[467] in Vegetarian_Support_Group
vegetarian/animal rights quotes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (elsiedee@MIT.EDU)
Wed Mar 29 16:29:17 1995
From: elsiedee@MIT.EDU
To: vsg@MIT.EDU
Cc: conti@wpi.wpi.edu
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 16:27:31 EST
------- Forwarded Message
From: dgraft@gate.net
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 22:05:27 -0500
To: arlist@umich.edu
Subject: New version of Quotes Collection
Greetings!
I have added about 25 new quotes to the quotes collection and arranged
them in alphabetical order, resulting in version 1.7. Enjoy!
Thanks,
Don
- ------------------------
ANIMAL RIGHTS/VEGETARIANISM QUOTATIONS
BY CELEBRITIES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT
_________________________________________________________________
Compiled by Donald Graft
Version 1.7
_________________________________________________________________
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 (poet and philosopher)
Even the animals have a sense of right or wrong. It is very well shown
in Kipling's Jungle Book.
Sri Aurobindo (poet and philosopher)
[George Bernard] Shaw is an acute thinker. He refuses to be deceived
into the belief of the greatness of man. He says that man must rise
higher.
Sri Aurobindo (poet and philosopher)
I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They
lived next to eath 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 you could see or feel the suffering you wouldn't think twice. Give
back life. Don't eat meat.
Kim Basinger (actress)
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 (philosopher)
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 (philosopher)
When he bethought him of the first beginning of all things, he was
filled with a yet more overflowing charity, and would call the dumb
animals, howsoever small, by the names of brother and sister,
forasmuch as he recognized in them the same origin as in himself.
Saint Bonaventure (theologian)
Respect your fellow earthlings.
Berke Breathed ("Bloom County" cartoonist)
Opus told me that his six-year pickled-herring habit ended after
reading the Compassionate Cook. He discovered the rutabaga frappe
recipe and has been practicing it ever since.
Berke Breathed ("Bloom County" cartoonist)
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing.
Edmund Burke (statesman and orator)
I just couldn't stand the idea of eating meat--and I really do think
that it has made me calmer...People's general awareness is getting
much better, even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the
calves are actually killed so that the milk doesn't go to them but to
us can't really be right, and if you've seen a cow in a state of
extreme distress because it can't understand why its calf isn't by it,
it can make you think a lot.
Kate Bush (singer and songwriter)
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 (marine biologist)
Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his
conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life.
Norman Cousins (author)
The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our
job is to salvage Mother Nature...We are facing a formidable enemy in
this field. It is the hunters...and to convince them to leave their
guns on the wall is going to be very difficult.
Jacques Cousteau (oceanographer)
If human civilization is going to invade the waters of the earth, then
let it be first of all to carry a message of respect.
Jacques Cousteau (oceanographer)
The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it
is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.
Charles Darwin (biologist)
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 (biologist)
Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our
equals.
Charles Darwin (biologist)
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 (artist and scientist)
Killing an animal to make a coat is sin. It wasn't meant to be, and we
have no right to do it. A woman gains status when she refuses to see
anything killed to be put on her back. Then she's truly beautiful.
Doris Day (actress)
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
You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the
rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.
Harvey Diamond (author)
Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the
object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at
last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death
only one tiny creature, and to found that edifice on its unavenged
tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell
me, and tell the truth.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (novelist)
Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy
untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harrass them, don't
deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man,
do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin,
and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your apppearance on
it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you--alas, it is true
of almost every one of us!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (novelist)
[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)
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to
favour freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain
without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of
its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did
and it never will.
Frederick Douglass (abolitionist)
Even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other;
yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no preeminence above
a beast: for all is Vanity.
Ecclesiastes 3:19
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 (inventor)
We and others indeed believe that along with the preeminence that Homo
sapiens 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 co-habitants of earth.
Paul Ehrlich (bacteriologist, Nobel 1908)
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 (physicist, Nobel 1921)
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 (physicist, Nobel 1921)
It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely
physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially
influence the lot of mankind.
Albert Einstein (physicist, Nobel 1921)
One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye
other than human.
