horses to take care of. – Sara Gruen • Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike. – Willard Van Orman Quine • Diplomacy is much like the “lovemaking of elephants”, which is accompanied with a lot of bellowing and other sound effects, but no one can be sure of the consequences for at least the next two years – Shashi Tharoor • Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants. – Peter Senge • Do not be thoughtless, always be mindful, watch your thoughts! Draw yourself out of the path of evil, like an elephant sunk in mud. – Gautama Buddha • Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant. – Guy Kawasaki • Education isn’t everything, for a start it isn’t an elephant – Spike Milligan • Elephant Man [movie] was much more difficult physically. This had a couple of days. It was quite tricky. I had my leg strapped up behind me and I am a little older now. It was all marvelous, though. He [Bong Joon-ho] is one of the most fabulous directors in the world. – John Hurt • Elephants and grandchildren never forget. – Andy Rooney • Elephants are contagious. – Paul Eluard • Elephants are highly emotional. Whatever they are feeling, they let it out immediately, and the histrionics are over and forgotten in a moment, lasting no longer than the cloud formations that are constantly coming apart and re-forming overhead. There is no guile in pachyderms. – Alex Shoumatoff • Elephants are living treasures. Nature’s gardeners. Nature’s great teachers. Tragically some people don’t give a damn. They prefer the dead treasure to the living one. The ivory. We must challenge this so-called ‘trade’ with all our might and shame on those who would condone it. – Virginia McKenna • Elephants are my favourite creatures and have been since I was a boy and my mother read Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child to me. It was loving elephants so much that made we want to write my own story with an elephant at the centre and its bond with a child. – Michael Morpurgo • Elephants are so wise and so funny and so endangered and so intelligent. I just think there is a lot to learn from them. – Gloria Steinem • Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything. – Peter Drucker • Elephants have the largest brains of any mammal on the face of the Earth. They are creative, altruistic and kind. – Ingrid Newkirk • Elephants suffer from too much patience. Their exhibitions of it may seem superb,-such power and such restraint, combined, are noble,-but a quality carried to excess defeats itself. – Clarence Day • Employers ganging up against workers is like raising an army of elephants against ants. – Mahatma Gandhi • Even animals have a conscience. Those in the jungle KILL only to eat, not live to kill. This is why we often see packs of predators focusing on just one kill, instead of targeting many. Even animals exercise reason. I have seen a mother lion taking care of a baby antelope, and a mother elephant taking care of a baby lion. The primal need to eat is unavoidable, yet even under severe hunger stretches, the desire to love can sometimes overcome the desire to eat. – Suzy Kassem • Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. The perfection of traveling is to travel without baggage. – Henry David Thoreau • Even though the topic [of slavery] itself is the big, screaming elephant in the room, we still get a chance to have fun and enjoy what is on the screen, and we have moments where we’re actually happy. – Aldis Hodge • Every culture from the Egyptians to the Mayans to the American Indians to the Bedouins created bestiaries that enabled them to express their relationship with nature. Ashes and Snow is a 21st-century bestiary filled with species from around the world. Nature’s orchestra includes not just Homo sapiens but elephants, whales, manatees, eagles, cheetahs, orangutans, and many others. – Gregory Colbert • Every Man being conscious to himself, That he thinks, and that which his Mind is employ’d about whilst thinking, being the Ideas, that are there, ’tis past doubt, that Men have in their Minds several Ideas, such as are those expressed by the words, Whiteness, Hardness, Sweetness, Thinking, Motion, Man, Elephant, Army, Drunkenness, and others: It is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received Doctrine, That Men have native Ideas, and original Characters stamped upon their Minds, in their very first Being. – John Locke • Every theory in philosophy, which is built on pure conjecture, is an elephant; and every theory that is supported partly by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar’s image, whose feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay. – Thomas Reid • Everything that I love is behind those gates. We have elephants, and giraffes, and crocodiles, and every kind of tigers and lions. And – and we have bus loads of kids, who don’t get to see those things. They come up sick children, and enjoy it. – Michael Jackson • For me to put a look together, if it’s going to be a boy look or a girl look or whatever, is quite a tricky thing to do. I’m not doing drag because drag is seen in a certain way and my comedy has got zero to do with what I’m wearing. I could wear an elephant suit and say the same thing. – Eddie Izzard • General, your tank is a powerful vehicle It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: It needs a driver. General, your bomber is powerful. It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant. But it has one defect: It needs a mechanic. General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think. – Bertolt Brecht • God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things. – Pablo Picasso • Have you ever been bitten by an elephant? How about a mosquito? It’s the little things in life that will bite you. For most of us, it’s the frequent, small and seemingly inconsequential choices that are of grave concern. – Darren Hardy • ‘Helping industry’ is the elephant pit of socialism, a deep hole with sharp spikes at the bottom, covered over with twigs and fresh grass. – Enoch Powell • How hard can it be to find a girl and an elephant for Christ’s sake? – Sara Gruen • I am persuaded that if the brutes even–if the dog, the horse, the ox, the elephant, the bird, could speak, they would confess, that, at the bottom of their nature, their instincts, their sensations, their obtuse intelligence, assisted by organs less perfect than ours, there is a clouded, secret sentiment of this existence of a superior and primordial Being, from whom all emanates, and to whom all returns. – Alphonse de Lamartine • I am she who lifts the mountains When she goes to hunt, Who wears mamba for a headband And a lion for a belt. Beware! I swallow elephants whole And pick my teeth with rhinoceros horns, I drink up rivers to get at the hippos. Let them hear my words! Nhamo is coming And her hunger is great. I am she who tosses trees Instead of spears. The ostrich is my pillow And the elephant is my footstool! I am Nhamo Who makes the river my highway And sends crocodiles scurrying into the reeds! – Nancy Farmer • I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I’ve heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society. – Elizabeth Berg • I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange… There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea. – Peter Matthiessen • I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly; they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express the actions of their inward forms. – Thomas Browne • I couldn’t hit an elephant’s ass with a bull fiddle. – Babe Didrikson Zaharias • I do believe that the party has a bunch of elephants running around in donkey clothes. – Al Sharpton • I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature-not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor. – John Ruskin • I do not now so much as wish to have the Strength of Youth again that I wish’d in Youth for the Strength of an Ox or Elephant. For it is our Business only to make the best Use we can of the Powers granted us by Nature. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • I don’t do impersonations. I can do a wounded elephant! I can do a really good cow! And because of the amount of time I spent in North Yorkshire, I do a variety of sheep. All of which I will be happy to roll out for you! – Patrick Stewart • I don’t know where I learned elephants like their tongues slapped. Whatever turns you on. – Betty White • I feel certain that the largest part of all photographs ever taken or being taken or ever to be taken, is and will continue to be, portraits. This is not only true, it is also necessary. We are not solitary mammals, like the elephant, the whale and the ape. What is most profoundly felt between us, even if hidden, will reappear in our portraits of one another. – Ben Maddow • I feel so guilty when I see orcas performing their stupid tricks in their little swimming pools, and when I see circuses or elephant abuse. I don’t want to be in the same industry with these people. – Sam Simon • I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book. – Stephen Fry • I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense native forest … pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world. – Isak Dinesen • I have a face like the behind of an elephant. – Charles Laughton • I have a memory like an elephant. I remember every elephant I’ve ever met. – Herb Caen • I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me. – Noel Coward • I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo. – Wyndham Lewis • I have family in Tanzania. I can’t even explain the joy of riding through the Tanzania national park and seeing giraffes run across the road and elephants over in a pond and baboons running. – Emanuel Cleaver • I have little space from the suffering of elephants right now. I wake up with it and go to sleep with it. The plight of animals in shelters, of kids used for labor for the metals in our electronics and endless other things, the fate of our water supply to dye our blue jeans and water our lawns, the sad painful life of conventionally raised meat…For me, I am working to not contribute to this. I really don’t want to hurt others for my benefit. – Kristin Bauer van Straten • I imagine the film [“300″] as if I was a Spartan and I had never seen an immortal or a Persian, or an elephant or a rhino for that matter. – Zack Snyder • I look after those who look after me.” He smacks his lips, stares at me, and adds, “I also look after those who don’t.” – Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants) – Sara Gruen • I often say, with something like ‘The Elephant Man,’ had it been an American series for television, where you have to sign your life away for seven years…well, maybe I would never have made ‘Sailcloth.’ – John Hurt • I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa Seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror… As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight. • I really wanted to work with David Lynch. I was a big fan of The Elephant Man and Eraserhead. – Sting • I saw a dead elephant in one of Kenya’s natural reserves. Around her were footprints of her baby elephant. This was just so sad, as three days before, perhaps the mother was still taking the baby around to play and to drink water. In her mind, she probably was thinking they had a life of decades to be together. However, the poaching happened so fast and everything collapsed. Without the protection of the mother, the baby elephant is likely to die too. That moment changed me. – Li Bingbing • I think the lion, besides the elephant, was the one animal that I just started thinking about so much. – Jillian Hervey • I want to go to Africa and find a really great hotel with good food right above a water hole where I can sit, have breakfast, and just watch the elephants play in the water. – David Crosby • I wanted to work with an elephant. – Robert Pattinson • I was born in love with all elephants. Not for a reason that I know. Not because of any of their individual qualities — wisdom, kindness, power, grace, patience, loyalty — but for what they are altogether. For their entire elephantness. – Pat Derby • I was driving pretty much the way everyone drives in LA, like elephants dancing on each others’ backs at a circus. – Gary Reilly • I was pretty shocked to learn that as many as 30,000 elephants are being killed every year to fuel the ivory trade, despite an international ban since 1989, and that 60% of forest elephants have already been wiped out. At this rate, experts say populations will become extinct in the next decade. No one needs ivory. – Ian Somerhalder • I will be doing a film called Whispers, for Disney. It’s about elephants, and doesn’t have any people in it. It will be a live action film – I don’t know how much I can say about it, since I still don’t know too much about it. – Trevor Rabin • I wore bell bottoms in elementary school. Never wore elephant bells. Remember, this was middle Oklahoma in the ’70s. – Garth Brooks • I worked next to an elephant. And considering that she could step on your toes, it’s a good idea to keep a certain distance. It’s also a good idea to befriend the trainer. – Christoph Waltz • If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps. – James Thurber • If anyone wants to know what elephants are like, they are like people only more so. – Pierre Corneille • If he be so resolved, I can o’ersway him; for he loves to hear That unicorns may be betrayed with trees And bears with glasses, elephants with holes, Lions with toils, and men with flatterers – William Shakespeare • If thou art of elephant-strength or of lion-claw, still peace is, in my opinion, better than strife. – Saadi • If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. – Desmond Tutu • If you cannot find a good companion to walk with, walk alone, like an elephant roaming the jungle. It is better to be alone than to be with those who will hinder your progress. – Gautama Buddha • If you have appreciation for life, whether it is a planet or any wild species, if it’s a human or an elephant, death is really bad for all