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  "title": "Last Chance to See",
  "slug": "last-chance-to-see",
  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see",
  "json": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see.json",
  "markdown": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see.md",
  "author": {
    "name": "Douglas Adams",
    "slug": "douglas-adams",
    "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams"
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      "slug": "on-the-kakapos",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/on-the-kakapos",
      "text": "[On the kakapo’s tendency to freeze in confusion when faced with a predator:] It’s frustrating to think of the difference that language would make. The millennia crawl by pretty bloody slowly while natural selection sifts its way through generation after generation, favouring the odd aberrant kakapo, which is a little twitchier than its contemporaries, till the species as a whole finally gets the idea. It would all be cut short in a moment if one of them could say, “When you see one of those things with whiskers and little bitey teeth, run like hell.” On the other hand, human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.",
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/i-have-a-well-deserved",
      "text": "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.",
      "language": "en",
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      "page": 38,
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      "slug": "i-was-feeling",
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      "text": "I was feeling pretty raw about my own species because we presume to draw a distinction between what we call good and what we call evil. We find our images of what we call evil in things outside ourselves, in creatures that know nothing of such matters, so that we can feel revolted by them, and, by contrast, good about ourselves.",
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      "page": 48,
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      "slug": "it-bothers-me-when",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/it-bothers-me-when",
      "text": "It bothers me when they make up these colourful answers. I wish I could make them understand that if they don’t know the answer, or they think the right answer isn’t very interesting, it’s better to say so rather than just invent absolute nonsense.",
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      "page": 76,
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      "slug": "i-remembered-once",
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      "text": "I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.\n\n“So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.\n\n“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.\n\n“But it’s been burned down?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“Twice.”\n\n“Many times.”\n\n“And rebuilt.”\n\n“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”\n\n“With completely new materials.”\n\n“But of course. It was burned down.”\n\n“So how can it be the same building?”\n\n“It is always the same building.”\n\nI had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.\n\nI couldn’t feel entirely comfortable with this view, because it fought against my basic Western assumptions, but I did see the point.",
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      "slug": "we-are-not",
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      "text": "We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.",
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      "slug": "the-great-thing",
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      "text": "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.",
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      "slug": "its-easy-to-think",
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      "text": "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.",
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/douglas-adams/last-chance-to-see/wildlife-conservation-is-always",
      "text": "Wildlife conservation is always a race against time. As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read.",
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      "slug": "the-only-people",
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      "text": "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.",
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      "slug": "the-system-by-which",
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      "text": "The system by which Zaïre works, and which this card [a card urging Zaireans to be helpful to foreigners] was a wonderfully hopeless attempt to correct, is very simple. Every official you encounter will make life as unpleasant as he possibly can until you pay him to stop it. In U.S. dollars. He then passes you on to the next official, who will be unpleasant to you all over again.",
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      "text": "I began to feel how patronising it was of us to presume to judge their intelligence, as if ours was any kind of standard by which to measure. I tried to imagine instead how he saw us, but of course that’s almost impossible to do, because the assumption you end up making as you try to bridge the imaginative gap are, of course, your own, and the most misleading assumptions are the ones you don’t even know you’re making.",
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      "slug": "it-was-hard",
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      "text": "It was hard to avoid the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was missing the point. I couldn’t even be sure it wasn’t me.",
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      "slug": "the-system-of-life",
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      "text": "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.",
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      "text": "I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings.",
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      "slug": "so-the-question",
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      "text": "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?",
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      "text": "Like most colonies, Zaïre had impose on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function of which was to refer decisions upward to its colonial masters. Local officials rarely had the power to do things, only to prevent them from being done until bribed. So once the colonial masters are removed, the bureaucracy continues to thrash around like a headless chicken with nothing to do but trip itself up, bump into things, and, when it can get the firepower, shoot itself in the foot. You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able to find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.",
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      "text": "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.",
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      "text": "Up until that point [the extinction of the dodo] it hadn’t really clicked with man that an animal could just cease to exist. It was as if we hadn’t realised that if we kill something, it simply won’t be there any more. Ever. As a result of the extinction of the dodo we are sadder and wiser.",
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      "text": "I watched the gorilla’s eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don’t listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn’t been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.",
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      "text": "Assumptions are the things you don’t know you’re making, which is why it is so disorienting the first time you take the plug out of a washbasin in Australia and see the water spiraling down the hole the other way around. The very laws of physics are telling you how far you are from home.",
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      "text": "We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphising animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions on to them, where they were inappropriate and didn’t fit. We simply had no idea what it was like being an extremely large lizard, and neither, for that matter, did the lizard, because it was not self-conscious about being an extremely large lizard, it just got on with the business of being one. To react with revulsion to its behaviour was to make the mistake of applying criteria that are only appropriate to the business of being human. We each make our own accommodation with the world and learn to survive in it in different ways. What works as successful behaviour for us does not work for lizards, and vice versa.",
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      "text": "I’ve never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime.",
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      "text": "When we told our guide that we didn’t want to go to all the tourist places, he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don’t want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists. Which is not to say that we weren’t tourists every bit as much as the others, but it does highlight the irony that everything you go to see is changed by the very action of going to see it, which is the sort of problem which physicists have been wrestling with for most of this century.",
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