|
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
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.
|
