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Quotations
General
"True benevolence or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathises with the distress of every creature capable of sensation."
~Joseph Addison
"I am sometimes asked "Why do you spend so much of your time and money talking about kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to men?" I answer: "I am working at the roots."
~George T.Angell
"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
"Isn't man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife- birds, kangaroos, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes, and dingoes- by the million in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billions and eats them. This in turn kills man by the million, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative- and fatal- health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kill so easily and so violently, and yet once a year sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth."
~C. David Coats, author of Old MacDonald's Factory Farm
"The love for all living creatures is the noblest attribute of man."
~Charles Darwin
"Animals do feel like us, also joy, love, fear and pain but they cannot grasp the spoken word. It is our obligation to take their part and continue to resist the people who profit by them, who slaughter them and who torture them."
~Denis De Roughement
"There can be no justification for causing suffering to animals simply to serve mans' pleasure or simply to enhance mans' lifestyle."
~The Dean of York
"Any society which does not insist upon respect for all life must necessarily decay."
~Albert Einstein
"The awful wrongs and sufferings forced upon the innocent, helpless, faithful animal race form the blackest chapter in the whole world's history."
~Edward Freeman
"Strictly speaking, no activity and no industry is possible without a certain amount of violence, no matter how little. Even the very process of living is impossible without a certain amount of violence. What we have to do is to minimize it to the greatest extent possible."
~Mahatma Gandhi
"...what has been called the "Golden Rule" should be enlarged from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom."
~Thomas Hardy
"...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 sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people."
~Ruth Harrison
"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
"He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals"
~Immanuel Kant
"Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals."
~Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
"The tendency to cruelty should be watched in children and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing other animals will, by degrees, harden their hearts even toward man. Children should from the beginning be brought up in an abhorrence of killing or tormenting living beings."
~John Locke
"You do not like to suffer yourself. How can you inflict suffering on others?"
~Ramana Maharishi
"All beings seek for happiness; so let your compassion extend itself to all."
~Mahavamsa
"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
"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
"The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals."
~Friedrich Nietzsche
"For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love"
~Pythagorus
"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
"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
"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."
~Arthur Schopenhauer
"Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight."
~Dr. Albert Schweitzer
"Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives."
~Dr. Albert Schweitzer
"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..."
~Dr. Albert Schweitzer
"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
"Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it."
~Mark Twain
"Cruelty to animals is one of the most significant vices of a low and ignoble people."
~Alexander von Humboldt
"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 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
Vivisection
"Results from animal tests are not transferable between species, and therefore cannot guarantee product safety for humans...In reality these tests do not provide protection for consumers from unsafe products, but rather they are used to protect corporations from legal liability."
~Herbert Gundersheimer, M.D.
"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
"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 OK to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction."
~Professor Charles R.Magel
"The reason why I am against animal research is because it doesn't work, it has no scientific value and every good scientist knows that."
~Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, M.D.
"Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character."
~George Bernard Shaw
Vegetarian/Vegan
"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of `real food for real people,' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital."
~Neal D. Barnard, M.D.
"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
"I went snorkeling and noticed how gently the fish welcomed us into their world.. as compared to the violence with which we welcomed them into ours. I became a vegetarian."
~Syndee Brinkman
"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."
~Samuel Butler
"Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?"
~Peter Cheeke
"Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists."
~Stephen Clark
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The most violent weapon on earth is the table fork."
~Mahatma Gandhi
"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, Ronald McDonald actor in the 1980's
"I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat."
~Tenzin Gyatso
"Suppose that tomorrow 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 they have the right to treat you as you treat the animals you breed, keep and kill for food?"
~John Harris
"How good it is to be well-fed, healthy, and kind all at the same time."
~Henry J. Heimlich
"As soon as I realized that I didn't need meat to survive or to be in good health, I began to see how forlorn it all is. If only we had a different mentality about the drama of the cowboy and the range and all the rest of it. It's a very romantic notion, an entrenched part of American culture, but I've seen, for example, pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and their hysteria and panic was something I shall never forget."
~Cloris Leachman
"To become a vegetarian, it is not necessary to make an oath of allegiance to the Great Turnip over a sack of soybeans. All one needs to do is to make the decision and alter their diet. This can be done gradually or all at once, depending on the strength and urgency of one's beliefs."
~Blanche Leonardo, Ph.D.
"Compassion is the foundation of everything positive, everything good. If you carry the power of compassion to the marketplace and the dinner table, you can make your life really count."
~Rue McClanahan
"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
"While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?"
~George Bernard Shaw
"To be a vegetarian is to disagree -- to disagree with the course of things today. Starvation, world hunger, cruelty, waste, wars -- we must make a statement about these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it is a good one."
~Issac Bashevis Singer
"A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses."
~George Bernard Shaw
"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals."
~Henry David Thoreau
"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
"As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out."
~Alice Walker
Hunting
"Do not kill any animal for pleasure, see harmony in nature, and lend a helping hand to all living creatures."
~Hindu Proverb
"They were shooting pigeons...How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain. At one moment -- graceful, mysterious, desirable and free -- and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion."
~Iris Murdoch
"Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they're in the game."
~Paul Rodriguez
"When a man wants to murder a tiger it is called a sport, when the tiger wants to murder him it is called ferocity."
~Geroge Bernard Shaw
"The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest."
~Henry David Thoreau
Entertainment
"We would consider it cruel to confine a dog permanently in a kennel. Yet we visit zoos where hundreds of wild animals are kept permanently in the equivalent of a kennel. It is as if we, like the animals, become trapped within the zoo concept and we cannot see beyond the bars. We forget that wildlife in zoos is still wildlife."
~Virginia McKenna
"But for the use of physical punishment by, and fear of their oppressors, animals would never be a part of a circus."
~Richard Pryor
Activism
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires in people's minds."
~Samuel Adams
"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."
~Edmund Burke
"I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done."
~Marie Curie
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
~Albert Einstein
"The world we have created is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking."
~Albert Einstein
"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
~Anne Frank
"Be the change you want to see in the world."
~Mahatma Gandhi
"Knowing is not enough...we must apply. Willing is not enough...we must do."
~Goethe
"I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something I can do."
~Edward Everett Hale
"One determined person can make a significant difference, and a small group of determined people can change the course of history."
~Sonia Johnson
"If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it."
~ Lucy Larcom
Compassion & Kindness
"Remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end."
~Scott Adams
"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion."
~ Simone de Beauvoir
"A kind and compassionate act is often its own reward."
~William John Bennett
"When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space."
~Pema Chodron
"Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar."
~Bradley Millar
"The highest realms of thought are impossible to reach without first attaining an understanding of compassion."
~Socrates
"The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life."
~William Wordsworth