Quotes

QUOTES

General Quotes

• "The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our dominant position."
  - Christine Stevens
• "Don't do nothing because you can't do everything. Do Something. Anything"
  - Sasha
• "Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
  - Thomas A. Edison
• "Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight."
  - Albert Schweitzer
• "Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account?"
  - Jean Paul Richter
• "The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot."
  - Mark Twain
• "It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.
  - Mark Twain
• All the arguments to prove man's superiority can not shatter this hard fact: In suffering, the animals are our equals.
  - Peter Singer (Animal Liberation)
• There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties... The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.
  - Charles Darwin
• "As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right."
  - Isaac Bashevis Singer
• "As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together. "
  - Isaac Bashevis Singer
• "If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth - beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals - would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?"
  - Attributed to George Bernard Shaw
• "From beasts we scorn as souless,
  In forest, field and den,
  The cry goes up to witness
  The soullessness of men."
  - M. Frida Hartley
• "When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble."
  - Buddha
• "Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored. "
  - Alice Walker
• "The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans anymore than black people were made for whites or women for men."
  - Alice Walker
• "We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace." - Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization
• "Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages." - Thomas Edison
• If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.
  - Albert Einstein
• I am in favour of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.
  - Abraham Lincoln
• The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated
  - Gandhi, the Moral Basis of Vegetarianism
• "When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."
  - Ingrid Newkirk
• " The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
  - Jeremy Bentham
• "Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character; and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man. "
  - Arthur Schopenhauer
• "Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage."
  - Sri Aurobindo
• "There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is."
  - Isaac Bashevis Singer
• "Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. "
  - Albert Einstein
• "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
• "The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever."
  - Ashley Montague
• "At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society."
  - Arthur Conan Doyle

Vivisection

• "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
• "I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures." - Christian Barnard, surgeon
• "If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reason." - C.S. Lewis
• "Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character." - George Bernard Shaw
• "Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research."
  --George Bernard Shaw
• "Doctors who speak out in favour of vivisection do not deserve any recognition in society, all the more so since their brutality is apparent not only during such experiments, but also in their practical medical lives. They are mostly men who stop at nothing in order to satisfy their ruthless and unfeeling lust for honours and gain. "
  --Dr. Hugo Knecht
• "I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence." - Mahatma Gandhi
• "Vivisection is the blackest of all the black crimes that a man is at present committing against God and his fair creation. It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practise elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures."--Mohandas Gandhi

Diet

• "The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of great compassion. "--Mahaparinirvana
• "Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own."--Robert Louis Stevenson
• "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
• "A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral."--Leo Tolstoy
• "Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends. "--George Bernard Shaw
• "I brainwashed youngsters into doing wrong. I want to say sorry to children everywhere for selling out to concerns who make millions by murdering animals."
  --Geoffrey Guiliano, the main Ronald McDonald actor in the 1980's who quit and publicly apologised
• "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we're not contributing to their pain." --Paul and Linda McCartney
• "But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy."--Plutarch
• "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."--Albert Einstein
• When we kill the animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings.
  --William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of The American Journal of Cardiology
• "I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."--Leonardo Da Vinci
• "I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb." --Vaslav Nijinsky
• "Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you anymore."--Franz Kafka
• "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."-Leo Tolstoy, author
• "To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body." --Mohandas Gandhi
• "We are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for?" --George Bernard Shaw (Living Graves, published 1951)
• "To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime." ~Romain Rolland, Nobel Prize 1915
• "It's just that I have this funny objection to torturing small animals no matter how scrumptious their body parts might be. ... Our food industries are equal opportunity abusers: cows, chickens, pigs, and a special mention to those little calves who for their short, miserable lives are locked into crates too small to allow movement just so we can eat veal." ~ Ron Reagan
• "We stopped eating meat many years ago. During the course of a Sunday lunch we happened to look out of the kitchen window at our young lambs playing happily in the fields. Glancing down at our plates, we suddenly realized that we were eating the leg of an animal who had until recently been playing in a field herself. We looked at each other and said, "Wait a minute, we love these sheep--they're such gentle creatures. So why are we eating them?" It was the last time we ever did." --Linda and Paul McCartney

Religion

• Thou shalt not kill.
  --Exodus 20:13
• He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man...
  --Isaiah 66:3
• And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed: to you it shall be as meat....
  --Genesis 1:29
• "God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages." - Jacques Deval, Afin De vivre bel et bien
• "We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form." - William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922
• "Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?" - Pierre Troubetzkoy
• "Christian morality contains the great and essential imperfection of taking into consideration only man, and leaving the entire animal world without right." - Arthur Schopenhauer
• "If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." - St. Francis of Assisi
• "God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear,
  To give sign, we and they are His children, one family here."
  - Robert Browning

Other

• "No one in the world needs a mink coat but a mink." - Murray Banks
• "Cruelty is one fashion statement we can all do without." - Rue McClanahan
• "Get a feel for fur: Slam your fingers in a car door." Anon (on use of steel traps to capture fur-bearing animals)
• "Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow- creatures is amusing in itself." - James Anthony Froude, Oceana, 1886