I've become a much more serious young insect.

Planting native species in our gardens and communities is increasingly important, because indigenous insects, birds and wildlife rely on them. Over thousands, and sometimes millions, of years they have co-evolved to live in local climate and soil conditions.

People have a fear of the unknown. Insects have different senses than us, different amount of limbs and their body structure is very different. It's hard for us to really relate to them and understand them.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.

Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.

Evolution, dismissed as a sloppy programmer, has seen fit to create us as a wild amalgam of everything that came before us: except for the realm of insects, the whole history of life on earth is inscribed within our bodies.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

There's this shop in New York I go to; it has bones and fossils and insects that are like works of art. I have a few on my wall.

I was more of, like, into butterflies, insects, playing out in the yard, planting flowers. I was really into plants.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

I was so intrigued by insects and things that crawled or flew - I could spend hours by myself in a vacant lot.

Some men spend their lives watching bees and ants, noting down the habits of these insects; my pleasure is to watch the human mind, noting how unselfish instincts rise to the surface and sink back again, making way for selfish instincts, each equally necessary, for the world would perish were it to become entirely selfish or entirely unselfish.

In a broader sense, the rhythms of nature, large and small - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music.

I had been obsessed with insects and creepy-crawlies: I used to get up at five o'clock in the morning and go out into this field behind our garden and collect insects before everyone else got up, and suddenly, all I wanted to know about was music. It just seemed a very, very strange thing.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life - but there was no one to tell me.

Not enough people know what Lyme disease is and the dangers of being bitten by an insect.

I've always felt that specialization is best left to the insects.

In temperate zones, winter is the best insecticide; it keeps the bugs in check. The tropics enjoy no such respite, so plants there have developed a wide range of alkaloids that kill off nosy insects and animals.

I think the greatest giant insect movie ever made is 'Them!'

Insects are living metaphors for me. They are so alien and so remote and so perfect, but also they are emotionless; they don't have any human or mammalian instincts. They'll eat their young at the drop of a hat; they can eat your house! There's no empathy - none.

It's easy for me to go back to being a kid. You know how kids can be like savages before they get civilized? There's that sadist quality. Y'know, like boys who like to pick apart an insect for the sake of it.

When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house. And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just phenomenal.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

I never kill insects. If I see ants or spiders in the room, I pick them up and take them outside. Karma is everything.

Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.

Nature is full of drama. I know nothing about biology, about birds, about insects, about the details of politics. I just make movies about human interest stories.

If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.