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AR Quotes 9
Man is a religious animal. He is the
only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the 'True Religion'
- several of them! He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as
himself but cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a
graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's
path to happiness and heaven...The higher animals have no religion. And we
are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder
why? It seems questionable taste...
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...
It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an
animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions...
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 creature that cannot...
I am not interested to know
whether experimentation 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...
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
(1835-1910).
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When a man has pity on all living
creatures then only is he noble.
The Buddha (6th cent
BCE).
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There will come a day when such men as
myself will view the slaughter of innocent creatures as horrible a crime
as the murder of his fellow man - Our task must to be free ourselves - by
widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the
whole of nature and its beauty.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955).
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Not to hurt our humble brethren (the
animals) is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We
have a higher mission - to be of service to them whenever they require
it...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.
Francis of Assisi
(1182-1226).
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It were much better that a sentient
being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to
endure unmitigated misery...
I wish no living thing to suffer
pain.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822).
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All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is
accepted as being self-evident...
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...
Boundless compassion for all living things is the surest
and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct. Whoever is filled with
it will assuredly injure no one...
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 (1788-1860).
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Out of 135 criminals, including robbers
and rapists, 118 admitted that when they were children they burned, hanged
and stabbed domestic animals.
Ogonyok
(1979).
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Animal experimentation is the blackest
of all the black crimes that a man is at present committing...
We
should be able to refuse to live if the price of living be the torture of
sentient beings...
I abhor [animal] experimentation with my whole soul.
All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of
no consequence...
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can
be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Mahatma Gandhi
(1869-1948).
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It is ridiculous to expect that an
experimenter who commits acts of diabolical cruelty for the sake of what
he calls science can be trusted to tell the truth about the results...any
fool can vivisect and gain kudos by writing a paper describing what
happened: the laboratories are infested with kudos hunters who have
nothing to tell...Vivisectors crowd humane research workers out of the
schools and discredit them, they use up all the available endowments and
bequests, leaving nothing for serious research.
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?...
Atrocities are no less atrocities when they occur in
laboratories and are called medical research...
It has been said that
man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence
which could support this...
[O]nce grant the ethics of the
vivisectionists and you not only sanction the experiment on the human
subject, but make it the first duty of the vivisector. If a guinea pig may
be sacrificed for the sake of the very little that can learnt from it,
shall not a man be sacrificed for the sake of the great deal that can be
learnt from him?...
You do not settle whether an experiment is
justified or not by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction
is not between useful and useless experiments, but between barbarous and
civilized behavior. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances
human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.
George
Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).
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Truly man is the king of beasts, for his
brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial
places...
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 (1452-1519).
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During my medical education at the
University of Basel I found [animal] experimentation horrible, barbarous,
and above all unnecessary.
Carl G. Jung
(1875-1961).
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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 reasons...
Now I take it that when we
understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own
convenience we reduce it to the level of 'Nature' in the sense that we
suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any),
and treat it in terms of quantity...something has to be overcome before we
can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room...
It is
not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object,
stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is
wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of
science may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so
treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has
been lost.
(C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York:
Macmillan, 1947), pp.81,82).
It is the rarest thing in the world to hear a rational discussion of
vivisection. Those who disapprove of it are commonly accused of
'sentimentality', and very often their arguments justify the accusation.
They paint pictures of pretty little dogs on dissecting tables. But the
other side lie open to exactly the same charge. They also often defend the
practice by drawing pictures of suffering women and children whose pain
can be relieved (we are assured) only by the fruits of
vivisection...
Now vivisection can only be defended by showing it to be
right that one species should suffer in order that another species should
be happier...
The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the
triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of
ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the
victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent
achievements...
You will notice I have spent no time in discussing what
actually goes on in the laboratories. We shall be told, of course, that
there is surprisingly little cruelty. That is a question with which, at
present, I have nothing to do. We must first decide what should be
allowed: after that it is for the police to discover what is already being
done.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) , 'Vivisection', God in the Dock,
ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1970),
pp.224,225,228.
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For as long as man continues to be the
ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or
peace. 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...
Primoque a caede ferarum incaluisse puto maculatum sanguine
ferrum ('I think the blood of animals was the first to stain our
weapons').
Pythagoras (ca. 580-520
BCE).
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Let none count themselves wise who have
not with the nerves of their imagination felt the pain of the
vivisected.