Loren Eiseley (anthropologist)
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is
concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (author)
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 (mystic and preacher)
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.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the
way its animals are treated.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)
I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings
called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with
such things as crawl upon earth.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)
Vivisection is the blackest of all the black crimes that a man is at
present committing against God and his fair creation.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)
I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not
retreat a single inch and *I will be heard*.
William Lloyd Garrison (author)
You Shall Love Each Other. Thou shalt not kill.
God (supreme being)
In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing
so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them?
Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness
as we show to other humans; and as we recognise human rights, so too
should we recognise the rights of the great apes? Yes.
Jane Goodall (ethologist)
If only we could...understand that we should respect the individual
ape just as we should respect the individual human; that we should
recognise the right of each ape to live a life unmolested by humans,
if necessary helped by humans, in the same way as we should recognise
these rights for individual human beings; and that the same moral and
ethical attitudes should apply to ape beings and human beings alike.
Jane Goodall (ethologist)
...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 (novelist)
How good it is to be well-fed, healthy, and kind all at the same time.
Henry Heimlich (physician)
Most animal experimentation is useless.
Henry Heimlich (physician)
The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of
each is different.
Hippocrates (philosopher)
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 (poet, novelist, and playwright)
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 (phiolosopher)
Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels
perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and
tyrant.
Aldous Huxley (novelist, essayist, and poet)
We are indeed told...that the belief in the unity of origin of man and
brutes involves the brutalization and degradation of the former. But
is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute, by obvious
arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would force this conclusion
upon us?
Thomas H. Huxley (biologist)
Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up
every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever
abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
Thomas H. Huxley (biologist)
One person can make all the difference in the world...For the first
time in recorded human history, we have the fate of the whole planet
in our hands.
Chrissie Hynde (musician)
Woe to those who add house after house and join field to field until
everything belongs to them and they are the sole inhabitants of the
land.
Isaiah (Biblical prophet)
Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you anymore.
Franz Kafka (novelist)
Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous
obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.
Thomas Jefferson (3rd U.S. President)
I tremble for my species when I reflect that God is just.
Thomas Jefferson (3rd U.S. President)
How can you eat anything with eyes?
Will Kellogg (creator "Kellogg's Corn Flakes")
I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells
him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to
arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in
reality expressing the very highest respect for law.
Martin Luther King Jr. (civil rights leader)
There is not an animal on the earth, nor a flying creature on two
wings, but they are people like unto you.
The Koran (sacred scripture of Islam)
The recklessness with which we sacrifice our sense of decency to
maximize profit in the factory farming process sets a pattern for
cruelty to our own kind.
Jonathan Kozol (author)
And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as
some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils,
plants and animals, of which we are a part.
Joseph Wood Krutch (naturalist and essayist)
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the
fore only when its recipient has no power. 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 (author and playright)
After a great deal of research, we discovered that we could develop
new, innovative, and safe products without testing them on animals.
Kenneth Landis (President, Benettons)
I grew up in cattle country--that's why I became a vegetarian. Meat
stinks, for the animals, the environment, and your health.
k.d. lang (musician)
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 capitalist for the
same reasons.
C. S. Lewis (novelist and essayist)
I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the
way of a whole human being.
Abraham Lincoln (16th U.S. President)
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 (physician and philosopher)
There are a lot of directors who will injure animals to further a
plot. I will have none of it.
James Mason (actor)
If mankind and the world as a whole are to have a future, it will be
necessary that we reduce the selfish tendencies in our ethics in favor
of a higher regard for the community and for the whole of Creation.
Ernst Mayr (biologist)
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 (musicians)
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 (musicians)
Cruelty is one fashion statement we can all do without.
Rue McClanahan (actress)
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 (actress)
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 (actress)
Animal life, somber mystery. All nature protests against the barbarity
of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior
brethren.
Jules Michelet (historian)
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 (novelist, Pulitzer 1947)
As to what concerns fidelity, there is no animal in the world so
treacherous as man.
Michel Montaigne (essayist)
How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How
blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!
John Muir (naturalist and explorer)
The world, we are told, was made especially for man--a presumption not
supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more
than a small part of the one great unit of creation?
John Muir (naturalist and explorer)
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 (activist)
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people
what they don't want to hear.
Goerge Orwell (author)
It is a cruel folly to offer up to ostentation so many lives of
creatures, as to make up the state of our treats.
William Penn (Quaker colonizer of America)
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 (essayist and biographer)
Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from
flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what
state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore
and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth
tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment
the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and
lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit
and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure
the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste,
which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and
serums from mortal wounds?
Plutarch (essayist and biographer)
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 (philosopher and mathematician)
Animals share with us the privilege of having a soul.
Pythagoras (philosopher and mathematician)
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 (author, Nobel 1915)
Remember those macaques who would rather go hungry than profit from
harming their fellows; might we have a more optimistic view of the
human future if we were sure our ethics were up to their standards?
Carl Sagan (astronomer and biologist)
Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to
recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and
shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the
sun!
Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopher)
It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a
man.
Albert Schweitzer (missionary and statesman, Nobel 1952)
Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things,
man will not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer (missionary and statesman, Nobel 1952)
We need a boundless ethics which will include animals also.
Albert Schweitzer (missionary and statesman, Nobel 1952)
When I help an insect out of his troubles all that I do is attempt to
remove some of the guilt contracted through [humanity's] crimes
against animals.
Albert Schweitzer (missionary and statesman, Nobel 1952)
...the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The
rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony and
man--all belong to the same family... The White Man must treat the
beasts of this land as his brothers.
Chief Seattle (Indian chief)
What with our hooks, snares, nets, and dogs, we are at war with all
living creatures, and nothing comes amiss but that which is either too
cheap or too common; and all this is to gratify a fantastical palate.
Seneca (Roman Stoic philosopher)
We and the beasts are kin.
Ernest Thompson Seton (writer and illustrator)
My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the
power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.
Anna Sewell (author)
Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can
we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)
This is the true joy in life; being used for a purpose recognized by
yourself as a mighty one, and being a force of nature instead of a
feverish, selfish little clod.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)
Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and
are called medical research.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)
Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge,
it does so at the expense of human character.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)
It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed,
than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (poet)
It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary
preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or
digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does
not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (poet)
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 (author, Nobel 1978)
As long as human beings go on shedding the blood of animals, there
will never be any peace.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)
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 (author, Nobel 1978)
As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he
always had the same thought: In their behavior toward creatures, all
men were Nazis.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)
Even in the worm that crawks in the earth there glows a divine spark.
When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)
Mutilating animals and calling it "science" condemns the human species
to moral and intellectual hell...this hideous Dark Age of the mindless
torture of animals must be overcome.
Grace Slick (musician)
...it is difficult to picture the great Creator conceiving of a
program of one creature (which He has made) using another living
creature for purposes of experimentation. There must be other, less
cruel ways of obtaining knowledge.
Adlai Stevenson (statesman and diplomat)
Nothing more strongly arouses our dusgust than cannabalism, yet we
make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on
babies, though not our own.
Robert Louis Stevenson (novelist and poet)
Man is connected by his nature...with the whole tribe of animals, and
so closely with some of them, that the distance between his
intellectual faculties and theirs...appears, in many instances, small,
and would probably appear still less, if we had the means of knowing
their motives, as we have of observing their actions.
Henry St. John (statesman)
We manage to swallow flesh, only because we do not think of the cruel
and sinful thing we do. There are many crimes which are the creation
of man himself, the wrongfullness of which is put down to their
divergence from habit, custom, or tradition. But cruelty is not of
these. It is a fundamental sin, and admits of no arguments or nice
distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, it
protests against cruelty, is always clearly heard; and yet we go on
perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us--in fact, any one
who does not join in is dubbed a crank.
Rabindranath Tagore (poet, Nobel 1913)
All good things are wild, and free.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)
If...the machine of government...is of such a nature that it requires
you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the
law.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)
If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behavior.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)
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 (essayist and poet)
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)
And in fasting, if he be really and seriously seeking to live a good
life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the
use of animal food, because...its use is simply immoral, as it
involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral
feeling--killing.
Leo Tolstoy (author)
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.
Leo Tolstoy (author)
I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that
are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it
inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward
it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without
looking further.
Mark Twain (author)
The Queen has done all she could on the dreadful subject of
vivisection, and hopes that Mr. Gladstone will speak strongly against
such a practice which is a disgrace to humanity...
Queen Victoria
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