of us to adjust to. We are all going to die. When it happens in such a drastic, inhuman way, which we’ve been seeing in Africa, this is crime on its highest level. – Veronika Varekova • If you want to shoot rare, fast-moving elephants, you should always carry a loaded gun. – Warren Buffett • If you’ve got a great crew it’s intense, but its quite short. ‘The Elephant Man’ was longer than most, for an independent film. That was a 14 week film. But it was because of the intrinsic difficulties. We had to invent a different way of filming, because the makeup was so long. A working day for me with a full makeup on was nineteen hours. So obviously you couldn’t do that twice running. – John Hurt • If you’ve never seen an elephant ski, then you’ve never been on acid. – Eddie Izzard • I’ll do anything to keep everyone laughing. Things get too intense on film sets. I remember on The Elephant Man, I used to imitate a cat without moving my lips. David Lynch would say, “Cut! Sorry, we’ve got a noise somewhere on set.” Everyone would be looking around for this cat. – Anthony Hopkins • I’m like an elephant, ok? If I walk into a room, it’s like, OK, he’s in there. – Aziz Ansari • I’m moved by us, our quirks and mistakes. I find inspiration in everything from a piece of art to the hem of a dress. I’m one of those people who sees Frank Zappa in a cup of coffee, or elephants wrestling in clouds. But also, conscious creation of all kinds moves me. And a divinely expressed performance in any genre sets me completely on fire. – Idara Victor • I’m one of those people who sees Frank Zappa in a cup of coffee, or elephants wrestling in clouds. But also, conscious creation of all kinds moves me. – Idara Victor • I’m really into moderation. Too much of anything will harm you in the end. Too much sugar. Too much pasta. I’m into drugs as a teaching tool, which is why I only take hallucinogenics. I mean, it’s not like I’ve never done cocaine, but, on the whole, if I can’t see dancing elephants then I’m not interested. – Tori Amos • In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes’ bath and Newton’s apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western. – John Reader • In America you have the mouse now trying to sit down on the elephant, thinking that he’s going somewhere. And it’s – and it’s absurd. – Malcolm X • In Haydn’s oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • In terms of economical aspects, reinforcing those national parks with sophisticated anti-poaching patrols – these poachers are beefed up like the army. In the case of Cameroon, that’s a perfect example of the lack of finance. The government could not provide the national park with more guards. Therefore, they lost the majority of the elephant population. I don’t want to see that anywhere else. – Veronika Varekova • In the divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim. – John Owen • In the sallies of badinage a polite fool shines; but in gravity he is as awkward as an elephant disporting. – Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann • Isimangaliso must be the only place on the globe where the oldest land mammal (rhinoceros) and the world biggest terrestrial mammal (elephant) share an ecosystem with the world’s oldest fish (coelacanth) and the world’s biggest marine mammal (whale) – Nelson Mandela • It happened while I was filming “Water for Elephants in which my partner is Reese Witherspoon. We had a scene with elephants but there were so many paparazzi around that it was scaring the animals and it was impossible to film. Out of the blue, fans, that were waiting for autographs, had enough and circled around the paparazzi. Teens made big guys run away. It was unreal! I was pleased. – Robert Pattinson • It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution. – Havelock Ellis • It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge a elephant, but we can’t dodge a fly. – Josh Billings • It may surprise people to learn that one elephant is killed every 15 minutes for its ivory. – Li Bingbing • It wasn’t that I hated being asked a bunch of questions. I had nothing against questions. I just didn’t like listening to them, because some questions take forever to make sense. Sometimes waiting for a question to finish is like watching someone draw an elephant starting with the tail first. As soon as you see the tail your mind wanders all over the place and you think of a million other animals that also have tails until you don’t care about the elephant because it’s only one thing when you’ve been thinking about a million others. – Jack Gantos • It’s amazing how quickly human beings adapt, isn’t it? It was such a great crew, and David [Lynch] was wonderful to work with [on ‘The Elephant Man’]. It was a very thrilling time, actually. – John Hurt • It’s estimated that across Africa 100 elephants are killed for their tusks every day. It takes nothing more than simple math to get to what that adds up to in a year, and it’s a distressing figure. – Graydon Carter • It’s hard for the donkeys to win the race if they’re going to carry the elephants on their backs. – Jim Hightower • It’s very difficult to move yourself up bit by bit. It’s like trying to eat an elephant for God’s sake. I can do it. It’s just I have to have it bite by bite, you know. It’s possible. You can eat an elephant, but you have to do it bite by bite. You can’t do it all in one go. – Colin Montgomerie • Jackie had a keen eye for talent, and like an elephant never forgot. And, he was always right on the mark. – Audrey Meadows • Knowing what you need doesn’t always mean you know how to get it, though. I’d spent a long time hiding in my cave. No matter how much I might want to come out into the light, I knew it would hurt my eyes. I was a fool. A fool, but nevertheless too smart not to know I was the architect of my own demise, that it was time to put my past behind me. It was time to stop allowing the white elephants to stand unspoken of in my living room. – Megan Hart • Learning to play with a big amplifier is like trying to control an elephant. – Ritchie Blackmore • Leo couldn’t help smiling. “That could be fun.” “Fun” she said unhappily. “Blue elephants.” “Blue elephants.” “Kiss me you fool.” “You fool. – Rick Riordan • Letter 1 To the princess of the elephants, I disappeared exactly one year ago. On that day I received a letter. It called me back to the place where my life with the elephants began Please forgive me, for the silence between us has been unbroken for one year. I will never be more of myself than in these letters. They are my maps of the bird path, and they are all that I know to be true. – Gregory Colbert • Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt. – Pierre Trudeau • Love will draw an elephant through a key-hole. – Samuel Richardson • Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It’s just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends. – Tahir Shah • May an elephant caress you with his toes – ‘Little’ Jimmy Dickens • Media people should have long noses like an elephant to smell out politicians, mayors, prime ministers and businessmen. We need to know the reality, the good and the bad, not just the appearance. – Dalai Lama • Mother elephants in the circus cannot help their babies, but we can. – Edie Falco • Mumbling priests swinging stick cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well-buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their places in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it. – N.D. Wilson • My biggest concern and main engagement with UNEP is focused on endangered species and illegal wildlife trade – mostly elephants, rhinos, etc. – Yaya Toure • My biggest influence growing up was Mad magazine, which is a very text-heavy form of visual satire. I didn’t grow up wanting to draw donkeys and elephants with the names of politicians written across them. – Tom Tomorrow • My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery • My roommate got a pet elephant. Then it got lost. It’s in the apartment somewhere. – Steven Wright • My stepfather used to be a clown in The Shrine Circus. He took me backstage when I was 23. I saw three elephants chained to the cement floor in the warehouse of the Michigan State Fairgrounds. Sadness, hopelessness and fear were emanating from their eyes, from their bodies. They were swaying neurotically from side to side. A monkey was screaming in his cage, grabbing the bars of his prison. Two tigers were pacing feverishly in their tiny cages. Cruelty was staring me in the face. I knew something was wrong. If you pay attention to energy, you can tell when a fellow being is in peril. – Gary Yourofsky • Nature’s great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing. – John Donne • Nothing appeases an enraged elephant so much as the sight of a little lamb. – Saint Francis de Sales • Now the freaks are on television, the freaks are in the movies. And it’s no longer the sideshow, it’s the whole show. The colorful circus and the clowns and the elephants, for all intents and purposes, are gone, and we’re dealing only with the freaks. – Jonathan Winters • Once there was an elephant Who tried to use the telephant. No! no! I mean an elephone Who tried to use the telephone. Dear me, I am not certain quite That even now I’ve got it right. – Laura E. Richards • One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know. – Groucho Marx • One researcher just determined that African and Indian elephants make each other sick. When a new animal or plant is introduced to a habitat bad things happen. The biggest danger to native wildlife is foreign wildlife. – Robert T. Bakker • Our elders say that an elephant does not find its own trunk heavy. – Zakes Mda • Our problem with limited resources is not primarily overpopulation; it is greed. Our problem with pollution is not the invention of fluorocarbons or mass transport; it is irresponsibility. The loss of an acre of forest every second, the mass slaughter of elephants for their ivory, the extinction of entire species of plants, insects and animals all over the world is not something that “just happens” because there are more of us human beings. It happens because the race of ruling beings put in charge has almost wholly lost its sense of stewardship. We have turned away from God. – Winkie Pratney • Over-population is the ’cause of drive-by shootings’ and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants. – Ted Turner • People of conscience in our leadership in Washington have been scared off by the right and the fossil fuel lobbies. They won’t even use the term “sustainability” or “climate change” in an energy bill, which is ludicrous on its face. It completely ignores the elephant in the room that we’re all dealing with. The average American doesn’t even believe climate change is real, they think it’s all a hoax. – James Cameron • Plastic surgery is like a big elephant sitting in the Hollywood living room. – Patricia Heaton • Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant. – William Faulkner • PROBOSCIS, n. The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk. – Ambrose Bierce • Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget. – Arthur Laurents • Recently I stood in the desert, far out side of L. A., and watched the sun set on a circus tent from 1930. Every where stood animals: elephants, tigers that should be loaded into a steam train. 300 extras in costumes raced around, the modern world had disappeared totally. Although that was totally fake, it still happened directly before my eyes! That was my perfect day. I would be gladly experience that every day. It happens continually to me: It calls itself work. That is wonderful and more than enough. – Robert Pattinson • Seized ivory stocks around Africa are recycled back into illegal trade due to corruption. Ivory stocks should be burnt together with the hopes of traffickers for any “legal” way to allow them to slaughter our elephants. – Ofir Drori • Shallows where a lamb could wade and depths where an elephant would drown. – Matthew Henry • So I went home and I told my mom that I wanted to quit and be an actress and she said, “Huh, that sounds fascinating. It’s wonderful!” And I told my father and he literally said, “I don’t care if you want to be an elephant trainer if it makes you happy.” – Gena Rowlands • So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen! – John Godfrey Saxe • So slowly the hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire. – D. H. Lawrence • Soft fantasy worlds have a much looser cause-and-effect relationship. Alchemists can turn lead into gold and nobody wonders about how it will impact the currency system. Someone waves a wand and turns an elephant into a mouse and nobody worries about conservation of mass. – Patrick Rothfuss • Some women are like elephants. I don’t mean size, I mean they never forget. – Laura Schlessinger • Sybil’s female forebears had valiantly backed up their husbands as distant embassies were besieged, had given birth on a camel or in the shade of a stricken elephant, had handed around the little gold chocolates while trolls were trying to break into the compound, or had merely stayed at home and nursed such bits of husbands and sons as made it back from endless little wars. The result was a species of woman who, when duty called, turned into solid steel. – Terry Pratchett • The ability to double our biomass – not by waiting several million years and growing to be the size of an elephant – but waiting a few hundred thousand years for neurons to sprout into our brains – ones capable of having us create emotional relationships with other members of our species. We thereby double our biomass not by getting bigger, but by creating an ally. – John Medina • The Arab awakening was like watching elephants fly: something you didn’t expect, something you haven’t seen before, “Wow, elephants fly.” – Thomas Friedman • The Bible is a stream of running water, where alike the elephant may swim, and the lamb walk without losing its feet. – Pope Gregory I • The Buddhists have a story about blind men trying to describe an elephant by feeling it’s various parts, and each describes the elephant according to the part he touched. That is the way we can hope to know God. – Kent Nerburn • The circus a place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool. – Ambrose Bierce • The elephant hath joints, but none for courtesy; his legs are legs for necessity, not for flexure. – William Shakespeare • The elephant in the room time and time again when it comes to work and promotions is maternity leave. We need to work with businesses so they work with women and make it easy and supportive for them to come back into the workplace. – Mary Portas • The Elephant Man claimed his head was big because, it’s so full of dreams. Actually, it’s because his skull was shaped like a turkey. – Dana Gould • ‘The Elephant Man’ was hugely enjoyable to do. I thought the one stage, when Chris Tucker did the first makeup and it took 12 hours, I thought they’d actually found a way for me not to enjoy filming. – John Hurt • The Elephant Man would never have gotten up and gone, ‘Oh, God. Look at me hair today.’ – Karl Pilkington • The elephant, not only the largest but the most intelligent of animals, provides us with an excellent example. It is faithful and tenderly loving to the female of its choice, mating only every third year and then for no more than five days, and so secretly as never to be seen, until, on the sixth day, it appears and goes at once to wash its whole body in the river, unwilling to return to the herd until thus purified. Such good and modest habits are an example to husband and wife. – Saint Francis de Sales • The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate – D. H. Lawrence • The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels. – Richard Leakey • The fact that the infrastructure is falling apart is not necessarily because it’s built poorly. The New York City subways were built in 1903. The fact that they’re still running at all is an enormous success. The fact that New York City’s bridges have held up as long as they have is extraordinary, and the engineers didn’t have computers to tell them about tolerance. They overbuilt these things – traffic on them is like an ant on an elephant. – Alan Weisman • The illegal wildlife trade threatens not only the survival of entire species, such as elephants and rhinos, but also the livelihoods and, often, the very lives of millions of people across Africa who depend on tourism for a living. – Yaya Toure • The Internet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea – massive, difficult to re-direct, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it. – Gene Spafford • The largest land animal is the elephant, and it is the nearest to man in intelligence: it understands the language of its country and obeys orders, remembers duties that it has been taught, is pleased by affection and by marks of honour, nay more it possesses virtues rare even in man, honesty, wisdom, justice, also respect for the stars and reverence for the sun and moon. – Pliny the Elder • The law of nature gives a man the right to defend himself when he’s attacked. And God’s law itself gives a man the right to defend himself when he’s attacked.so, peaceful suffering and passive resistance and all of that stuff is all right maybe in India somewhere, where the people in India outnumber the whites – about a million to one.But here in America, when you tell that’s like an elephant sitting down on a – on a mouse in India with [Mahatma] Gandhi. – Malcolm X • The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior. – Jonathan Haidt • The problem is that during the 1980s, a decade of heavy poaching, the elephants retreated to safer areas. And now people have moved into the corridors once used by the elephants. – Richard Leakey • The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book? – David Attenborough • The reason I know about ‘Tomb Raider’ is from when I was researching ‘Elephant.’ It was 1999, and I was trying to research the Columbine-massacre kids, and they had played video games, and I, at the time, had never really seen one. It was a world I didn’t know. – Gus Van Sant • The sad thing about destroying the environment is that we’re going to take the rest of life with us. The bluebirds will be gone, and the elephants will be gone, and the tigers will be gone, and the pandas will be gone. – Ted Turner • The strongest animals on earth are plant eaters. Every creature we’ve enlisted to do the work we couldn’t handle – the horse, donkey, elephant, camel, water buffalo, ox, yak – is an herbivore… whose huge muscles were built from plant protein, and whose strong bones got that way, and stayed that way, from grazing on grass and eating other vegetables. – Victoria Moran • The thing about movie musicals is that there have been some brilliant ones, but when they’re bad, they’re really bad – big white elephants. – Rob Marshall • The United States should not jump around like an elephant frightened by a mouse. – George F. Kennan • The whole idea of being in captivity in such limited space, especially in a zoo, causes elephants to suffer. They develop all kinds of foot diseases. They die. They get cysts. Not only is it painful, it eventually kills them. – Lily Tomlin • The whole new Democratic Party is the old Republican Party. We have a whole bunch of elephants running around in donkey’s clothes. – Robert Novak • The world is hollow. It’s a lot to take in. Like cracking an egg and finding nothing inside. Or a full grown elephant. – Geraldine McCaughrean • The world is not a burden; we make it a burden by our desires. When the desires are removed, the world is as light as a feather on an elephant’s back. – Baba Hari Dass • The world’s strongest animals are plant eaters. Gorillas, Buffaloes, Elephants and me. – Patrik Baboumian • There are some people the gestation period is like an elephant’s and it’s just years and years before they’re ready. – John Amaechi • There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants…. The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. – Jack London • There is no creature among all the Beasts of the world which hath so great and ample demonstration of the power and wisdom of almighty God as the Elephant. – Edward Topsell • There’s a place in Botswana where there are 100,000 elephants living in a single population. Think of the amount of space they need. Remember, the United States would fit in Africa three times over and there would still be space. That’s how big Africa is. – Patrick Bergin • There’s enough sedative in these darts to bring down a werewolf, which is exactly what we’re hunting. Why would we want to bring down an elephant if we’re not hunting elephants? – Derek Landy • These magnificent species of Africa – elephants, rhino, lions, leopards, cheetah, the great apes (Africa has four of the world’s five great apes) – this is a treasure for all humanity, and they are not for sale. They are not for trade. They need to be valued and preserved by humanity. We all need a global commitment to that. – Patrick Bergin • They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist… – John Sedgwick • They say that vegetable food is not sufficiently nutritious. But chemistry proves the contrary. So does physiology. So does experience….And again: the largest and strongest animals in the world are those which eat no flesh-food of any kind – the elephant and the rhinoceros. – R. Trall • Time magazine put Chris Christie on the cover with the caption, ‘The Elephant in the Room.’ And People magazine named him ‘Sexiest Garbage Truck in a Suit.’ – Bill Maher • To achieve this density of a neutron star at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble. – Neil deGrasse Tyson • To be a baby elephant must be wonderful. Surrounded by a loving family 24 hours a day. Touched by the family, cuddled and comforted. A tremendous love and compassion exuded by every family member. I think it must be how it ought to be, in a perfect world. – Daphne Sheldrick • To keep a man a slave you do much the same as the cruel circus masters did to the elephant around the turn of last century. Clamp heavy chains around their legs and stake them to the ground. Then beat and terrorize them. After a while you no longer even have to stake the chain; the elephant gives up and just the mere rattle of the chain convinces the elephant there is no hope, so they give up and do whatever it is the circus requires. – Glenn Beck • Use a sweet tongue, courtesy, and gentleness, and thou mayest manage to guide an elephant by a hair. – Saadi • We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior. – Graydon Carter • We already live a very long time for mammals, getting three times as many heartbeats as a mouse or elephant. It never seems enough though, does it? – David Brin • We are having to pull money into site-level protection for elephants just to keep them alive. But there isn’t enough money to go around. The people involved in protecting those elephants, like rangers on the ground, are so under-resourced. They have very few vehicles, they have very poor weapons (if any weapons at all), and they are treated as the bottom of the tree when it comes to law enforcement priority. – Allen Crawford • We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures. – Geraldine Brooks • We are the bird’s eggs. Bird’s eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep, we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and springs of wildflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear. – Susan Griffin • We call a thing big or little with reference to what it is wont to be, as we speak of a small elephant or a big rat. – D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson • We can’t have these great corporations crowding competition off the sidewalks. It’s like an elephant saying, “Everyone for himself,” as he dances among the chickens. – Emanuel Celler • We did a campaign here with New York Times. We had a great ad: “Today in America, someone will kill an elephant for a bracelet.” We became sensitized in our society. Now there are four or five billion people in Asia who need to get this message. We need to use social media, print magazines, celebrities – anything we can to share this message. It’s not cool, it’s not okay. You are destroying beautiful animals. You are robbing a continent of its wealth. And you are hurting a lot of innocent people. – Patrick Bergin • We have all seen these circus elephants complete with tusks, ivory in their head and thick skins, who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them. – John F. Kennedy • We have to be aggressive when those we stick up for have no voice. I don’t consider it radical to say cruelty is wrong and that animals should be respected. I consider it radical to eat corpses, put electrodes in animals’ heads, make elephants live in chains in the circus, and poison animals we consider a nuisance. – Ingrid Newkirk • We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination. – Victor Hugo • We’ll be back to our nature documentary, ‘Baggy the Anorexic Elephant’ in just a second. – Colin Mochrie • Well, the big elephant in the whole system is the baby boomer generation that marches through like a herd of elephants. And we begin to retire in 2008. – Lindsey Graham • Whales, like elephants, are so social and intelligent. This hurts me to think of them being transported, put in noisy airplanes, and brought to a horrible concrete pen when they’re supposed to be out in the sea. – Jane Goodall • What ever happened to freak shows? Back in the twenties when elephant man was born at least he had a job waiting for him. – Doug Stanhope • What is bigger than an elephant? But this also is become man’s plaything, and a spectacle at public solemnities; and it learns to skip, dance, and kneel – Plutarch • What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it… Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient. – Timothy Garton Ash • What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant. – Jacques Monod • What? Men dodging this way for single bullets? What will you do when they open fire along the whole line? I am ashamed of you. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance. – John Sedgwick • When children see animals in a circus, they learn that animals exist for our amusement. Quite apart from the cruelty involved in training and confining these animals, the whole idea that we should enjoy the humiliating spectacle of an elephant or lion made to perform circus tricks shows a lack of respect for the animals as individuals. – Peter Singer • When eating an elephant take one bite at a time. – Creighton W. Abrams, Jr. • When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there was no one there to hear it, does it – philosopically speaking – make a noise – Terry Pratchett • When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him run. – Abraham Lincoln • Where do they go when they die? We hear of the elephant graveyards, where the elephants go to die, but how much more curious it is that birds are not falling out of the sky all the time, on our heads, at our feet, dying and falling and flopping to the ground. I rarely see a dead bird on the ground. – Sophy Burnham • Whereas all humans have approximately the same life expectancy the life expectancy of stars varies as much as from that of a butterfly to that of an elephant. – George Gamow • Whereas an elephant that was scared to death that diesel powered equipment, equipment that ran on a gas engine, was just fine. Because somebody had attacked it with construction equipment. But if it had a diesel engine, it was bad. – Temple Grandin • While I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love. – Roger Zelazny • Women and elephants never forget an injury. – Hector Hugh Munro • Women and elephants never forget. – Dorothy Parker • Women are like elephants to me. I like to look at them, but I wouldn’t want to own one. – W. C. Fields • Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is “elephant”. – Charlie Chaplin • Yeah, Kubrick’s a big influence. In something like ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ he is trying to use the practical light – I mean, at least he says that in his interviews, like they’re not using traditionally Hollywood lights. In ‘Elephant’ we basically used no lights; we never really adjusted. – Gus Van Sant • You can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time. – Robert Christopher Riley • You know, that stuff about pink elephants, that’s the bunk. It’s little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes. – Billy Wilder • You know…they say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t tell you is, you never forget an elephant. – Bill Murray • You see, in a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high. – Judith Rascoe • You’ve got to shake your fists at lightning now, you’ve got to roar like forest fire You’ve got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky They’re going to aim the hoses on you, show ’em you won’t expire Not till you burn up every passion, not even when you die Come on now, you’ve got to try, if you’re feeling contempt, well then you tell it If you’re tired of the silent night, Jesus, well then you yell it Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel That broken trees and elephant ivories conceal – Joni Mitchell