John Cowper Powys
(1872-1963).
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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.
Thousands of animals are butchered
every day without a shadow of remorse. It cries vengeance upon all the
human race.
Romain Rolland
(1866-1944).
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At present scientists do not look for
alternatives simply because they do not care enough about the animals they
are using.
Peter Singer (1946-
).
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Liberty is given by nature even to mute
animals.
Tacitus (55-117
CE).
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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...
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'.
As long as human beings go on
shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace.
Isaac
Bashevis Singer.
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No humane being, past the thoughtless
age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by
the same tenure that he does.
Henry David Thoreau
(1817-62).
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True benevolence, or compassion, extends
itself through the whole of existence and sympathises with the distress of
every creature capable of sensation.
Joseph
Addison.
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This wild blood-lust, starting with
animal vivisection and proceeding to human mutilation, stamps 'modern
medicine' as the most primitive religion ever known to
mankind.
Professor Robert Mendelsohn (foreword to Slaughter of the
Innocents).
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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.
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I expect to pass through this world but
once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness or abilities that
I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now.
Let me not defer
it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
William
Penn.
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The necessity for these experiments I
dispute. Man has no right to gratify an idle and purposeless curiosity
through the practice of cruelty.
Charles Dickens
(1812-1870).
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Forbid the day when vivisection shall be
practiced in every college and school, and when the man of science,
looking forth over a world which will then own no other sway than his,
shall exult in the thought that he had made of this fair earth, if not a
heaven for man, at least a hell for animals. Lewis Carroll
(1832-1898).
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I am of the opinion that not one of
those experiments on animals was justified or necessary...I witnessed many
harsh sights, but I think the saddest was when the dogs were brought up
from the cellar to the laboratory. Instead of appearing pleased with the
change from darkness to light, they seemed seized with horror as soon as
they smelt the air of the place, apparently divining their approaching
fate...
Hundreds of times I have seen when an animal writhed in pain,
it would receive a slap, and an angry order to be quiet and behave
itself...To this recital I need hardly add that, having drunk the cup to
the dregs, I cry off, and am prepared to see not only science, but even
mankind, perish rather than have recourse to such means of saving
it.
Dr. George Hoggan (assistant to vivisector Claude
Bernard).
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Their very weakness and inability to
protest demands that man should refrain from torturing animals for the
mere possibility of obtaining some knowledge.
Luther Burbank
(1849-1926).
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Judge the behavior of a dog who has lost
his master, who has searched for him in the road barking miserably, who
has come back to the house, restless and anxious, who has run upstairs and
down, from room to room, and who has found the beloved master at last in
his study, and then shown his joy by barks, bounds and caresses.
There
are some barbarians who will take this dog, that so greatly excels man in
capacity for friendship, who will nail him to a table, and dissect him
alive. And what you discover in him are the same organs of sensation you
have in yourself.
Voltaire
(1694-1778).
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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
humanity'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.
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An individual animal doesn't care if its
species is facing extinction - it cares if it is feeling pain.
Ronnie
Lee.
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We use a method [vivisection] which
continues to lead to terrible mistakes, which kills thousands of people
and which contributes to our environmental problems...none of which can be
predicted under animal laboratory conditions. I have had talks with many
doctors and scientists, who are perfectly convinced that animal testing is
dangerous, not only for the animals, but also, and most of all, for us,
human beings...
Dr. Madeleine Petrovic, Dr at Law, Austria, Chairwoman
Austrian Green Party in Parliament, Vice-President, DLRM. DBAE Scientific
Congress, May 1995.
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The brute animals have all the same
sensations of pain as human beings, and consequently endure as much pain
when their body is hurt; but in their case the cruelty of torment is
greater, because they have no mind to bear them up against their
sufferings and no hope to look forward to when enduring the last extreme
pain.
Thomas Chalmers.
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We need to bring home to people that all
cruel behaviour, whoever or whatever the victims, is the expression of a
deep evil flaw in human nature, and that all who oppose and fight it, in
whatever form, are crusading against a curse that could destroy us
all.
Bishop John Austin
Baker.
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Animals are our younger brothers and
sisters, also on the ladder of evolution but a few rungs lower. It is an
important part of our responsibilities to help them in their ascent, and
not to retard their development by cruel exploitation of their
helplessness.
Air-Chief Marshal Lord
Dowding.
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Cruelty is the obvious cancer of modern
civilization.
Rev. A. D.
Beldon.
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Anything that can feel pain should not
be put to pain.
R. M.
Dolgin.
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No nation is truly free until the
animal, man's younger brother is free and happy.
T. L.
Vaswani.
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If having a soul means being able to
feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a
lot of humans.
I hope to make people realize how totally helpless
animals are, how dependent on us, trusting as a child must that we will be
kind and take care of their needs ...[they] are an obligation put on us, a
responsibility we have no right to neglect, nor to violate by
cruelty.
James Herriot.
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We can not have peace among men whose
hearts find delight in killing any living creature.
Rachel
Carson.
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Humanity advances only as it becomes
more humane.
Dr.Frank
Crane.
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I am sometimes asked 'Why do you spent
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.
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History has shown that in the long run
all dictators fail; and also for the dictatorial empire of the
pharmaceutical speculation, built on the sufferings of animals needlessly
tortured in the laboratories and on the sufferings of human beings,
victims of iatrogenic (medically-induced) diseases, the day of redde
rationem (final reckoning) is bound to come....
Giornale
d'Italie, 20 February
1983.
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He who harms animals has not understood
or renounced evil...Those whose minds are at peace...do not desire to live
at the expense of others.
Acharanga Sutra
(Jainism).
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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.
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Healing the relationship between humans
and animals is crucial to restoring the health of the world.
Susan
Chernak McElroy.
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The lives of animals are woven into our
very being - closer than our own breathing - and our souls will suffer
when they are gone...
We cannot discount the lives of sensitive and
intelligent creatures merely because they assume non-human form.
Gary
Kowalski.
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I cannot significantly improve on the
assertion that it simply is proper for us, as intelligent members of the
universe, to try to look after our fellow creatures, and evil for us to do
otherwise.
Colin Tudge.
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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.
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The wretched have no
compassion.
Samuel
Johnson.
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Can one regard a fellow creature as a
property item, an investment, a piece of meat, an 'it,' without
degenerating into cruelty towards that creature?
Karen Davis,
PhD.
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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.
Ashley
Montagu.
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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.
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When a chimpanzee mother comforts her
frightened infant, we say that she is behaving like a human; when a human
being resorts to insane violence, we say that he is acting like an
animal.
Perhaps it's the other way around....
Wayne
Grady.
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Take sides. Neutrality helps the
oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the
tormented.
Elie Wiesel.
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The highest realms of thought are
impossible to reach without first attaining an understanding of
compassion.
Socrates.
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A universe is, indeed, to be pitied
whose dominating inhabitants are so unconscious and so ethically embryonic
that they make life a commodity, mercy a disease, and systematic massacre
a pastime and a profession.
Professor J. Howard
Moore.
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One determined person can make a
significant difference, and a small group of determined people can change
the course of history.
Sonia
Johnson.
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People say: 'We have rights over
animals. They are given to us for use.' You have no rights over them. You
have duties towards them.
Annie
Besant.
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We and others indeed believe that along
with the preeminence that Homosapiens has achieved goes a very great moral
responsibility - a stewardship if you will - upon which we must not turn
our backs. Perhaps especially because we have the power to destroy them we
must respect the rights of our cohabitants of earth.
Paul
Ehrlich.
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As custodians of the planet it is our
responsibility to deal with all species with kindness, love, and
compassion. That these animals suffer through human cruelty is beyond
understanding.
Richard
Gere.
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I have always felt that the way we treat
animals is a pretty good indicator of the compassion we are capable of for
the human race.
Ali
McGraw.
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Animals form an inalienable fragment of
nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we
diminish our world and our place in it.
James
Michener.
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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.
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The existence of organized cruelty -
that is, cruelty practiced as a matter of social principle or public
policy, and presented to the community as a means of a higher goal - is
the most obscene and decadent phenomenon of any civilization.
Clare
Booth Luce.
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It is no measure of health to be well
adjusted to a profoundly sick
society.
Krishnamurti.
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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.
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Whatever your work or life circumstances
may be, the power to make a positive difference for others, be they
two-legged or four-legged, resides within us all.
Hope
Tarr.
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It is an important and popular fact that
things are not always what they seem.
For instance, on the planet
Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins
because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, war and so on -
whilst all the dolphins had ever done is muck about in the water having a
good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they
were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same
reasons.
Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy).
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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.
