"You won't walk into a store and steal food. But people think it's ok to steal music."

“Human relationships with predators have always been thorny. Predators are the first creatures our kind purposely eradicates. Too often, people feel humans are and should be in control; we are enraged to discover this is not true. And when other creatures share our appetites and kill our livestock (often animals we were raising to kill, ourselves), we call them vandals and murderers...Predators are the most persecuted creatures on Earth.”

“This is a comment on fear. Today it's like 'They're going to bomb the New York subway and there's the avian flu and 50 million of us are going to die.' We wanted to make fun of that fear-based culture we've been plunged into. And Halloweens the perfect metaphor for fear.”

“What the podcast novelists do isnt all that different from what self-publishers do. We put the books out in different formats, but the goal is the same: build an audience and attract a publisher.”

“In his attempt to develop the beauty he sees, the artist develops himself.”

“To write a book such as Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn is a formidable undertaking. You must accumulate thousands of facts and spare no detail, no matter how terrible. It is always easier to write a piece of fluff and leave everybody smiling. But then, the horrors of poaching would continue unchallenged?like as tent caterpillars consuming an apple orchard, our species mindlessly consumes the others of the earth. At present, the most significant hope for our planet may be knowledge, and Richard Ellis has done a heroic job in providing a large measure of that.”

“Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.”

“If we would vote in mass on the more promising ticket, or, if the two are equally bad, would throw out the party that is in, and wait till the next election and then throw out the other party that is in - then, I say, the commercial politician would feel a demand for good government and he would supply it.”

Source : Lincoln Steffens (2012). “The Shame of the Cities”, p.6, Courier Corporation

“Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.”