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Elephants Quotes
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• A camel makes an elephant feel like a jet plane. – Jackie Kennedy • A closed mouth gathers no foot. A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking. A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. – David Gries • A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. – George Bernard Shaw • A lot of my dreams have to do with animals I think because I’m such a huge animal lover. I have so many pets. I always have crazy dreams where I’m like riding an elephant through the jungle or hanging out with a bunch of monkeys. – Paris Hilton • A true philosopher is like an elephant; he never puts the second foot down until the first one is solidly in place. – Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle • Abrams’s Advice: When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time. – Paul Dickson • All the religions are true, they just see a different part of the elephant. – George Lucas • Always drawn to the theatric, Bowie also performed in stage productions of “The Elephant Man” and just recently collaborated on “Lazarus,” an off-Broadway musical that’s a sequel to his 1976 role in the film “The Man Who Fell To Earth.” – David Bowie • Americans should never underestimate the constant pressure on Canada which the mere presence of the United States has produced. We’re different people from you and we’re different people because of you. Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is effected by every twitch and grunt. It should not therefore be expected that this kind of nation, this Canada, should project itself as a mirror image of the United States. – Pierre Trudeau • Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked. – Anna Quindlen • And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze About a star of deathless and painless peace But no astronomer can find where it is. – Ted Hughes • Animals are indeed more ancient, more complex and in many ways more sophisticated than us. They are more perfect because they remain within Nature’s fearful symmetry just as Nature intended. They should be respected and revered, but perhaps none more so than the elephant, the world’s most emotionally human land mammal. – Daphne Sheldrick • As big as an elephant is, a whale is still larger. Everything’s relative. Even gods have their spot on the food chain. – Jim Starlin • Awake. Be the witness of your thoughts. The elephant hauls himself from the mud. In the same way drag yourself out of your sloth. – Gautama Buddha
jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Elephant', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_elephant').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_elephant img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Band of Skulls is joining Cage the Elephant as my new musical caffeine. – Michael Koryta • Be humble as the blade of grass that is being trodden underneath the feet. The little ant tastes joyously the sweetness of honey and sugar. The mighty elephant trembles in pain under the agony of sharp goad – Sivananda • Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure. – Georg C. Lichtenberg • But as the work proceeded I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was not more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable. – Bertrand Russell • But if you do not find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go on your way alone, like a king abandoning a conquered kingdom, or like a great elephant in the deep forest. – Gautama Buddha • But my mother loved The Elephant Man, and my father gave David Lynch a scholarship to study in Rome. – Isabella Rossellini • But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves. – Lawrence Anthony • But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant – Jeffrey Eugenides • China cares about its reputation and doesn’t want to be known as the nation whose preferences drove the extinction of elephants. – Wayne Pacelle • Consider the biggest animals on the planet: elephants, and buffaloes, and giraffes. These are vegetarian animals. They grow to thousands of pounds of muscle and bone without ever eating cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas. – Michael Klaper • Currently poaching threatens the very existence of the African Elephant, and my worry is that if we do not act NOW, we could be looking at a future in which this iconic species is wiped out. – Yaya Toure • Dealing with the State Department is like watching an elephant become pregnant. – Franklin D. Roosevelt • Dear God. Not only am I unemployed and homeless, but I also have a pregnant woman, bereaved dog, elephant, and eleven horses to take care of. – Sara Gruen • Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike. – Willard Van Orman Quine • Diplomacy is much like the “lovemaking of elephants”, which is accompanied with a lot of bellowing and other sound effects, but no one can be sure of the consequences for at least the next two years – Shashi Tharoor • Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants. – Peter Senge • Do not be thoughtless, always be mindful, watch your thoughts! Draw yourself out of the path of evil, like an elephant sunk in mud. – Gautama Buddha • Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant. – Guy Kawasaki • Education isn’t everything, for a start it isn’t an elephant – Spike Milligan • Elephant Man [movie] was much more difficult physically. This had a couple of days. It was quite tricky. I had my leg strapped up behind me and I am a little older now. It was all marvelous, though. He [Bong Joon-ho] is one of the most fabulous directors in the world. – John Hurt • Elephants and grandchildren never forget. – Andy Rooney • Elephants are contagious. – Paul Eluard • Elephants are highly emotional. Whatever they are feeling, they let it out immediately, and the histrionics are over and forgotten in a moment, lasting no longer than the cloud formations that are constantly coming apart and re-forming overhead. There is no guile in pachyderms. – Alex Shoumatoff • Elephants are living treasures. Nature’s gardeners. Nature’s great teachers. Tragically some people don’t give a damn. They prefer the dead treasure to the living one. The ivory. We must challenge this so-called ‘trade’ with all our might and shame on those who would condone it. – Virginia McKenna • Elephants are my favourite creatures and have been since I was a boy and my mother read Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child to me. It was loving elephants so much that made we want to write my own story with an elephant at the centre and its bond with a child. – Michael Morpurgo • Elephants are so wise and so funny and so endangered and so intelligent. I just think there is a lot to learn from them. – Gloria Steinem • Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything. – Peter Drucker • Elephants have the largest brains of any mammal on the face of the Earth. They are creative, altruistic and kind. – Ingrid Newkirk • Elephants suffer from too much patience. Their exhibitions of it may seem superb,-such power and such restraint, combined, are noble,-but a quality carried to excess defeats itself. – Clarence Day • Employers ganging up against workers is like raising an army of elephants against ants. – Mahatma Gandhi • Even animals have a conscience. Those in the jungle KILL only to eat, not live to kill. This is why we often see packs of predators focusing on just one kill, instead of targeting many. Even animals exercise reason. I have seen a mother lion taking care of a baby antelope, and a mother elephant taking care of a baby lion. The primal need to eat is unavoidable, yet even under severe hunger stretches, the desire to love can sometimes overcome the desire to eat. – Suzy Kassem • Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. The perfection of traveling is to travel without baggage. – Henry David Thoreau • Even though the topic [of slavery] itself is the big, screaming elephant in the room, we still get a chance to have fun and enjoy what is on the screen, and we have moments where we’re actually happy. – Aldis Hodge • Every culture from the Egyptians to the Mayans to the American Indians to the Bedouins created bestiaries that enabled them to express their relationship with nature. Ashes and Snow is a 21st-century bestiary filled with species from around the world. Nature’s orchestra includes not just Homo sapiens but elephants, whales, manatees, eagles, cheetahs, orangutans, and many others. – Gregory Colbert • Every Man being conscious to himself, That he thinks, and that which his Mind is employ’d about whilst thinking, being the Ideas, that are there, ’tis past doubt, that Men have in their Minds several Ideas, such as are those expressed by the words, Whiteness, Hardness, Sweetness, Thinking, Motion, Man, Elephant, Army, Drunkenness, and others: It is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received Doctrine, That Men have native Ideas, and original Characters stamped upon their Minds, in their very first Being. – John Locke • Every theory in philosophy, which is built on pure conjecture, is an elephant; and every theory that is supported partly by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar’s image, whose feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay. – Thomas Reid • Everything that I love is behind those gates. We have elephants, and giraffes, and crocodiles, and every kind of tigers and lions. And – and we have bus loads of kids, who don’t get to see those things. They come up sick children, and enjoy it. – Michael Jackson • For me to put a look together, if it’s going to be a boy look or a girl look or whatever, is quite a tricky thing to do. I’m not doing drag because drag is seen in a certain way and my comedy has got zero to do with what I’m wearing. I could wear an elephant suit and say the same thing. – Eddie Izzard • General, your tank is a powerful vehicle It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: It needs a driver. General, your bomber is powerful. It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant. But it has one defect: It needs a mechanic. General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think. – Bertolt Brecht • God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things. – Pablo Picasso • Have you ever been bitten by an elephant? How about a mosquito? It’s the little things in life that will bite you. For most of us, it’s the frequent, small and seemingly inconsequential choices that are of grave concern. – Darren Hardy • ‘Helping industry’ is the elephant pit of socialism, a deep hole with sharp spikes at the bottom, covered over with twigs and fresh grass. – Enoch Powell • How hard can it be to find a girl and an elephant for Christ’s sake? – Sara Gruen • I am persuaded that if the brutes even–if the dog, the horse, the ox, the elephant, the bird, could speak, they would confess, that, at the bottom of their nature, their instincts, their sensations, their obtuse intelligence, assisted by organs less perfect than ours, there is a clouded, secret sentiment of this existence of a superior and primordial Being, from whom all emanates, and to whom all returns. – Alphonse de Lamartine • I am she who lifts the mountains When she goes to hunt, Who wears mamba for a headband And a lion for a belt. Beware! I swallow elephants whole And pick my teeth with rhinoceros horns, I drink up rivers to get at the hippos. Let them hear my words! Nhamo is coming And her hunger is great. I am she who tosses trees Instead of spears. The ostrich is my pillow And the elephant is my footstool! I am Nhamo Who makes the river my highway And sends crocodiles scurrying into the reeds! – Nancy Farmer • I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I’ve heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society. – Elizabeth Berg • I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange… There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea. – Peter Matthiessen • I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly; they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express the actions of their inward forms. – Thomas Browne • I couldn’t hit an elephant’s ass with a bull fiddle. – Babe Didrikson Zaharias • I do believe that the party has a bunch of elephants running around in donkey clothes. – Al Sharpton • I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature-not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor. – John Ruskin • I do not now so much as wish to have the Strength of Youth again that I wish’d in Youth for the Strength of an Ox or Elephant. For it is our Business only to make the best Use we can of the Powers granted us by Nature. