Jacqui > Jacqui's Quotes

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Tempting as it may be to interpret the behavior of other animals in terms of human mental processes, it's perhaps even more tempting to reject the possibility of kinship. It's what primatologist Frans de Waal calls "anthropodenial," blindness to humankind characteristics of other species,"Those who are in anthropodenial," says de Waal, "try to build a brick wall to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“Each spring the robins nesting in our cherry tree attack the side mirror of our car as if it were a rival, pecking furiously at their own reflections while streaking the door with guano. But who among us hasn’t been toppled by our vanity or made an enemy of our own image?”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“AS A HUMAN BEING,” Einstein once wrote, “one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“What kind of intelligence allows a bird to anticipate the arrival of a distant storm? Or find its way to a place it has never been before, though it may be thousands of miles away? Or precisely imitate the complex songs of hundreds of other species? Or hide tens of thousands of seeds over hundreds of square miles and remember where it put them six months later? (I would flunk these sorts of intelligence tests as readily as birds might fail mine.)”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“It’s a notion that was proposed three decades ago by Jane Goodall and her colleague Hans Kummer. The pair made a plea for measuring a wild animal’s intelligence by looking at its ability to find solutions to problems in its natural setting. What’s needed is an ecological rather than a laboratory measure of intelligence, they suggested. This can be found in an animal’s ability to innovate in its own environment, “to find a solution to a novel problem, or a novel solution to an old one.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“A narrow-minded man can lead one to devalue others, and in the end, to desperately dangerous hates of outsiders, ranging in expression from discrimination against minorities to world conflagrations,' Tolman wrote. The solution? Create broader cognitive maps in the mind that encompass bigger geographical boundaries and a wider social scope, embracing those we might consider others, and in this way encourage empathy and understanding.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“In some cities, you can find smoked cigarette butts in sparrow nests, which effectively function as a parasite repellent. Butts from smoked cigarettes retain large amounts of nicotine and other toxic substances, including traces of pesticides that repel all kinds of harmful creepy crawlies—an apparently ingenious new use of materials.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds