Best 10 quotes of Michael Tobias on MyQuotes

Any rational human being is horrified and existentially baffled by the reality of the Holocaust meted out by the Nazis, by the majority of Germans throughout the 1930s and World War II; and by the countless countries, communities and individuals who collaborated with the vast constellation of Hitler's monsters in the gruesome murder of well over 60% of European Jewry. Codex Orféo reminds us that the root of that insanity is continuing in the form of contemporary Holocausts against other species, with equally systematic, atrocious and inexplicable madness.

Codex Orféo is something you won't see coming at you, but it does. It's all about kindness to other species, and to one another. If we can work that out, the world will take care of herself.

I find contemporary Holocausts against other species so unbearable as to make life itself a fundamental question mark. Are we a demonic, suicidal species? Can good conquer evil? And if so, when will that renaissance of virtue occur? This is truly "psychology today.

I write both, as you know, dozens of ecological and social scientific and historical works, dozens of novels. It's hard to describe a novel that grapples with the horrors of World War II as anything but grueling. But Codex Orféo is somehow...well, I hope, riveting for readers. Deeply provocative. Cinematic in a nearly surreal sense.

Non-violent ecological activism, scientific research and art are pillars of my experience. But I am also a story-teller. I merge science, and my passion for literature whenever possible if it helps me to wrestle demons, and to more effectively communicate what I believe to be most important to our lives.

Poetry, song, stories, art, our reverence for nature, are key to our survival as a species, and to the survival of all species, I believe. You can't always extract such emphatic hunches and activist stances from a scientific maxim or mathematical axiom.

The Holocaust most assuredly challenges any and all faith in God. Faith in humanity. Faith in nature. Faith in the future. I don't "tell" young people anything. I ask them to consider many things, particularly, their assumptions regarding their natural obligations to be loving towards all living beings. Many of my works - both literary and film - are fictional, like Codex Orféo. And that's because the genre has always allowed me to suggest things that are opinions, spiritual impulses and intuitions, not necessarily provable.

We often speak of "deep ecology," but this is also Deep Eco-Psychology: how the environment can remind us of, and help mend, mental and psychic wounds.

When you ask about "mission" it is easy to reference a "mission statement" which, in my case, is the quest, however Quixotic, at times, to sensitize everyone I am in contact with to the miracle of life on Earth, and our sacred responsibilities to preserve, protect and revere biodiversity, at every possible juncture of our days and nights. We have very little time.

I remember one bobcat they had in here - now bobcats are an endangered species in this neck of the woods - they'd caught it somewhere and they must have put that cat through a dozen rounds of burn experiments before they finally determined that it was utterly useless to them. Like an empty beer can. And then you know what they did to it? Claudius was late for a lunch date so rather thanput the destroyed but still breathing animal to sleep, he picked it up by its hind legs and simply smashed its head against a wall repeatedly until it was dead. How can I forget it: I was the one told to clean up the mess. The head dented in. The eyes slowly closing. The once proud claws hanging down, stunned and lifeless, the utter senselessness of it all, and the hate, a hatred that was consummated in me which is as dangerous a hormone, or chemical, or portion of the brain, as any neutron bomb. Except that I didnt know how to explode. I was like a computer without a keyboard, a bird without wings. Roaring inside. I wanted to kill that man. To do unto others what they had done unto me. I was that bobcat, you better believe it.