Quotations
See also a new section Graphic Quotes : Photographs with quotes concerning human and animal rights, and the environment which will focus on anything motivating, uplifting or informative concerning these issues.
Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether its victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in this world... We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity
Rachel Carson
Just as there can not be peace without justice,
so there can not be peace without compassion
for every living thing because the human heart
can tolerate neither injustice nor cruelty.
Elizabeth J. Farians
Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty.
Albert Einstein
It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life. Towards this end, experiments on living animals in classrooms should be stopped. To encourage cruelty in the name of science can only destroy the finer emotions of affection and sympathy, and breed an unfeeling callousness in the young towards suffering in all living creatures.
Eleanor Roosevelt
When people go within and connect with themselves, they realize they are connected to the universe and they are connected to all living things.
Armand Dimele
The utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable.
Sir Thomas More, lawyer, statesman and author
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
Schopenhauer
If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.
James Herriot, English Veterinarian and Author
The person who kills for fun is announcing that, could he get away with it, he'd kill you for fun. Your...life may be of no consequence to anyone else but is invaluable to you because it's the only one you've got. Exactly the same is true of each individual deer, hare, rabbit, fox, fish, pheasant and butterfly. Humans should enjoy their own lives, not take others.
Brigid Brophy
...to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state”
Alphonse de Lamartine, 1865, Les Confidences, New York: Appleton & Co
W&P p.78
The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat
the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger after
sweet and gentle creatures who harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service
John Jacques Rousseau
People often say that humans have always eaten animals as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
Pythagoras
It is difficult to understand how anyone who has studied animals could come to the conclusion that they do not feel; and more difficult still to understand how any man who professes to have been moved by the compassion of God could believe and teach that we need not consider the feelings of the other species, as they are only things— "mere chattels." Yet men do believe such things, and teach them. And when we realise how much the doctrine is held in "high places," it is not to be wondered at that cruelty abounds, and our fellow-creatures are made to pass through the fire of unspeakable suffering as sacrifices to the Moloch of human lust and scientific insanity.
John Todd Ferrier, On Behalf of the Creatures; A Plea Historical, Scientific, Economic, Dynamic, Humane and Religious, "A Plea for Humaneness," 1903
Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are like us." Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are not like us." Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.
Charles R. Magel
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Samuel Butler
The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
Charles Darwin
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.
Henry David Thoreau
My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.
George Bernard Shaw
Thou shalt not kill" does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.
Leo Tolstoy
I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't.... The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.
Mark Twain
Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?
Plutarch
I think the rapidly growing tendency to regard animals as born for nothing except slavery to so-called humanity absolutely disgusting.
Sir Victor Gollancz
From beasts we scorn as soulless,
In forest, field and den,
The cry goes up to witness
The soullessness of men.
M. Frida Hartley
Man is the only creatures that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
George Orwell, Animal Farm
The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.
Hippocrates
Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer
Animals are noteworthy and miraculous, not just because they share traits with us, but because they are special and impressive in their own right.
Timothy Gentner,
Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!
Artur Schopenhauer
It was said that the 'brutes' cannot reason. Only persons who do not themselves reason about the subject, with the facts before them, can any longer occupy such a position. The evidence of reasoning power is overwhelming for the upper rank of animals, and yearly the downward limits are being extended the more the inferior tribes are studied.
Dr Wesley Mills
The old assumption that animals acted exclusively by instinct, while man had a monopoly of reason, is, we think, maintained by few people nowadays who have any knowledge at all about animals. We can only wonder that so absurd a theory could have been held for so long a time as it was, when on all sides the evidence if animals' power of reasoning is crushing.
Ernest Bell
I personally can see no reason for conceding mind to my fellow men and denying it to animals ... I at least cannot doubt that the interests and activities of animals are correlated with awareness and feeling in the same way as my own, and which may be, for aught I know, just as vivid.
Lord (Walter Russel) Brain
I am in favour of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.
Abraham Lincoln
All great movements, it is written, go through three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. It is the realisation of this third stage, adoption, that requires our passion and our discipline, our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in our hands.
Tom Regan
Those who kill “humanely” often contend that their victims suffer minimally or not at all. This contention helps ease their guilt and makes the continuation of the killing more acceptable.
Charles Patterson, 2002, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust.