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What I think about vivisection is that
if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of
living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit for their
cruelty... Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply
seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life.
Leo
Tolstoy (1828-1910).
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We must develop a better sense of
responsibilty towards our total environment...this better sense cannot any
longer exclude from revision the staples of our diet. The case against
vivisection is the same as that against war and all other forms of cruelty
- that violence does not produce long-term solutions...the only argument
against vivisection that will be seen to have lasting power - that we do
not improve human society by means that debase human character.
Jon
Wynne-Tyson (1924- ).
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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 A. Froude
(1818-1894).
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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 (Animal
Machines).
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They administered beatings to dogs with
perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if
they felt pain. They said the animals were [like] clocks; that the cries
they made when struck, were only the noise of a string pulled, and the
whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals up to boards by
their four paws to vivisect them.
Nicholas Fontaine Memoirs pour
servir a l'histoire de Port- Royal,
1738.
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Institutional cruelty does everything it
can to conceal the fact that it is destroying its victims, and in doing
this it keeps its spectators from feeling disgust and from being confused
by the paradox of trying to justify the unjustifiable, of trying to praise
the smashing of the weak.
Philip P. Hallie,
Cruelty.
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At one time the benevolent affections
embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a
class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity; and
finally its influence is felt in the dealing of [humans] with the animal
world. In each of these cases, a standard is formed, different from that
of the preceding stage, but in each case, the same tendency is recognized
as a virtue.
Lecky, European
Morals.
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The ignorant drug-taker, returning to
health from some disease which he has overcome by the natural resistant
powers of his body, dips his pen in mistaken gratitude and writes his
testimonial. But the man who dies in spite of the medicine - or because of
it - does not bear witness to what it did for him. We see recorded only
the favourable results: the unfavourable is silent...
While many of the
printed testimonials are genuine enough, they represent not the average
evidence, but the most glowing opinions...
Samuel H. Adams, The
Great American Fraud (New York: P F Collier, 1906),
p.4.
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When animal experimentation is
criticised, students, teachers and researchers alike fall back on the two
most common justifications: (1)experimentation on live animals is
necessary to human welfare, and (2)researchers follow strict guidelines
that minimize animal suffering. But what is 'human welfare'? Better
poisons, better chemicals, better cosmetics, better drugs, better
behaviour, better brains, better genes? Acceptable levels of unacceptable
carcinogenic materials that have invaded everyone's home?...Making babies
in petri dishes? Clones? Human hybrids? Genetically engineered lifeforms?
Millions of animals suffer and are killed each year for all this
'welfare'.
As far as 'guidelines' are concerned, the very fact these
are needed indicates that researchers are unable to determine the limits
of humane treatment and regulate themselves accordingly. Ultimately, the
desecrator of animal life ends up desecrating all life including his own,
because he reduces life to discrete mechanisms of measurable
quantity.
Andree Collard with Joyce Contrucci, Rape of the Wild
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989),
pp.68.70.
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Once one allows that animals are part of
the moral community...then one's act of inflicting pain and suffering upon
them or killing them must be justified...
In my view pain is pain, as
much evil for an animal as for a human, and I agree with animal
liberationists that it is a form of speciesism or discrimination to
pretend otherwise.
R. Frey, 'The ethics of the search for benefits:
Experimentation in medicine', in Principles of Health Care Ethics,
ed. by R. Gillon (Chichester: John Wiley, 1994),
pp.1068-69.
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I think the rapidly growing tendency to
regard animals as born for nothing except slavery to so-called humanity
absolutely disgusting.
Sir Victor Gollancz. The Unlived
Life.
|
[Animals are] those unfortunate slaves
and victims of the most brutal part of mankind.
John Stuart Mill.
1868.
|
I despise and abhor the pleas on behalf
of that infamous practice, experimentation...I would rather submit to the
worst of deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat
tortured to death on the pretence of sparing me a twinge or two.
Robert
Browning (1812-1889).
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First it was necessary to civilize man
in relation to man. Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to
nature and the animals.
Victor Hugo
(1802-1885).
|
Animal experiments have an extremely
important role in underpinning, facilitating and justifying the machinery
of progress with which we are working on our own annihilation.
Rudolf
Bahro, Building the Green Movement (Philadelphia: NSP, 1986),
p.202.
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Until he extends the circle of his
compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace. It is
man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man.
