>These monkeys scuttling up the tree of knowledge in dread of their lives might be recommended not to look so much into the mangled entrails of a living animal, but rather with some calm and penetration into its eye; here perchance the scientific searcher would for the first time find expressed the thing most worthy man: namely truthfulness, the impossibility of a lie; and peering deeper, he might catch the lofty accents of Nature's grief at his own deplorably sinful presumption; for the scientific jokes he cracks the poor beast takes in bitter earnest.
— Richard Wagner, Against Vivisection
