ANTS QUOTES
quotations about ants
Left right left right.
We're army ants. We swarm we fight.
We have no home. We roam. We race.
You're lucky if we miss your place.
DOUGLAS FLORIAN
"The Army Ants"
So, the ant way of life is very ancient and very successful. As far as human beings are concerned, we've been around for only one million years--too soon be sure.
EDWARD O. WILSON
"Little Creatures Who Run the World", NOVA, Aug. 12, 1997
All the best work is done the way that ants do things -- by tiny but untiring and regular additions.
LAFCADIO HEARN
Ants are not only efficient, they are hard-working and thrifty, qualities which have always seemed like good reasons for seeing them as virtuous role models.
WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER
Ants
With the bugs, man, you just be looking at them. Because I was having these big ant problems in my house. It was crazy. And these are people in their own way, too. As I was studying these ant colonies infesting my house daily, I'm not kidding you, I left food out and 20 minutes later r-r-r-r-r and I'm like, man, they already know! They get it down pat! And real talk, like, seeing these ants and studying them and respecting them, it's like, man, they're in their own community too. They're trying to survive. They love. They fight. They telling themselves something. We can't understand, but one day we will. I'm trying hard to figure it out. I'm there with them.
LIL B
lecture at NYU, Apr. 11, 2012
What is it about the ant way of life that has stood the test of time so well? All ants belong to extended families, and carry their prey home to share. Unselfishness is the rule. Everything they do is for their colony's good.
BILL MASON
"Little Creatures Who Run the World", NOVA, Aug. 12, 1997
The tiny ant, a creature of great industry, drags with its mouth whatever it can, and adds it to the heap which she is piling up, not unaware nor careless of the future.
HORACE
Satires
Even the wishes of a small ant reach heaven.
JAPANESE PROVERB
Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a rebellious tribe, and I will destroy you; I will poison your nests with sweet-smelling traps.
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
You Bright and Risen Angels
It appears that ants, usually seen as the ultimate self-sacrificing workers, are also not bad at saving their own skins. Scientists have shown that ants with a life-threatening fungus are able to "self-medicate", eating a normally harmful substance that treats the condition. This form of "self-medication" in insects has been suspected in research circles but has never been proven until now, raising questions about how the ant "knows" it is sick.
JESSICA STAUFENBERG
"Ants are able to 'self-medicate' by changing diet when they are unwell in first for insect-kind", The Independent, August 22, 2015
Not all ants use violence to dominate their world, some use more subtle methods.
EDWARD O. WILSON
"Little Creatures Who Run the World", NOVA, Aug. 12, 1997
Forbear thou great good husband, little ant:
A little respite from thy flood of sweat;
Thou, thine own horse and cart under this plant
Thy spacious tent, fan thy prodigious heat;
Down with thy double load of that one grain;
It is a granarie for all thy train.
RICHARD LOVELACE
The Ant
On the lawn next to the sidewalk a fire ant colony is swarming. The ants are pouring out of a mound nest, here no more than an irregular pile of dirt partly flattened by the last pass of a lawnmower. Winged queens and males are taking off on their nuptial flight, protected by angry-looking workers that run up and down the grass blades and out onto the blistering-hot concrete of the sidewalk. The species is unmistakably Solenopsis geminata, the native fire ant.
EDWARD O. WILSON
Naturalist
The greatest enemies of ants are other ants, just as the greatest enemies of men are other men.
AUGUSTE FOREL
attributed, Ants: Their Structure, Development and Behavior
Only two great groups of animals, men and ants, indulge in highly organized mass warfare--warfare on so wide a scale that the geographic configuration of the earth becomes a factor in their operations.
CHARLES H. MASKINS
American Thought, 1947
An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.
LAO TZU
attributed, The Book of Uncommon Quips and Quotations
This isn't a war. It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.
H. G. WELLS
The War of the Worlds
The amazing thing is that they communicate mostly with chemicals, with substances that they pass back and forth, and taste and smell. I can communicate directly with the ants myself--these fire ants on the table--simply by taking an extract of the bodies of several of the workers, dipping this sharpened stick in, and laying a trail on the table for them to follow. And they'll go wherever I tell them. Each one of these fire ants has only a billionth of a gram--That's ten billionths of an ounce--of that substance in its body. And yet, the material is so powerful that a milligram of it is theoretically enough to lead a column of the ants three times around the world.
EDWARD O. WILSON
"Little Creatures Who Run the World", NOVA, Aug. 12, 1997
Still we live meanly, like ants ... our life is frittered away by detail.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
It wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it.
DON MARQUIS
Archy Does His Part