At
the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion
to give to every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to
his own. He experiences that other life in his own. He accepts as being
good: to preserve life, to promote life, to raise to its highest value
life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life,
to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is
the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of
thought.
Albert Schweitzer
(1875-1965).
|
I am in favor of animal rights as well
as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being...
I could not
have slept to-night if I had left that helpless little creature to perish
on the ground (President Lincoln's reply to friends who chided him for
delaying them by stopping to return a fledgling to its nest).
President
Abraham Lincoln
(1809-1865).
|
For too long we have occupied ourselves
with responding to the consequences of cruelty and abuse and have
neglected the important task of building up an ethical system in which
justice for animals is regarded as the norm rather than the exception. Our
only hope is to put our focus on the education of the young.
John Hoyt
(1932-).
|
The well-taught philosophic mind to all
compassion gives; casts round the world an equal eye and feels for all
that lives.
Anna Barbauld
(1743-1825).
|
If [man] is not to stifle human
feelings, he must practice kindness toward animals, for he who is cruel to
animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart
of man by his treatment of animals.
Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804).
|
Man is an animal easily conditioned by
almost anything. We must not allow our finer sensibilities to become
blunted regarding animal suffering.
Pamela Hansford
Johnson.
|
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.
Saint Francis of Assisi
(1181-1226) (quoted in Life by St.
Bonaventura).
|
'Do not kick him', said Pythagoras to a
man abusing a puppy. 'In his body is the soul of a friend of mine. I
recognized the voice when he cried out'.
E.S. Turner
(1909-).
|
Nothing living should ever be treated
with contempt. Whatever is it that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should
be touched gently, because the time is short.
Elizabeth Goudge
(1900-1984).
|
To us it seems incredible that the Greek
philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet
never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it
will seem incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own
oppression of animals....
'Sentimentalist' is the abuse with which
people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that
to be sentimental is worse than to be cruel, which it isn't...
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
(1929-).
|
Charity is indivisible. If a man resents
practical sympathy being bestowed on animals on the ground that all ought
to be reserved for the species to which he himself happens to belong, he
must have a mind the size of a pin's head.
C.W. Hume
(1886-1981).
|
Nothing cruel is useful or
expedient.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43
BCE).
|
All breathing, existing, living,
sentient creatures should not be slain or treated with violence, nor
abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure unchangeable
law.
Mahavira (ca. 599-527
BCE).
|
Cruelty to animals is one of the most
significant vices of a low and ignoble people. Whenever one notices them,
they constitute a sure sign of ignorance and brutality which cannot be
painted over by all the evidences of wealth and luxury. Cruelty to animals
cannot exist together with true education and true learning.
Alexander
von Humboldt (1769-1859).
|
Man by violating his own feelings
becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction
not to take life.
Tolstoy
(1828-1910).
|
[The day should come when] all of the
forms of life...will stand before the court - the pileated woodpecker as
well as the coyote and bear, the lemmings as well as the trout in the
streams.
William O. Douglas, late U.S. Supreme Court
Justice.
|
Is there any reason why we should be
allowed to torment the[se animals]? Not any that I can see. Are there any
why we should not be allowed to torment them. Yes several...
The day
may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights
which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of
tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin
is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the
caprice of a tormentor.
It may one day come to be recognized that the
number of the legs, the villosity of the skin...are reasons equally
insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else
is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason?
Or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is
beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal,
than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old.
But suppose
they were otherwise, what should it avail? The question is not, Can they
reason? nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?
Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832), Introduction to the Principles of Morals and of
Legislation, org. 1789 (New York: Hafner, 1948),
ch.17.
|
In the opinion of leading
biostatisticians, it is not possible to transfer the probability
predictions from animals to humans...At present, therefore, there exists
no possibility at all of a scientifically based prediction. In this
respect, the situation is even less favourable than in a game of
chance.
. Neue Juristische Wochenschrift in Zeitschrift fur
Rechtspolotik 12,
1975.
|
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 those on dry land. That this will come to pass is our
dearest wish.
Jacques Cousteau (Marine
biologist).
|
The wild cruel beast is not behind the
bars of the cage.
He is in front of it.
Axel
Munthe.
|
Mercy to animals means mercy to
mankind.
Henry Bergh.
|
Animal life, sombre mystery! Immense
world of thoughts and dumb sufferings! All nature protests against the
barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his
inferior brethren.