See also a new section Graphic Quotes : Photographs with quotes concerning human and animal rights, and the environment which will focus on anything motivating, uplifting or informative concerning these issues.
Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether its victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in this world... We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity
Rachel Carson
Just as there can not be peace without justice,
so there can not be peace without compassion
for every living thing because the human heart
can tolerate neither injustice nor cruelty.
Elizabeth J. Farians
Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty.
Albert Einstein
It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life. Towards this end, experiments on living animals in classrooms should be stopped. To encourage cruelty in the name of science can only destroy the finer emotions of affection and sympathy, and breed an unfeeling callousness in the young towards suffering in all living creatures.
Eleanor Roosevelt
When people go within and connect with themselves, they realize they are connected to the universe and they are connected to all living things.
Armand Dimele
The utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable.
Sir Thomas More, lawyer, statesman and author
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
Schopenhauer
If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.
James Herriot, English Veterinarian and Author
The person who kills for fun is announcing that, could he get away with it, he'd kill you for fun. Your...life may be of no consequence to anyone else but is invaluable to you because it's the only one you've got. Exactly the same is true of each individual deer, hare, rabbit, fox, fish, pheasant and butterfly. Humans should enjoy their own lives, not take others.
Brigid Brophy
...to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state”
Alphonse de Lamartine, 1865, Les Confidences, New York: Appleton & Co
W&P p.78
The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat
the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger after
sweet and gentle creatures who harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service
John Jacques Rousseau
People often say that humans have always eaten animals as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
Pythagoras
It is difficult to understand how anyone who has studied animals could come to the conclusion that they do not feel; and more difficult still to understand how any man who professes to have been moved by the compassion of God could believe and teach that we need not consider the feelings of the other species, as they are only things— "mere chattels." Yet men do believe such things, and teach them. And when we realise how much the doctrine is held in "high places," it is not to be wondered at that cruelty abounds, and our fellow-creatures are made to pass through the fire of unspeakable suffering as sacrifices to the Moloch of human lust and scientific insanity.
John Todd Ferrier, On Behalf of the Creatures; A Plea Historical, Scientific, Economic, Dynamic, Humane and Religious, "A Plea for Humaneness," 1903
Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are like us." Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are not like us." Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.
Charles R. Magel
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Samuel Butler
The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
Charles Darwin
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.
Henry David Thoreau
My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.
George Bernard Shaw
Thou shalt not kill" does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.
Leo Tolstoy
I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't.... The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.
Mark Twain
Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?
Plutarch
I think the rapidly growing tendency to regard animals as born for nothing except slavery to so-called humanity absolutely disgusting.
Sir Victor Gollancz
From beasts we scorn as soulless,
In forest, field and den,
The cry goes up to witness
The soullessness of men.
M. Frida Hartley
Man is the only creatures that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
George Orwell, Animal Farm
The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.
Hippocrates
Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer
Animals are noteworthy and miraculous, not just because they share traits with us, but because they are special and impressive in their own right.
Timothy Gentner,
Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!
Artur Schopenhauer
It was said that the 'brutes' cannot reason. Only persons who do not themselves reason about the subject, with the facts before them, can any longer occupy such a position. The evidence of reasoning power is overwhelming for the upper rank of animals, and yearly the downward limits are being extended the more the inferior tribes are studied.
Dr Wesley Mills
The old assumption that animals acted exclusively by instinct, while man had a monopoly of reason, is, we think, maintained by few people nowadays who have any knowledge at all about animals. We can only wonder that so absurd a theory could have been held for so long a time as it was, when on all sides the evidence if animals' power of reasoning is crushing.
Ernest Bell
I personally can see no reason for conceding mind to my fellow men and denying it to animals ... I at least cannot doubt that the interests and activities of animals are correlated with awareness and feeling in the same way as my own, and which may be, for aught I know, just as vivid.
Lord (Walter Russel) Brain
I am in favour of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.
Abraham Lincoln
All great movements, it is written, go through three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. It is the realisation of this third stage, adoption, that requires our passion and our discipline, our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in our hands.
Tom Regan
Those who kill “humanely” often contend that their victims suffer minimally or not at all. This contention helps ease their guilt and makes the continuation of the killing more acceptable.
Charles Patterson, 2002, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust.