Section: Quotations
Subsection: Animal Rights
Last revision: December 25, 2005
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. -- Mark Twain
The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men. -- Leonardo da Vinci
Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid. -- George Bernard Shaw
I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being. -- Abraham Lincoln
It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed. It was once considered foolish to suppose that black men were really human beings and ought to be treated as such. What was once foolish has now become a recognized truth. Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life. -- Albert Schweitzer
In studying the traits and dispositions of the so-called lower animals, and contrasting them with man's, I find the result humiliating to me. -- Mark Twain
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
Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as 'sentimental', 'impractical', or 'womanish', etc., by those whose fun, profit or convenience was at stake. -- Joan Gilbert
If animal experimentation, animal dissection and any kind of animal exploitation all ended tomorrow, I don't make a f-----' dime! I am for the animals, I couldn't care less about your need to eat animals, wear them, shoot them or exploit them. Too bad if you consider it suffering to let all that self-centered and traditional bullshit stop you from having the will to help the animals.. -- Riki Rockett
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
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 (PETA director)
As custodians of the planet it is our responsibity to deal with all species with kindness, love, and compassion. That these animals suffer through human cruelty is beyond understanding. Please help to stop this madness. -- Richard Gere
May those who oppose capital punishment for humans extend that protection to animals as well. May those who oppose germ and other biological warfare work to end the unconscious biological warfare unwittingly waged on those who eat animal products. Those who are prolife would logically become vegetarian. Those who are prochoice would not want to impose their wills upon the body of a cow, sheep or pig. -- Unknown
It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of man. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of anything else. -- Maimonides
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 Edison
Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission--to be of service to them wherever they require it. -- Francis of Assisi
I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice ... While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that's all. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man. -- Albert Schweitzer
Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace. -- Albert Schweitzer
We and the beasts are kin. -- Ernest Thompson Seton
Perhaps the time has come to formulate a moral code which would govern our relations with the great creatures of the sea as well as with those on dry land. That this will come to pass is [my] dear wish. -- Jacques Cousteau
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
All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals. -- Peter Singer
No truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as men. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant. -- David Hume
How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! -- John Muir
What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? -- Jeremy Bentham
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. -- Jeremy Bentham
The worst sin towards or fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That's the essence of inhumanity. -- George Bernard Shaw
A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist and shrinks from injuring anything that lives. -- Albert Schweitzer
The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men. -- Emile Zola
Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals' suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote. -- Paul Harvey
Will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless explitation of the species in our power? -- Peter Singer, Ph.D.
The thinking person must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies. -- Albert Schweitzer
I don`t hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality, and moral choice - and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals. -- Brigid Brophy
In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people. -- Ruth Harrison, author of Animal Machines
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
When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why the should man expect mercy from God? It is unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. -- Isaac B. Singer
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. -- Mohandas Gandhi
Martin Luther King taught us all nonviolence. I was told to extend nonviolence to the mother and her calf. -- Dick Gregory
Please put the ladybug outside without harming her. (to his butler) -- Winston Churchill
I have reached zero tolerance for the cruelty against our animal brothers. If we are to nuture our culture, let's begin with the animals who have been nothing but our beasts of burden for so long. -- Riki Rockett
There can be no justification for causing suffering to animals simply to serve man's pleasure or simply to enhance man's lifestyle. -- The Dean of York
Whenever people say 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it. -- Brigid Brophy
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men. -- Alice Walker
The thinking [person] must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another... --Albert Schweitzer
Look deep into the eyes of any animal, and then for a moment, trade places, their life becomes as precious as yours and you become as vulnerable as them. Now smile if you believe all animals deserve our respect and our protection, for in a way, they are us, and we are them. --Philip Ochoa
I don't consider myself an animal rights activist or a human rights activist, because to me if you believe in the rights of one living thing, you must believe in the rights of all living things, in all of creation. -- Rod Coronado
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
If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals. -- Albert Einstein
There is something so very dreadful, so satanic in tormenting those who have never harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence nor defense, that none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of it -- Cardinal Newman
When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble. -- Buddha
Cruelty to animals is as if humans did not love God. -- Cardinal John Henry Newman
