Elephants are the biggest land mammals on earth. When in the vicinity of one of their habitats, you don't have to look too far to spot one. Their long trunks and fan-shaped ears, with their tusks that sometimes act like a second hand, are enough to give them away. Our selection of elephant quotes talks about the majesty of these amazing creatures and why we should protect them.
Elephants are also impressively smart. They are highly intelligent with brains that are four times the size of the human brain. But the most amazing thing about elephants isn't their size. It's their socially complex nature that in one way mirrors who we are as humans. Elephants can feel, mourn, express love, and so much more.
Yet, as wonderful as these animals are, they are on the brink of extinction. According to this BBC report, there are less than 400,000 elephants left. Without conscious actions to protect them, these peaceful creatures may have no place in the future of our ecosphere.
Here are some quotes to remind you of the nature of elephants and why we must continue caring for them. For more elephant inspiration check out our list of amazing elephant facts.
If elephants didn't exist, you couldn't invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense.
Lyall Watson was a South African botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, and ethologist. Watson authored many books, including his famous best seller Supernature (amazon). Watson had an early fascination for nature, a feeling that was reflected in his works as a widely celebrated biologist author.
Elephants have such a unique combination of characteristics. For instance, African Elephants can detect vibrations in the ground that come from miles away because of the sensory cells in their feet.
The threat of extinction is more real than many realise. And the damage done to elephants directly leads to destruction of the ecosystem.
Li Bingbing is a Chinese actress and singer who is famous for her acts in The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010), and Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014, all on Amazon). She is also an environmental activist and one of the founders of the two-year One-million tree project, aiming to improve climatic conditions and living standards in Gansu Province, South-West China.
The elephant count has seen a disappointing decline due to poaching and habitat destruction. If we don't stop this rot and oppression suffered by elephants, it'll not only be the end of elephants but other animals and useful plants that depend on the big guy too.
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.
Edward Graydon Carter is a Canadian journalist and co-founder of the satirical monthly magazine Spy. Graydon Carter wrote extensively on the maltreatment and inappropriate killings of African elephants in Africa in the Vanity Fair.
Like humans, elephants are emotional creatures. They feel pain. They show love. When they lose someone they love, they show empathy and never leave the side of their dead companions for days. When they finally leave, they may return again to pay homage to their bones. Nothing can be more humane than that.
Elephants are magnificient creatures.
Paul Craig Roberts is an American economist and author, as well as, a teacher. Roberts is a stiff opponent of US foreign policy. He received credit as the primary author of the original draft of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. Roberts was the United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Ronald Reagan.
Elephants are not just elegant creatures. They are spectacular and one of a kind. They are highly sensitive and caring animals. Like humans, adult elephants love to nurse and nurture their babies. When a baby elephant cries, the entire herd will caress the baby with its trunk to comfort it.
I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer. Many knew Coward for his wit, flamboyance, pose, and poise. He was also famous for his plays and musicals. He also worked in the Secret Service using his influence to persuade the American public to come to Britain's aid during the Second World War.
Elephants may have poor eyesight compared to humans, but they remember faces. Elephants have the surprising, yet stunning ability to recall things from the past. According to researchers, it's one of those beautiful traits that make them live up to 80 years. Another remarkable thing about elephants is that they can recognize and keep track of the location of 30 traveling companions. We can't really say the same about humans.
I hate to witness animals in captivity - or see circus elephants paraded down the streets. When animals are caged, it's a loss of what they are.
K.A Applegate is an American young adult and children's fiction writer. Applegate's most popular books are science fiction, fantasy, and adventure novels. Applegate’s 2012 novel The One and Only Ivan won the 2013 Newbery Medal. Her book Home of the Brave has won several awards (both on Amazon).
According to PETA.org, ‘owners’ ripped most of the animals in captivity (circuses and zoos) today away from their families as baby elephants from the wild. Then they forced the elephants to learn tricks in chains. Physically difficult tricks that could lead to crippling injuries. Applegate speaks against this inhumaneness in this Elephant quote. Especially against a very humane animal like the elephant.
Earlier, 100,000 elephants lived in Kenya and we didn't have any noteworthy problem with it. The problem that we have is not that there are now more elephants.
