Man embraces in his makeup all the natural orders; he's a squid, a mollusk, a sucker and a buzzard; sometimes he's a cerebrate.

Fischer’s line is a sardonic, quasi-biological inventory of human behavior. By saying that a man can be “a squid, a mollusk, a sucker and a buzzard,” he collapses moral and social types into animal metaphors: the grasping, the spineless, the gullible, the scavenging. The final turn—“sometimes he’s a cerebrate”—suggests that rational, higher mental life is only intermittent, not the default. The quote thus reads as a critique of human pretensions to consistent reason or nobility, emphasizing instead the mixed, layered inheritance of instinct, appetite, and opportunism that can dominate conduct.