To be non-violent to human beings and to be a killer or enemy of poor animals is Satan's philosophy. In this age there is always enmity against animals, and therefore the poor creatures are always anxious. The reaction of the poor animals is being forced on human society, and therefore there is always the strain of cold or hot war between men, individually, collectively or nationally... -- Pythagoras
Out of 135 criminals, including robbers and rapists, 118 admitted that when they were children they burned, hanged and stabbed domestic animals. -- Ogonyok (1979) (Soviet anti-cruelty magazine)
I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to the protection by man from the cruelty of man. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Animals are God's creatures, not human property, nor utilities, nor resources, nor commodities, but precious beings in God's sight. ... Christians whose eyes are fixed on the awfulness of crucifixion are in a special position to understand the awfulness of innocent suffering. The Cross of Christ is God's absolute identification with the weak, the powerless, and the vulnerable, but most of all with unprotected, undefended, innocent suffering. -- Rev. Andrew Linzey
May all that have life be delivered from suffering -- Buddha
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
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feather so badly that, beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the devil in human form. -- William Ralph Inge
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilisation surveys the creatures through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, we greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. -- Henry Beston
If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them, and what you do not know you will fear. What one fears one destroys. -- Chief Dan George
Shame on such a morality 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. -- Schopenhauer
If we examine what is done to animals in the fields of vivisection and diet alone, the figures are a shocking condemnation of our indifference to others' right to life and wellbeing. Because animals lack a language we can understand, we listen only to our own thin excuses for treating them so abominably. -- Jon Wynne-Tyson
There are many noteworthy examples of ordinary evil in every culture and country around the globe, but in terms of preventable evil I am hard pressed to find any examples that approach those systematically perpetrated by humans against the members of other species. -- Lawrence Pope
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals. -- Theodor Adorno
Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages. -- Thomas Jefferson
All living beings love their life, desire pleasure, and are averse to pain; they dislike any injury to themselves; everybody is desirous of life, and to every being, his own life is very dear? This is the quintessence of wisdom: Not to injure any living being. -- From "Here's Harmlessness - An Anthology of Ahimsa"
In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought. -- Isaac Bashevis Singer
In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people. -- Ruth Harrison
All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?" -- Buddha
...there is something so very dreadful, so satanic in tormenting those who have never harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence nor defence, that none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of it. -- Cardinal Newman
Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them - without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us. -- Dr. Carl Sagan & Dr. Ann Druyan
Some will take refuge in the old cliché that humans are different from other animals. But when did a difference justify a moral prejudice? When did those with black hair have a right to mistreat those with red hair...or even those with blue or purple hair...Surely the crucial similarity that men share with other animals is the capacity to suffer? Regardless of the number of legs or the woolliness of our fur, we can all suffer... -- Richard Ryder
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
The awful wrongs and sufferings forced upon the innocent, faithful animal race, form the blackest chapter in the whole world's history. -- Edward Augustus Freeman
The dissolution of commercial animal farming as we know it obviously requires more than our individual commitment to vegetarianism. To refuse on principle to buy products of the meat industry is to do what is right, but it is not to do enough. To recognize the rights of animals is to recognize the related duty to defend them against those who violate their rights, and to discharge this duty requires more than our individual abstention. It requires acting to bring about those changes that are necessary if the rights of these animals are not to be violated. Fundamentally, then, it requires a revolution in our culture's thought about, and its accepted treatment of, farm animals... But prejudices die hard, all the more so when they are insulated by widespread secular customs and religious beliefs, sustained by large and powerful economic interests, and protected by the common law. To overcome the collective entropy of those forces against change will not be easy. The animal rights movement is not for the faint heart. -- Tom Regan
Because one species is more clever than another, does it give it the right to imprison or torture the less clever species? Does one exceptionally clever individual have a right to exploit the less clever individuals of his own species? To say that he does is to say with the Fascists that the strong have a right to abuse and exploit the weak - might is right, and the strong and ruthless shall inherit the earth. -- Richard Ryder
The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different. -- Hippocrates
Respect the old and cherish the young. Even insects, grass and trees you must not hurt. -- Attr. Ko Hung (284-363 AD)
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
If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals. -- Albert Einstein
The habit of shedding blood, or even of seeing it shed, corrupts all sentiment of humanity. -- Constantin Francois Chasseboeuf
Cruelty has cursed the human family for countless ages. It is almost impossible for one to be cruel to animals and kind to humans. If children are permitted to be cruel to their pets and other animals, they easily learn to get the same pleasure from the misery of fellow-humans. Such tendencies can easily lead to crime. -- Fred A.McGrand
An individual animal doesn't care if its species is facing extinction - it cares if it is feeling pain. -- Ronnie Lee
I am not basically a conservationist. When the last great whale is slaughtered, as it surely will be, the whales' suffering will be over. This is not the whales' loss, but man's. I am not concerned about the wiping out of a species - this is man's folly - I have only one concern, the suffering which we deliberately inflict upon animals whilst they live. -- Clive Hollands