Richard Erskine Frere Leakey is a Kenyan palaeoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician. Leakey has held a number of official positions in Kenya, especially in areas such as archaeology and wildlife conservation. Leakey is the founder of the NGO WildlifeDirect and is the chairman of the Kenya Wildlife Service.
Elephants face a huge threat because daily they're constantly hunted down by poachers for their ivory. This shameful act has since seen the number of elephants in the world today drop. Though most countries and animal lovers are doing all they can to protect elephants, we can still do more.
Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.
Frans de Waal is a Dutch primatologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. de Waal is widely known for his contributions to the controversial issue of primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.
When we think of animals that are closest to us in the ways they interact socially, the first that comes to our minds are the apes. However, like apes, elephants are just as friendly and smart even though they walk on all fours. Elephants can point using their trunks even without being taught, an unimaginable feat most intelligent animals have struggled to master.
Surrounded by a burgeoning human population, Asian elephants have to contend with the spread of settlements and farming, and the demands of rapidly developing nations: plantations, mines, railways, and irrigation canals have carved up former wilderness.
Mark Roland Shand was a British travel writer and conservationist, and the brother of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. He was the chairman of Elephant Family, a wildlife foundation, which he co-founded in 2002. Shand became actively involved in the conservation of elephants, especially Asian elephants.
As our population continues to inflate, there is a growing need to continue to develop, expand and tear down more trees and wildlife habitats to construct roads and more houses. When this happens, we displace animals, like the elephants, from their natural habitats and risk getting them killed by poachers. Instead, we can find improved and effective ways to live together with these beautiful creatures without destroying their natural homes.
I've known elephants with broken hearts, others with depression.
Shand speaks to the humaneness of elephants in this elephant quote. At some point in our lives, we may endure long bouts of depression over troubling issues. Sadly, elephants feel the same way too, especially when we steal them away from their families and lock them up.
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.
Edward Graydon Carter is a Canadian journalist and co-founder of the satirical monthly magazine Spy. Graydon Carter wrote extensively on the maltreatment and inappropriate killings of African elephants in Africa in the Vanity Fair.
Elephants face grave danger. As the demand for ivory continues to surge in places like Asia and North America, the number of elephants has diminished. Altogether, this threatens their existence and the economic benefits (wildlife attractions, source of employment...) they provide for us.
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.
Robert Edward Turner III is an American producer and philanthropist. Many heard of Turner because of his pledge of $1billion to the United Nations. Turner is an environmentalist and primarily raises bison. Other important wildlife species on some of his property include whitetail deer, wild turkey, and bobwhite quail.
Life is beautiful because it offers a unique blend of what we know as nature. Imagine if we continue to strip these things away. Preserving our environment and everything in it is part of who we are. It is our identity and we should make it our obligation to make it a safer and better place not just for ourselves, but for the animals too.
Elephants are constantly under threat. Their numbers are reducing daily because poaching is difficult to monitor and control. Thankfully, there are ways we can protect these precious animals. Start by refusing to buy from, and reporting people who sell ivory products. Also, you can make voluntary donations to groups run by people who have dedicated their lives to protecting elephants.
Our elephants are under siege because of an illegal international market that has driven ivory prices in the region up significantly. I call upon the international community to join us in this fight.
Save the elephants, and then you save the forest - and then you save yourself.
We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.
Maybe our best family trip started at Victoria Falls, which drenches you with spray and is so vast that it makes Niagara Falls seem like a backyard creek. Then we rented a car and made our way to Hwange National Park, which was empty of people but crowded with zebras, giraffes, elephants and more.
You can look at your dog and see that it's thinking and has strong feelings. And if it does, so do wolves. And if wolves do, so do elephants. People aren't the only beings that think and feel.
I don't know where I learned elephants like their tongues slapped. Whatever turns you on.
Elephants are like humans. They are very smart, very logical.
People don't realize how amazing elephants are.
The question of one versus two species of African elephants isn't about settling an arcane DNA argument; it's about life or death for these majestic, extraordinary creatures.
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.
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.
We know African and Asian elephants can interbreed, and they're separated by 5 million to 6 million years.
More than two million years ago, mammoths and Asian elephants took different evolutionary paths - and around the same time, according to DNA research, so did their lumbering relatives in Africa.
Sumatra has these lush forests and huge, amazing creatures like elephants, orangutans, and tigers. They're disappearing because of industry coming in and cutting down the forests.
