Last Chance to See Quotes

“We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.”

“I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings.”

“Wikipedia: Last Chance to See”

“I believe in traveling light, but then I also believe that I should give up smoking and shop early for Christmas.”

“It was hard to avoid the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was missing the point. I couldn’t even be sure it wasn’t me.”

“I didn’t notice that I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals.”

“The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.”

“So the question really is this: How do you persuade a young Yemeni that a rhino horn dagger is not a symbol of your manhood but a signal of the fact that you need such a symbol?”

“The only people who do believe it are people who’ve read somewhere that other people believe it, and are ready and willing to believe anything they hear that they like the sound of.”

“It’s easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.”

“The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realised that it was a system at all and that it wasn’t something that was just there.”

“You can’t help but try and follow an animal’s thought processes, and you can’t help, when faced with an animal like a three-ton rhinoceros with nasal passages bigger than its brain, but fail.”

“But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we’re driving.”

“I’ve heard a tape of collected kakapo noises, and it’s almost impossible to believe that it all just comes from a bird, or indeed any kind of animal. Pink Floyd studio outtakes perhaps, but not a parrot.”

““You’d think that everyone involved in conservation work would be on the same side,” said Mark after he’d gone, “but there’s just as much squabbling and bureaucracy as there is in anything else.””

“One of the first things you need to know about Richard Lewis, indeed the thing you need to know about him, is that he’s an ornithologist. Once you know that, everything else more or less falls into place.”

“The thing [Komodo dragon] is just a monitor lizard, and yet it is massive to a degree that is unreal. As it rears its head up over the fence and around as it turns, you wonder how it’s done, what trickery is involved.”

““So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly, then?” I asked.
He blinked at me as if I were stupid.
“Well, what do you think you do?” he said. “You die of course. That’s what deadly means.””

““The most poisonous spider is the Sydney funnel web. We get about five hundred people a year bitten by spiders. A lot of them used to die, so we had to develop an antidote to stop people bothering me with it all the time.””

“I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.”