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • I don’t do impersonations. I can do a wounded elephant! I can do a really good cow! And because of the amount of time I spent in North Yorkshire, I do a variety of sheep. All of which I will be happy to roll out for you! – Patrick Stewart • I don’t know where I learned elephants like their tongues slapped. Whatever turns you on. – Betty White • I feel certain that the largest part of all photographs ever taken or being taken or ever to be taken, is and will continue to be, portraits. This is not only true, it is also necessary. We are not solitary mammals, like the elephant, the whale and the ape. What is most profoundly felt between us, even if hidden, will reappear in our portraits of one another. – Ben Maddow • I feel so guilty when I see orcas performing their stupid tricks in their little swimming pools, and when I see circuses or elephant abuse. I don’t want to be in the same industry with these people. – Sam Simon • I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book. – Stephen Fry • I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense native forest … pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world. – Isak Dinesen • I have a face like the behind of an elephant. – Charles Laughton • I have a memory like an elephant. I remember every elephant I’ve ever met. – Herb Caen • I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me. – Noel Coward • I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo. – Wyndham Lewis • I have family in Tanzania. I can’t even explain the joy of riding through the Tanzania national park and seeing giraffes run across the road and elephants over in a pond and baboons running. – Emanuel Cleaver • I have little space from the suffering of elephants right now. I wake up with it and go to sleep with it. The plight of animals in shelters, of kids used for labor for the metals in our electronics and endless other things, the fate of our water supply to dye our blue jeans and water our lawns, the sad painful life of conventionally raised meat…For me, I am working to not contribute to this. I really don’t want to hurt others for my benefit. – Kristin Bauer van Straten • I imagine the film [“300″] as if I was a Spartan and I had never seen an immortal or a Persian, or an elephant or a rhino for that matter. – Zack Snyder • I look after those who look after me.” He smacks his lips, stares at me, and adds, “I also look after those who don’t.” – Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants) – Sara Gruen • I often say, with something like ‘The Elephant Man,’ had it been an American series for television, where you have to sign your life away for seven years…well, maybe I would never have made ‘Sailcloth.’ – John Hurt • I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa Seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror… As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight. • I really wanted to work with David Lynch. I was a big fan of The Elephant Man and Eraserhead. – Sting • I saw a dead elephant in one of Kenya’s natural reserves. Around her were footprints of her baby elephant. This was just so sad, as three days before, perhaps the mother was still taking the baby around to play and to drink water. In her mind, she probably was thinking they had a life of decades to be together. However, the poaching happened so fast and everything collapsed. Without the protection of the mother, the baby elephant is likely to die too. That moment changed me. – Li Bingbing • I think the lion, besides the elephant, was the one animal that I just started thinking about so much. – Jillian Hervey • I want to go to Africa and find a really great hotel with good food right above a water hole where I can sit, have breakfast, and just watch the elephants play in the water. – David Crosby • I wanted to work with an elephant. – Robert Pattinson • I was born in love with all elephants. Not for a reason that I know. Not because of any of their individual qualities — wisdom, kindness, power, grace, patience, loyalty — but for what they are altogether. For their entire elephantness. – Pat Derby • I was driving pretty much the way everyone drives in LA, like elephants dancing on each others’ backs at a circus. – Gary Reilly • I was pretty shocked to learn that as many as 30,000 elephants are being killed every year to fuel the ivory trade, despite an international ban since 1989, and that 60% of forest elephants have already been wiped out. At this rate, experts say populations will become extinct in the next decade. No one needs ivory. – Ian Somerhalder • I will be doing a film called Whispers, for Disney. It’s about elephants, and doesn’t have any people in it. It will be a live action film – I don’t know how much I can say about it, since I still don’t know too much about it. – Trevor Rabin • I wore bell bottoms in elementary school. Never wore elephant bells. Remember, this was middle Oklahoma in the ’70s. – Garth Brooks • I worked next to an elephant. And considering that she could step on your toes, it’s a good idea to keep a certain distance. It’s also a good idea to befriend the trainer. – Christoph Waltz • If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps. – James Thurber • If anyone wants to know what elephants are like, they are like people only more so. – Pierre Corneille • If he be so resolved, I can o’ersway him; for he loves to hear That unicorns may be betrayed with trees And bears with glasses, elephants with holes, Lions with toils, and men with flatterers – William Shakespeare • If thou art of elephant-strength or of lion-claw, still peace is, in my opinion, better than strife. – Saadi • If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. – Desmond Tutu • If you cannot find a good companion to walk with, walk alone, like an elephant roaming the jungle. It is better to be alone than to be with those who will hinder your progress. – Gautama Buddha • If you have appreciation for life, whether it is a planet or any wild species, if it’s a human or an elephant, death is really bad for all of us to adjust to. We are all going to die. When it happens in such a drastic, inhuman way, which we’ve been seeing in Africa, this is crime on its highest level. – Veronika Varekova • If you want to shoot rare, fast-moving elephants, you should always carry a loaded gun. – Warren Buffett • If you’ve got a great crew it’s intense, but its quite short. ‘The Elephant Man’ was longer than most, for an independent film. That was a 14 week film. But it was because of the intrinsic difficulties. We had to invent a different way of filming, because the makeup was so long. A working day for me with a full makeup on was nineteen hours. So obviously you couldn’t do that twice running. – John Hurt • If you’ve never seen an elephant ski, then you’ve never been on acid. – Eddie Izzard • I’ll do anything to keep everyone laughing. Things get too intense on film sets. I remember on The Elephant Man, I used to imitate a cat without moving my lips. David Lynch would say, “Cut! Sorry, we’ve got a noise somewhere on set.” Everyone would be looking around for this cat. – Anthony Hopkins • I’m like an elephant, ok? If I walk into a room, it’s like, OK, he’s in there. – Aziz Ansari • I’m moved by us, our quirks and mistakes. I find inspiration in everything from a piece of art to the hem of a dress. I’m one of those people who sees Frank Zappa in a cup of coffee, or elephants wrestling in clouds. But also, conscious creation of all kinds moves me. And a divinely expressed performance in any genre sets me completely on fire. – Idara Victor • I’m one of those people who sees Frank Zappa in a cup of coffee, or elephants wrestling in clouds. But also, conscious creation of all kinds moves me. – Idara Victor • I’m really into moderation. Too much of anything will harm you in the end. Too much sugar. Too much pasta. I’m into drugs as a teaching tool, which is why I only take hallucinogenics. I mean, it’s not like I’ve never done cocaine, but, on the whole, if I can’t see dancing elephants then I’m not interested. – Tori Amos • In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes’ bath and Newton’s apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western. – John Reader • In America you have the mouse now trying to sit down on the elephant, thinking that he’s going somewhere. And it’s – and it’s absurd. – Malcolm X • In Haydn’s oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • In terms of economical aspects, reinforcing those national parks with sophisticated anti-poaching patrols – these poachers are beefed up like the army. In the case of Cameroon, that’s a perfect example of the lack of finance. The government could not provide the national park with more guards. Therefore, they lost the majority of the elephant population. I don’t want to see that anywhere else. – Veronika Varekova • In the divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim. – John Owen • In the sallies of badinage a polite fool shines; but in gravity he is as awkward as an elephant disporting. – Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann • Isimangaliso must be the only place on the globe where the oldest land mammal (rhinoceros) and the world biggest terrestrial mammal (elephant) share an ecosystem with the world’s oldest fish (coelacanth) and the world’s biggest marine mammal (whale) – Nelson Mandela • It happened while I was filming “Water for Elephants in which my partner is Reese Witherspoon. We had a scene with elephants but there were so many paparazzi around that it was scaring the animals and it was impossible to film. Out of the blue, fans, that were waiting for autographs, had enough and circled around the paparazzi. Teens made big guys run away. It was unreal! I was pleased. – Robert Pattinson • It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution. – Havelock Ellis • It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge a elephant, but we can’t dodge a fly. – Josh Billings • It may surprise people to learn that one elephant is killed every 15 minutes for its ivory. – Li Bingbing • It wasn’t that I hated being asked a bunch of questions. I had nothing against questions. I just didn’t like listening to them, because some questions take forever to make sense. Sometimes waiting for a question to finish is like watching someone draw an elephant starting with the tail first. As soon as you see the tail your mind wanders all over the place and you think of a million other animals that also have tails until you don’t care about the elephant because it’s only one thing when you’ve been thinking about a million others. – Jack Gantos • It’s amazing how quickly human beings adapt, isn’t it? It was such a great crew, and David [Lynch] was wonderful to work with [on ‘The Elephant Man’]. It was a very thrilling time, actually. – John Hurt • It’s estimated that across Africa 100 elephants are killed for their tusks every day. It takes nothing more than simple math to get to what that adds up to in a year, and it’s a distressing figure. – Graydon Carter • It’s hard for the donkeys to win the race if they’re going to carry the elephants on their backs. – Jim Hightower • It’s very difficult to move yourself up bit by bit. It’s like trying to eat an elephant for God’s sake. I can do it. It’s just I have to have it bite by bite, you know. It’s possible. You can eat an elephant, but you have to do it bite by bite. You can’t do it all in one go. – Colin Montgomerie • Jackie had a keen eye for talent, and like an elephant never forgot. And, he was always right on the mark. – Audrey Meadows • Knowing what you need doesn’t always mean you know how to get it, though. I’d spent a long time hiding in my cave. No matter how much I might want to come out into the light, I knew it would hurt my eyes. I was a fool. A fool, but nevertheless too smart not to know I was the architect of my own demise, that it was time to put my past behind me. It was time to stop allowing the white elephants to stand unspoken of in my living room. – Megan Hart • Learning to play with a big amplifier is like trying to control an elephant. – Ritchie Blackmore • Leo couldn’t help smiling. “That could be fun.” “Fun” she said unhappily. “Blue elephants.” “Blue elephants.” “Kiss me you fool.” “You fool. – Rick Riordan • Letter 1 To the princess of the elephants, I disappeared exactly one year ago. On that day I received a letter. It called me back to the place where my life with the elephants began Please forgive me, for the silence between us has been unbroken for one year. I will never be more of myself than in these letters. They are my maps of the bird path, and they are all that I know to be true. – Gregory Colbert • Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt. – Pierre Trudeau • Love will draw an elephant through a key-hole. – Samuel Richardson • Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It’s just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends. – Tahir Shah • May an elephant caress you with his toes – ‘Little’ Jimmy Dickens • Media people should have long noses like an elephant to smell out politicians, mayors, prime ministers and businessmen. We need to know the reality, the good and the bad, not just the appearance. – Dalai Lama • Mother elephants in the circus cannot help their babies, but we can. – Edie Falco • Mumbling priests swinging stick cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well-buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their places in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it. – N.D. Wilson • My biggest concern and main engagement with UNEP is focused on endangered species and illegal wildlife trade – mostly elephants, rhinos, etc. – Yaya Toure • My biggest influence growing up was Mad magazine, which is a very text-heavy form of visual satire. I didn’t grow up wanting to draw donkeys and elephants with the names of politicians written across them. – Tom Tomorrow • My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery • My roommate got a pet elephant. Then it got lost. It’s in the apartment somewhere. – Steven Wright • My stepfather used to be a clown in The Shrine Circus. He took me backstage when I was 23. I saw three elephants chained to the cement floor in the warehouse of the Michigan State