I'm not much for cats. I'm terrified of mice. I've worked a lot with elephants, and they are extremely intelligent and sensitive, and thankfully, they seem to like me. You never want to get on the bad side of an elephant. And never trust a chimp.
Elephants are social, thoughtful animals. They live in communities and - I have to say it - in matriarchal societies. They bear no grudge, but they remember well.
At independence, Tanzania had 350,000 elephants... in 1987, there were only 55,000 elephants left.
Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget.
African elephants have long been thought of as a single species, but a critical mass of genetic studies now proves there are two.
Elephants are not human, of course. They are something much more ancient and primordial, living on a different plane of existence. Long before we arrived on the scene, they worked out a way of being in the world that has not fundamentally changed and is sustainable, and not predatory or destructive.
There are 13 Asian countries that still have elephants, and Elephant Family is looking to invest in further projects that will be the most critical for saving elephants while there is still time.
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.
Without elephants, Africa's landscape would be unrecognizable, yet these animals have fallen by the hundreds of thousands as a result of two enormous waves of poaching in this century - one in the 1970s and 1980s, the other, beginning around 2009, now underway.
Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary.
Elephants have the largest brains of any mammal on the face of the Earth. They are creative, altruistic and kind.
Illegal killings of elephants are being linked to organized crime and the funding of armed militia groups. Many consumers in Asia do not realize that by buying ivory, they are playing a role in the illegal wildlife trade and its serious consequences.
Elephants and grandchildren never forget.
Elephants seek food elsewhere if their route is blocked, and raiding crops and grain stores brings them into conflict with people, often resulting in deaths on both sides.
Elephants can live to an age of up to 70 or 80 years and they have a good memory. It could be they come across an area that is experiencing a drought. Then they continue on their path and run into people.
Elephants love to play around. They are very intelligent animals. They have a strong bond, at times stretching to several decades, with their mahouts.
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.
Vulcan Inc. is a unique organization that unites commercial, philanthropic, research, policy, and technology innovation. Our goals are ambitious - from saving Africa's elephants to unlocking the secrets of the human brain to building sustainable communities and opening up access to space.
So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us. Because the planet doesn't need to be saved. It doesn't care if all the squirrels, elephants, and trees die and there's just a couple of amoebas floating around at the poles.
I love elephants! It's my favorite animal.
Elephants are contagious.
I really enjoyed staying at an encampment at the top of a hill in the Samburu Reserve in Kenya. You reach it on a small plane; there is no electricity, no city noises and you sleep and shower under the Milky Way, with moths fluttering around a kerosene lamp, knowing that there are elephants and lions roaming free in the valley.
The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look 'natural,' but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert.
Animals are everywhere. Some are more romantic, like tigers and elephants and chimpanzees, and some are less romantic, like earthworms, but they are just as interesting.
We know about the socially complex lives of elephants: how they communicate, how they bond, how they even seem to grieve. We have ethologists in the field and activists on the ground to thank for that knowledge.
Preventing ongoing extinction of elephants, rhinoceroses, and other threatened species is critically important. By all means, we must set priorities for allocating finite conservation resources.
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.
We read our children stories starring elephants and monkeys and bears to teach them about nobility, curiosity and courage, to warn them against selfishness and stubbornness.
No one in the world needs an elephant tusk but an elephant.
~ Thomas Schmidt
Only elephants should own ivory.
~ Yao Ming
She owned the road as an elephant owns the veldt and like a big blue elephant moved with massive grace and dignity.
~ David Drake
Of all African animals, the elephant is the most difficult for man to live with… I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange such as mow grass…
~ Peter Matthiessen
He who mounts a wild elephant goes where the elephant goes.
~ Randolph Bourne
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
My roommate got a pet elephant. Then it got lost. It's in the apartment somewhere.
~ Steven Wright
They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light spirits at the end.
~ Robert R. McCammon
Without being an elephant sycophant, it is relevant to note that an infant elephant is a lieutenant giant.
~ Vincent Okay Nwachukwu
All around the edges of the platform where she sat, elephants stood patiently waiting for their breakfast. Occasionally, one would grunt or snort or flap its ears, but otherwise, they were as quiet as apparitions.
~ Dawn Reno Langley
When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.
~ Karen Joy Fowler
Wallowing was for elephants, depressing people, and depressing elephants.
~ Cassandra Clare
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