Michelet (La Bible de
L'humanite).
|
Animal experimentation based on a
hierarchy is absurd. All animals have the ability to suffer, whether we
are willing to accept it or not.
Patricia
Lonergan.
|
Mankind's true moral test, its
fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its
attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect
mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that
all others stem from it.
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of
Being).
|
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.
|
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.
|
The soul is the same in all living
creatures, although the body of each is different.
Hippocrates (ca.
460-377 BCE).
|
We have enslaved the rest of animal
creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so
badly that beyond doubt, if they were to formulate a religion, they would
depict the Devil in human form...
The great discovery of the nineteenth
century, that we are of one blood with the lower animals, has created new
ethical obligations which have not yet penetrated the public
conscience.
William Ralph Inge
(1860-1954).
|
For the animals shall not be measured by
man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and
complete, gifted with extensions 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.
|
I assert [the behaviour of
animals]...proceed from a reasoning, that is not in itself different, nor
founded on different principles, from that which appears in human
nature.
David Hume
(1711-1776).
|
Humanity's true moral test, its
fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its
mercy: animals. and in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental
debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
Milan
Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of
Being.
|
Until we stop harming all other living
beings, we are still savages.
Thomas Edison, Harpers
Magazine.
|
The animals of the world exist for their
own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were
made for white, or women created for men.
Alice Walker, The Color
Purple.
|
Compassion for the suffering of others
is not weakness. Acting from compassion when those around you do not takes
more courage and strength of character than going along with everyone
else's cruelty.
Norm Phelps, Fund for
Animals.
|
We must infer like faculties...and we
must consequently confess that the same reason, the same methods, that we
employ in working are also employed by animals (if not some other and
better ones)...
We condemn everything that appears strange to us and
which we do not understand; and we do the same in our judgement of the
animals...
Natures that are bloodthirsty towards animals show a
propensity towards cruelty...Nature I fear, implants in men some instinct
towards inhumanity....
We owe justice to men, and kindness and
benovolence to all other creatures who may be susceptible of
it...
Michel E. de Montaigne (1533-1592), Essays (London:
Penguin, 1958).
|
How do we know that we have a right to
kill creatures that we are so little above, as dogs, for our curiosity or
even for some use to us?...
Perhaps that voice or cry so nearly
resembling the human, with which providence has endued so many different
animals, might purposely be given them to move our pity, and prevent those
cruelties we are too apt to inflict on our fellow-creatures.
Alexander
Pope (1688-1744).
|
Compassion is a necessary outcome of
social life. But compassion also means a considerable step in general
intelligence and sensibility. It is the first step towards the development
of higher moral sentiments. It is, in turn, a powerful factor of further
evolution.
P. Kropotkin
(1842-1921).
|
The fact that an opinion has been widely
held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the
silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often
likely to be foolish than sensible...
There is no impersonal reason for
regarding the interests of human beings as more important than those of
animals.
We can destroy animals more easily than they can destroy us;
that is the only solid basis of our claim to superiority.
Bertrand
Russell (1872-1970).
|
The principle of domination has become
the idol to which everything is sacrificed. The history of man's efforts
to subjugate nature is also the history of man's subjugation by
man.
Max Horkheimer
(1895-1973).
|
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...
They who delight
in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures will not be apt to
be very compassionate or benign to their own kind.
John Locke
(1632-1704).
|
An animal [is] no less sensible of pain
than a man. He has similar nerves and organs of sensation; and his cries
and groans, in case of violent impressions upon his body, though he cannot
utter his complaints by speech, or human voice, are as strong indications
to us of his sensibility of pain, as the cries and goans of a human being,
whose language we do not understand...
A man can have no right to abuse
and torment a beast.
Humphry Primatt (c.
1742).
|
Every act of injustice arises from the
blind and criminal selfishness of the human heart; to this we look, as the
cause of that unfeeling disposition, together with all those acts of
injustice and cruelty which are spent on...animals.
Herman Daggett
(1766-1832).
|
The animals, you say, were 'sent' for
man's free use and nutriment. Pray, then, inform me...why came they ions
before man did, to spend long centuries on earth awaiting their devourer's
birth?... Have the lower animals 'rights'? Undoubtedly - if men
have...
It is an entire mistake to suppose that the rights of animals
are in any way antagonistic to the rights of men.
Henry S. Salt
(1851-1939).
|
The deeper minds of all ages have had
pity for animals.
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900).
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