Fairgrounds. Sadness, hopelessness and fear were emanating from their eyes, from their bodies. They were swaying neurotically from side to side. A monkey was screaming in his cage, grabbing the bars of his prison. Two tigers were pacing feverishly in their tiny cages. Cruelty was staring me in the face. I knew something was wrong. If you pay attention to energy, you can tell when a fellow being is in peril. – Gary Yourofsky • Nature’s great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing. – John Donne • Nothing appeases an enraged elephant so much as the sight of a little lamb. – Saint Francis de Sales • Now the freaks are on television, the freaks are in the movies. And it’s no longer the sideshow, it’s the whole show. The colorful circus and the clowns and the elephants, for all intents and purposes, are gone, and we’re dealing only with the freaks. – Jonathan Winters • Once there was an elephant Who tried to use the telephant. No! no! I mean an elephone Who tried to use the telephone. Dear me, I am not certain quite That even now I’ve got it right. – Laura E. Richards • One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know. – Groucho Marx • One researcher just determined that African and Indian elephants make each other sick. When a new animal or plant is introduced to a habitat bad things happen. The biggest danger to native wildlife is foreign wildlife. – Robert T. Bakker • Our elders say that an elephant does not find its own trunk heavy. – Zakes Mda • Our problem with limited resources is not primarily overpopulation; it is greed. Our problem with pollution is not the invention of fluorocarbons or mass transport; it is irresponsibility. The loss of an acre of forest every second, the mass slaughter of elephants for their ivory, the extinction of entire species of plants, insects and animals all over the world is not something that “just happens” because there are more of us human beings. It happens because the race of ruling beings put in charge has almost wholly lost its sense of stewardship. We have turned away from God. – Winkie Pratney • Over-population is the ’cause of drive-by shootings’ and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants. – Ted Turner • People of conscience in our leadership in Washington have been scared off by the right and the fossil fuel lobbies. They won’t even use the term “sustainability” or “climate change” in an energy bill, which is ludicrous on its face. It completely ignores the elephant in the room that we’re all dealing with. The average American doesn’t even believe climate change is real, they think it’s all a hoax. – James Cameron • Plastic surgery is like a big elephant sitting in the Hollywood living room. – Patricia Heaton • Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant. – William Faulkner • PROBOSCIS, n. The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk. – Ambrose Bierce • Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget. – Arthur Laurents • Recently I stood in the desert, far out side of L. A., and watched the sun set on a circus tent from 1930. Every where stood animals: elephants, tigers that should be loaded into a steam train. 300 extras in costumes raced around, the modern world had disappeared totally. Although that was totally fake, it still happened directly before my eyes! That was my perfect day. I would be gladly experience that every day. It happens continually to me: It calls itself work. That is wonderful and more than enough. – Robert Pattinson • Seized ivory stocks around Africa are recycled back into illegal trade due to corruption. Ivory stocks should be burnt together with the hopes of traffickers for any “legal” way to allow them to slaughter our elephants. – Ofir Drori • Shallows where a lamb could wade and depths where an elephant would drown. – Matthew Henry • So I went home and I told my mom that I wanted to quit and be an actress and she said, “Huh, that sounds fascinating. It’s wonderful!” And I told my father and he literally said, “I don’t care if you want to be an elephant trainer if it makes you happy.” – Gena Rowlands • So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen! – John Godfrey Saxe • So slowly the hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire. – D. H. Lawrence • Soft fantasy worlds have a much looser cause-and-effect relationship. Alchemists can turn lead into gold and nobody wonders about how it will impact the currency system. Someone waves a wand and turns an elephant into a mouse and nobody worries about conservation of mass. – Patrick Rothfuss • Some women are like elephants. I don’t mean size, I mean they never forget. – Laura Schlessinger • Sybil’s female forebears had valiantly backed up their husbands as distant embassies were besieged, had given birth on a camel or in the shade of a stricken elephant, had handed around the little gold chocolates while trolls were trying to break into the compound, or had merely stayed at home and nursed such bits of husbands and sons as made it back from endless little wars. The result was a species of woman who, when duty called, turned into solid steel. – Terry Pratchett • The ability to double our biomass – not by waiting several million years and growing to be the size of an elephant – but waiting a few hundred thousand years for neurons to sprout into our brains – ones capable of having us create emotional relationships with other members of our species. We thereby double our biomass not by getting bigger, but by creating an ally. – John Medina • The Arab awakening was like watching elephants fly: something you didn’t expect, something you haven’t seen before, “Wow, elephants fly.” – Thomas Friedman • The Bible is a stream of running water, where alike the elephant may swim, and the lamb walk without losing its feet. – Pope Gregory I • The Buddhists have a story about blind men trying to describe an elephant by feeling it’s various parts, and each describes the elephant according to the part he touched. That is the way we can hope to know God. – Kent Nerburn • The circus a place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool. – Ambrose Bierce • The elephant hath joints, but none for courtesy; his legs are legs for necessity, not for flexure. – William Shakespeare • The elephant in the room time and time again when it comes to work and promotions is maternity leave. We need to work with businesses so they work with women and make it easy and supportive for them to come back into the workplace. – Mary Portas • The Elephant Man claimed his head was big because, it’s so full of dreams. Actually, it’s because his skull was shaped like a turkey. – Dana Gould • ‘The Elephant Man’ was hugely enjoyable to do. I thought the one stage, when Chris Tucker did the first makeup and it took 12 hours, I thought they’d actually found a way for me not to enjoy filming. – John Hurt • The Elephant Man would never have gotten up and gone, ‘Oh, God. Look at me hair today.’ – Karl Pilkington • The elephant, not only the largest but the most intelligent of animals, provides us with an excellent example. It is faithful and tenderly loving to the female of its choice, mating only every third year and then for no more than five days, and so secretly as never to be seen, until, on the sixth day, it appears and goes at once to wash its whole body in the river, unwilling to return to the herd until thus purified. Such good and modest habits are an example to husband and wife. – Saint Francis de Sales • The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate – D. H. Lawrence • The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels. – Richard Leakey • The fact that the infrastructure is falling apart is not necessarily because it’s built poorly. The New York City subways were built in 1903. The fact that they’re still running at all is an enormous success. The fact that New York City’s bridges have held up as long as they have is extraordinary, and the engineers didn’t have computers to tell them about tolerance. They overbuilt these things – traffic on them is like an ant on an elephant. – Alan Weisman • The illegal wildlife trade threatens not only the survival of entire species, such as elephants and rhinos, but also the livelihoods and, often, the very lives of millions of people across Africa who depend on tourism for a living. – Yaya Toure • The Internet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea – massive, difficult to re-direct, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it. – Gene Spafford • The largest land animal is the elephant, and it is the nearest to man in intelligence: it understands the language of its country and obeys orders, remembers duties that it has been taught, is pleased by affection and by marks of honour, nay more it possesses virtues rare even in man, honesty, wisdom, justice, also respect for the stars and reverence for the sun and moon. – Pliny the Elder • The law of nature gives a man the right to defend himself when he’s attacked. And God’s law itself gives a man the right to defend himself when he’s attacked.so, peaceful suffering and passive resistance and all of that stuff is all right maybe in India somewhere, where the people in India outnumber the whites – about a million to one.But here in America, when you tell that’s like an elephant sitting down on a – on a mouse in India with [Mahatma] Gandhi. – Malcolm X • The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior. – Jonathan Haidt • The problem is that during the 1980s, a decade of heavy poaching, the elephants retreated to safer areas. And now people have moved into the corridors once used by the elephants. – Richard Leakey • The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book? – David Attenborough • The reason I know about ‘Tomb Raider’ is from when I was researching ‘Elephant.’ It was 1999, and I was trying to research the Columbine-massacre kids, and they had played video games, and I, at the time, had never really seen one. It was a world I didn’t know. – Gus Van Sant • The sad thing about destroying the environment is that we’re going to take the rest of life with us. The bluebirds will be gone, and the elephants will be gone, and the tigers will be gone, and the pandas will be gone. – Ted Turner • The strongest animals on earth are plant eaters. Every creature we’ve enlisted to do the work we couldn’t handle – the horse, donkey, elephant, camel, water buffalo, ox, yak – is an herbivore… whose huge muscles were built from plant protein, and whose strong bones got that way, and stayed that way, from grazing on grass and eating other vegetables. – Victoria Moran • The thing about movie musicals is that there have been some brilliant ones, but when they’re bad, they’re really bad – big white elephants. – Rob Marshall • The United States should not jump around like an elephant frightened by a mouse. – George F. Kennan • The whole idea of being in captivity in such limited space, especially in a zoo, causes elephants to suffer. They develop all kinds of foot diseases. They die. They get cysts. Not only is it painful, it eventually kills them. – Lily Tomlin • The whole new Democratic Party is the old Republican Party. We have a whole bunch of elephants running around in donkey’s clothes. – Robert Novak • The world is hollow. It’s a lot to take in. Like cracking an egg and finding nothing inside. Or a full grown elephant. – Geraldine McCaughrean • The world is not a burden; we make it a burden by our desires. When the desires are removed, the world is as light as a feather on an elephant’s back. – Baba Hari Dass • The world’s strongest animals are plant eaters. Gorillas, Buffaloes, Elephants and me. – Patrik Baboumian • There are some people the gestation period is like an elephant’s and it’s just years and years before they’re ready. – John Amaechi • There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants…. The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. – Jack London • There is no creature among all the Beasts of the world which hath so great and ample demonstration of the power and wisdom of almighty God as the Elephant. – Edward Topsell • There’s a place in Botswana where there are 100,000 elephants living in a single population. Think of the amount of space they need. Remember, the United States would fit in Africa three times over and there would still be space. That’s how big Africa is. – Patrick Bergin • There’s enough sedative in these darts to bring down a werewolf, which is exactly what we’re hunting. Why would we want to bring down an elephant if we’re not hunting elephants? – Derek Landy • These magnificent species of Africa – elephants, rhino, lions, leopards, cheetah, the great apes (Africa has four of the world’s five great apes) – this is a treasure for all humanity, and they are not for sale. They are not for trade. They need to be valued and preserved by humanity. We all need a global commitment to that. – Patrick Bergin • They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist… – John Sedgwick • They say that vegetable food is not sufficiently nutritious. But chemistry proves the contrary. So does physiology. So does experience….And again: the largest and strongest animals in the world are those which eat no flesh-food of any kind – the elephant and the rhinoceros. – R. Trall • Time magazine put Chris Christie on the cover with the caption, ‘The Elephant in the Room.’ And People magazine named him ‘Sexiest Garbage Truck in a Suit.’ – Bill Maher • To achieve this density of a neutron star at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble. – Neil deGrasse Tyson • To be a baby elephant must be wonderful. Surrounded by a loving family 24 hours a day. Touched by the family, cuddled and comforted. A tremendous love and compassion exuded by every family member. I think it must be how it ought to be, in a perfect world. – Daphne Sheldrick • To keep a man a slave you do much the same as the cruel circus masters did to the elephant around the turn of last century. Clamp heavy chains around their legs and stake them to the ground. Then beat and terrorize them. After a while you no longer even have to stake the chain; the elephant gives up and just the mere rattle of the chain convinces the elephant there is no hope, so they give up and do whatever it is the circus requires. – Glenn Beck • Use a sweet tongue, courtesy, and gentleness, and thou mayest manage to guide an elephant by a hair. – Saadi • We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior. – Graydon Carter • We already live a very long time for mammals, getting three times as many heartbeats as a mouse or elephant. It never seems enough though, does it? – David Brin • We are having to pull money into site-level protection for elephants just to keep them alive. But there isn’t enough money to go around. The people involved in protecting those elephants, like rangers on the ground, are so under-resourced. They have very few vehicles, they have very poor weapons (if any weapons at all), and they are treated as the bottom of the tree when it comes to law enforcement priority. – Allen Crawford • We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures. – Geraldine Brooks • We are the bird’s eggs. Bird’s eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep, we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and springs of wildflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear. – Susan Griffin • We call a thing big or little with reference to what it is wont to be, as we speak of a small elephant or a big rat. – D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson • We can’t have these great corporations crowding competition off the sidewalks. It’s like an elephant saying, “Everyone for himself,” as he dances among the chickens. – Emanuel Celler • We did a campaign here with New York Times. We had a great ad: “Today in America, someone will kill an elephant for a bracelet.” We became sensitized in our society. Now there are four or five billion people in Asia who need to get this message. We need to use social media, print magazines, celebrities – anything we can to share this message. It’s not cool, it’s not okay. You are destroying beautiful animals. You are robbing a continent of its wealth. And you are hurting a lot of innocent people. – Patrick Bergin • We have all seen these circus elephants complete with tusks, ivory in their head and thick skins, who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them. – John F. Kennedy • We have to be aggressive when those we stick up for have no voice. I don’t consider it radical to say cruelty is wrong and that animals should be respected. I consider it radical to eat corpses, put electrodes in animals’ heads, make elephants live in chains in the circus, and poison animals we consider a nuisance. – Ingrid Newkirk • We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination. – Victor Hugo • We’ll be back to our nature documentary, ‘Baggy the Anorexic Elephant’ in just a second. – Colin Mochrie • Well, the big elephant in the whole system is the baby boomer generation that marches through like a herd of elephants. And we begin to retire in 2008. – Lindsey Graham • Whales, like elephants, are so social and intelligent. This hurts me to think of them being transported, put in noisy airplanes, and brought to a horrible concrete pen when they’re supposed to be out in the sea. – Jane Goodall • What ever happened to freak shows? Back in the twenties when elephant man was born at least he had a job waiting for him. – Doug Stanhope • What is bigger than an elephant? But this also is become man’s plaything, and a spectacle at public solemnities; and it learns to skip, dance, and kneel – Plutarch • What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it… Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient. – Timothy Garton Ash • What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant. – Jacques Monod • What? Men dodging this way for single bullets? What will you do when they open fire along the whole line? I am ashamed of you. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance. – John Sedgwick • When children see animals in a circus, they learn that animals exist for our amusement. Quite apart from the cruelty involved in training and confining these animals, the whole idea that we should enjoy the humiliating spectacle of an elephant or lion made to perform circus tricks shows a lack of respect for the animals as individuals. – Peter Singer • When eating an elephant take one bite at a time. – Creighton W. Abrams, Jr. • When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there was no one there to hear it, does it – philosopically speaking – make a noise – Terry Pratchett • When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him run. – Abraham Lincoln • Where do they go when they die? We hear of the elephant graveyards, where the elephants go to die, but how much more curious it is that birds are not falling out of the sky all the time, on our heads, at our feet, dying and falling and flopping to the ground. I rarely see a dead bird on the ground. – Sophy Burnham • Whereas all humans have approximately the same life expectancy the life expectancy of stars varies as much as from that of a butterfly to that of an elephant. – George Gamow • Whereas an elephant that was scared to death that diesel powered equipment, equipment that ran on a gas engine, was just fine. Because somebody had attacked it with construction equipment. But if it had a diesel engine, it was bad. – Temple Grandin • While I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love. – Roger Zelazny • Women and elephants never forget an injury. – Hector Hugh Munro • Women and elephants never forget. – Dorothy Parker • Women are like elephants to me. I like to look at them, but I wouldn’t want to own one. – W. C. Fields • Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is “elephant”. – Charlie Chaplin • Yeah, Kubrick’s a big influence. In something like ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ he is trying to use the practical light – I mean, at least he says that in his interviews, like they’re not using traditionally Hollywood lights. In ‘Elephant’ we basically used no lights; we never really adjusted. – Gus Van Sant • You can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time. – Robert Christopher Riley • You know, that stuff about pink elephants, that’s the bunk. It’s little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes. – Billy Wilder • You know…they say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t tell you is, you never forget an elephant. – Bill Murray • You see, in a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high. – Judith Rascoe • You’ve got to shake your fists at lightning now, you’ve got to roar like forest fire You’ve got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky They’re going to aim the hoses on you, show ’em you won’t expire Not till you burn up every passion, not even when you die Come on now, you’ve got to try, if you’re feeling contempt, well then you tell it If you’re tired of the silent night, Jesus, well then you yell it Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel That broken trees and elephant ivories conceal – Joni Mitchell
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Ted Talk Text
Today I'm going to speak to you about the last 30 years of architectural history.
It's a complex topic, so we're just going to dive right in at a complex place: New Jersey. Because 30 years ago, I'm from Jersey, and I was six, and I lived there in my parents' house in a town called Livingston, and this was my childhood bedroom. Around the corner from my bedroom was the bathroom that I used to share with my sister. And in between my bedroom and the bathroom was a balcony that overlooked the family room. And that's where everyone would hang out and watch TV, so that every time that I walked from my bedroom to the bathroom, everyone would see me, and every time I took a shower and would come back in a towel, everyone would see me. And I looked like this. I was awkward, insecure, and I hated it. I hated that walk, I hated that balcony, I hated that room, and I hated that house.
And that's architecture. Done. That feeling, those emotions that I felt, that's the power of architecture, because architecture is not about math and it's not about zoning, it's about those visceral, emotional connections that we feel to the places that we occupy. And it's no surprise that we feel that way, because according to the EPA, Americans spend 90 percent of their time indoors. That's 90 percent of our time surrounded by architecture. That's huge. That means that architecture is shaping us in ways that we didn't even realize.
That makes us a little bit gullible and very, very predictable. It means that when I show you a building like this, I know what you think: You think "power" and "stability" and "democracy." And I know you think that because it's based on a building that was build 2,500 years ago by the Greeks. This is a trick. This is a trigger that architects use to get you to create an emotional connection to the forms that we build our buildings out of. It's a predictable emotional connection, and we've been using this trick for a long, long time. We used it [200] years ago to build banks. We used it in the 19th century to build art museums. And in the 20th century in America, we used it to build houses. And look at these solid, stable little soldiers facing the ocean and keeping away the elements.
This is really, really useful, because building things is terrifying. It's expensive, it takes a long time, and it's very complicated. And the people that build things -- developers and governments -- they're naturally afraid of innovation, and they'd rather just use those forms that they know you'll respond to.
That's how we end up with buildings like this. This is the Livingston Public Library that was completed in 2004 in my hometown, and, you know, it's got a dome and it's got this round thing and columns, red brick, and you can kind of guess what Livingston is trying to say with this building: children, property values and history. But it doesn't have much to do with what a library actually does today. That same year, in 2004, on the other side of the country, another library was completed, and it looks like this. It's in Seattle. This library is about how we consume media in a digital age. It's about a new kind of public amenity for the city, a place to gather and read and share.
So how is it possible that in the same year, in the same country, two buildings, both called libraries, look so completely different? And the answer is that architecture works on the principle of a pendulum. On the one side is innovation, and architects are constantly pushing, pushing for new technologies, new typologies, new solutions for the way that we live today. And we push and we push and we push until we completely alienate all of you. We wear all black, we get very depressed, you think we're adorable, we’re dead inside because we've got no choice. We have to go to the other side and reengage those symbols that we know you love. So, we do that, and you're happy, we feel like sell-outs, so we start experimenting again and we push the pendulum back and back and forth and back and forth we've gone for the last 300 years, and certainly for the last 30 years.
Okay, 30 years ago we were coming out of the '70s. Architects had been busy experimenting with something called brutalism. It's about concrete. (Laughter) You can guess this. Small windows, dehumanizing scale. This is really tough stuff. So as we get closer to the '80s, we start to reengage those symbols. We push the pendulum back into the other direction. We take these forms that we know you love and we update them. We add neon and we add pastels and we use new materials. And you love it. And we can't give you enough of it. We take Chippendale armoires and we turned those into skyscrapers, and skyscrapers can be medieval castles made out of glass. Forms got big, forms got bold and colourful. Dwarves became columns. Swans grew to the size of buildings. It was crazy. But it's the '80s, it's cool. We're all hanging out in malls and we're all moving to the suburbs, and out there, out in the suburbs, we can create our own architectural fantasies. And those fantasies, they can be Mediterranean or French or Italian. (Laughter) Possibly with endless breadsticks.
This is the thing about postmodernism. This is the thing about symbols. They're easy, they're cheap, because instead of making places, we're making memories of places. Because I know, and I know all of you know, this isn't Tuscany. This is Ohio. (Laughter)
So architects get frustrated, and we start pushing the pendulum back into the other direction. In the late '80s and early '90s, we start experimenting with something called deconstructivism. We throw out historical symbols, we rely on new, computer-aided design techniques, and we come up with new compositions, forms crashing into forms. This is academic and heady stuff, it's super unpopular, we totally alienate you. Ordinarily, the pendulum would just swing back into the other direction. And then, something amazing happened.
In 1997, this building opened. This is the Guggenheim Bilbao, by Frank Gehry. And this building fundamentally changes the world's relationship to architecture. Paul Goldberger said that Bilbao was one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were completely united around a building. The New York Times called this building a miracle. Tourism in Bilbao increased 2,500 percent after this building was completed. So all of a sudden, everybody wants one of these buildings: L.A., Seattle,Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Springfield. Everybody wants one, and Gehry is everywhere. He is our very first starchitect.
Now, how is it possible that these forms -- they're wild and radical -- how is it possible that they become so ubiquitous throughout the world? And it happened because media so successfully galvanized around them that they quickly taught us that these forms mean culture and tourism. We created an emotional reaction to these forms. So, did every mayor in the world. So, every mayor knew that if they had these forms, they had culture and tourism.
This phenomenon at the turn of the new millennium happened to a few other starchitects. It happened to Zaha and it happened to Libeskind, and what happened to these elite few architects at the turn of the new millennium could actually start to happen to the entire field of architecture, as digital media starts to increase the speed with which we consume information. Because think about how you consume architecture. A thousand years ago, you would have had to have walked to the village next door to see a building. Transportation speeds up: You can take a boat, you can take a plane, you can be a tourist. Technology speeds up: You can see it in a newspaper, on TV, until finally, we are all architectural photographers, and the building has become disembodied from the site. Architecture is everywhere now, and that means that the speed of communication has finally caught up to the speed of architecture.
Because architecture actually moves quite quickly. It doesn't take long to think about a building. It takes a long time to build a building, three or four years, and in the interim, an architect will design two or eight or a hundred other buildings before they know if that building that they designed four years ago was a success or not. That's because there's never been a good feedback loop in architecture. That's how we end up with buildings like this. Brutalism wasn't a two-year movement, it was a 20-year movement. For 20 years, we were producing buildings like this because we had no idea how much you hated it. It's never going to happen again, I think, because we are living on the verge of the greatest revolution in architecture since the invention of concrete, of steel, or of the elevator, and it's a media revolution.
Everything is different now. Architects are no longer these mysterious creatures that use big words and complicated drawings, and you aren't the hapless public, the consumer that won't accept anything that they haven't seen anymore. Architects can hear you,and you're not intimidated by architecture. That means that that pendulum swinging back and forth from style to style, from movement to movement, is irrelevant. We can actually move forward and find relevant solutions to the problems that our society faces. This is the end of architectural history, and it means that the buildings of tomorrow are going to look a lot different than the buildings of today. It means that a public space in the ancient city of Seville can be unique and tailored to the way that a modern city works. It means that a stadium in Brooklyn can be a stadium in Brooklyn, not some red-brick historical pastiche of what we think a stadium ought to be. It means that robots are going to build our buildings, because we're finally ready for the forms that they're going to produce.
Find an architect, hire an architect, work with us to design better buildings, better cities, and a better world, because the stakes are high. Buildings don't just reflect our society, they shape our society down to the smallest spaces: the local libraries, the homes where we raise our children, and the walk that they take from the bedroom to the bathroom.
Bibliography
Kushner, M. (2014).Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by … you. [online] Ted.com. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/marc_kushner_why_the_buildings_of_the_future_will_be_shaped_by_you/transcript#t-1063612 [Accessed 13 Mar. 2018].
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There is actually proof off the burial place paintings that the historical Egyptians often brought cheetahs they had actually tamed.
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Research Report
Greek Tragedy
Greek Tragedy is a form of theatre from Ancient Greece and became most popular in Athens in the 5th century BC, the works of which are sometimes referred to as Attic Tragedy. It has influenced the theatre of Ancient Rome and Renaissance. The themes within Greek Tragedy are universal and anybody can relate to them. Many Greek Tragedies are set in a day, it is similar to a soap opera as the themes and relationships are similar.
We studied the text ‘Electra’ which was written by Sophocles and it is considered as one of his successful plays. Electra is based off the story of Electra and her brother Orestes and the revenge they are getting on their mother, Clytemnestra, and their step-father, Aegisthus, who killed their father, Agamemnon, in the aftermath of the Trojan War. It is set in the city of Argos a few years after the Trojan War. Even though nobody knows the exact date of which Electra was written, it has been thought that it was written and performed around 409 BC which would mean that Sophocles was in his eighties. At this time, the Greek states were at war with one another, Peloponnesian War. The city-state of Athens had established itself as the dominant region. Following its decisive role in the defeat of die Persians in the battle of Salamis in 480 BC.
For vocal requirements in Electra, there is a chorus which means that the people who are in the chorus would have to speak in sync with one another. As the play was performed outside, you would have to project your voice in order for the audience to be able to hear what you are saying. You also have to make sure that your voice fits your characters, for example if you were playing Electra, the way our group did it was the girl who played Electra had quite a soft voice but when she became angry you could still hear the softness in her voice. If you were to perform this as a modern day actor you would need to take into consideration your costume, vocal demands, gestures and language analysis. For costume you would need to dress according to how they dressed when the play was performed, for example they normally wore baggy clothes which were very basic colours like white, black and beige. If your costume hit the floor you would have to be careful so that you wouldn't trip over it. You would also have to figure out a way in which it would cover up your body language. I have already explained the vocal demands but you would have to project your voice throughout as you would normally be performing it outside so you would have to make sure that you voice is nice and clear for the audience to be able to hear you. As for gestures, the need to be over the top as that's how they performed it when it came out. Your gestures need to be over the top especially if you're in the chorus as you are the ones who like to make a big deal out of things and you are the gossip people so everything you do needs to be over the top. Finally, language analysis, to make sure that you have a clear understanding of the whole text, it's a good idea to have a read through and analyse your lines so you know what your character is talking about and so you know what facial expressions to use and what gestures to use as well. If you are in the chorus you need to make your actions big and over the top and always make sure that you are reacting to everything that is being said as the chorus is like the gossip people who want to know anything and everything. I also think that for if you're not in the chorus you movements need to be over the top.
Melodrama
Melodrama is a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions. A melodramatic story consists of the plot line of good versus evil and good always wins. It began in the 18th century and it was a technique of combining spoken recitation with short pieces of accompanying music. The first full melodrama was written in 1762 and was first staged in 1770 in Lyon.
We studied the text ‘London Assurance’ which was originally called ‘Out of Town’ and was written by Dion Boucicault and this was his second play but it was his first to be produced. It was first performed on the 4th march 1841 at the Theatre Royal. It all about a girl called Grace Harkaway who is commanded, by her uncle, to marry Sir Hardcourt Courtly. She then meets and falls in love with this gentleman's son, Charles, who has been posing as a student, but in reality a roysterer and one of the gayest young bloods in town. Young Courtly and his friend, Dazzle, plan with Lady Gay Spanker, a belle and noted huntsman, to draw out Sir Hardcourt, who has fallen in love with her, so that Grace may be free to marry who she loves. Sir Hardcourt believing that Lady Gay reciprocates the affection, plan to elope her. Grace’s uncle overhears their conversation and indignity changes his plans regarding Grace who is permitted to marry Charles. Sir Hardcourt discovers that he has been made a fool of by Lady Gay Spanker, who returns to her husband with the combined thanks of the happy couple.
As it was performed inside and they didn't have mics, they would have to project their voices so that everyone on the audience would be able to hear everything that they are saying. When we performed a part of the text we and we sure that what we said was was very well spoken and that our diction was really good. If you were to perform this as a modern day actor you would need to take into consideration costume, vocal demands, gestures, and language analysis. For your costume you would need to dress appropriate to the era which would be long dresses, for women, if you were a maid it would be a long black dress with a white pinafore over the top, is you were higher class it would be a dress which had colour and looked more higher class that a maids dress. As for men it would normally be black trouser a shirt, waistcoat and a jacket. You would have to make sure that you got used to your costume and use it in your advantage with your gestures and movement. As for vocal demands, as i mentioned before, you will need to project your voice and make sure that you have good diction. For gestures, depending on your character, you will need to make them big and noticeable, make sure that the gestures that you do do fit you character and positively affect your performance. For language analysis, make sure you go through and read each of your lines carefully so you know what your character is saying and you know what gestures to do and how you are going to say the line. It also helps you develop your character, if you know what you character is saying and know what each line means it will help you with they way you want your character to come across to the audience and help how you're going to do it.
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born on the 26th April 1564 and died 23rd April 1616. He was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English Language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist. He has written 38 plays, 154 sonnets, 2 long narrative poems and lots more. Most of his best known work was produced between 1589 and 1613. In the 20th and the 21st centuries, his works have been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship performance. His plays remain highly popular and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political throughout the world.
We studied the text ‘Romeo and Juliet’ which was written around 1594 and 1596 and was first published in an unauthorized quarto in 1597. It is set in Verona and tells the story of two people, Romeo and Juliet, whose families, the Montagues and the Capulets, have had an ongoing feud. Juliet is being forced to marry Paris but she doesn’t want to. Lord Capulet then holds a ball in which Romeo finds out about and then sees juliet and they fall in love. They then get married in secret and plan to run away together. Juliet then drinks a sleeping potion that sends her into a deep sleep to make it look as if she has died but Romeo never gets the letter and then when he goes to see her, he drinks poison and dies next to her. Juliet then wakes up and sees Romeo dead next to her and kills herself with his dagger.
As it was performed outside you would need to project your voice so that you could be heard and sometimes the crowd would talk over the performance, try to leave or even join in they would need to raise their voice so that they could be heard over everyone else. They would also have good diction and clear voices when speaking. If you were to perform this as a modern day actor you would need to take into consideration costume, vocal demands, gestures, and language analysis. For costume you need to make sure that it fits the time period, for example all of the women would wear long dresses which would compliment their figure, the maids would wear a long black dress and a white pinafore over the top. The men would wear trousers, a shirt and a waistcoat and if they were upper class they would maybe wear a jacket over the top. You would have to make sure that you were comfortable with your costume and that you could walk in it how your character would and be able to use your gestures and movement effectively when in your costumes. As for vocal demands, as i have mentioned before, you will have to project your voice as this piece of text would normally be performed outside. You will also have to have good diction as in the text the higher class characters would have good diction as they would have been taught well. As for gestures, the gestures that you would use would have to fit to your character and what they say. Language analysis, you will need to have a read through of you lines so that you understand what your character is saying and so you understand what is going on in the scene.
Conclusion
I think that all of the texts in which we studied all have their similarities and differences between them. I think that in terms of language analysis, if you were to do one of them as a modern day actor you would need to do the same for each text which would be to read it through the text and make sure that you understand each line which your character is saying which will help you develop your character. Greek Tragedy and Shakespeare was always performed outside unlike Melodrama so Greek Tragedy and Shakespeare have similar vocal demands as you would have to project your voice so that you could be heard, i think you needed to do this more with Shakespeare than with Greek Tragedy as when people would perform Shakespeare people would be talking over them and they would get louder which would cause them to rant on stage, people would also try and leave or even join in when they were performing which would also cause them to rant on stage. This contrasts with Melodrama as people would sit and watch, this was because it was performed in a theatre rather than outside. I think that the styles of Melodrama and Shakespeare are similar in the fact that, from the texts we did, both girls were being forced to marry someone whom they didn’t love and they fell in love with someone who they weren't supposed to. The style of Greek Tragedy i think is quite different, from the text we studied, as it has a chorus which are always on stage which didn't happen in Melodrama or Shakespeare. It also has more of a different storyline from the other two as the Greek Tragedy text we studied had a revenge type storyline which the other two did not they had a romantic storyline. I think that overall all of the texts have similarities with at least one of the other texts and they also have differences which i think shows that through the year there is a little bit of them all in different plays which have been carried through time.
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