• " 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
  
  
  
• " I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.
  
  So they show their relations to me and I accept them; They bring me tokens of myself...they evince them plainly in their possession. "
  - Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass"
  
  
  
• " But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are! "
  - Kurt Vonnegut
  
  
  
• " The world is a dangerous place,
  not because of those who do evil,
  but because of those who look on and do nothing. "
  - Albert Einstein
  
  
  
• " A human can 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. "
  - Leo Tolstoy
  
  
  
• " All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. "
  - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
  
  
  
• " 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
  
  
  
• " 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
  
  
  
• " 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
  
  
  
• " Will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power? "
  - Peter Singer, Ph.D.
  
  
  
• " 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
  
  
  
• " Men who have practiced tortures on animals without pity, relating them without shame. How can they still hold their heads high among human beings? "
  - Samuel Johnson
  
  
  
• " If all the beasts were gone,
  men would die
  from a great loneliness of spirit,
  for whatever happens to the beasts
  also happens to the man.
  All things are connected.
  Whatever befalls the Earth
  befalls the sons of the Earth. "
  - Chief Seattle
  
  
  
• " To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
  - Ralph Waldo Emerson
  
  
  
• " The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction."
  - Rachel Carson
  
  
  
• " 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
  
  
  
• " 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 against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one."
  -- Isaac Bashevis Singer
  
  
  
• " If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers."
  -- Joseph Wood Krutch
  
  
  
• " The most violent weapon on earth is the table fork."
  -- Mahatma Gandhi
  
  
  
• " 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. Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to."
  -- Mark Twain "Following the Equator"
  
  
  
• " The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves ... Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise . . . perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and determined front will do it ... and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end."
  -- Mark Twain "The Mysterious Stranger 382"
  
  
  
• " It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions."
  -- Mark Twain "What is Man?"
  
  
  
• " Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out."
  -- Mark Twain "Ibid"
  
  
  
• " I believe I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. 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
  
  
  
• " Of all the creatures ever made he (man) is the most detest- able. Of the entire brood, he is the only one ... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain."
  -- Mark Twain "Autobiography"
  
  
  
• " The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intel- lectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot."
  -- Mark Twain "What is man?"
  
  
  
• " Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."
  -- Mark Twain "Inscription beneath his bust in the Hall of Fame"
  
  
  
• " The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo . . . We need a boundless ethic which will include the animals also."
  -- Dr. Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
  
  
  
• " The eating of meat extinguishes the great seed of compassion."
  -- Buddha (563-483 BC)
  
  
  
• " Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?'
  Expediency asks the question, 'Is it popular?'
  But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?'
  And there comes a point when one must take a position that is
  neither safe,
  nor polite,
  nor popular,
  but one must take it because one's conscience tells him or her that it is right."
  -- Martin Luther King, Jr
  
  
  
• " The world has seen and tired of the worship of Nature, of Reason, of Humanity; for this nineteenth century has been reserved the development of the most refined religion of all - the worship of self . . . The enslavement of his weaker brethren - "the labor of those who do not enjoy, for the enjoyment of those who do not labor" - the degradation of women - the torture of the animal world - these are the steps of the ladder by which man is ascending to his higher civilization . . . This, then, is the glorious future to which the advocate of secular education may look forward: the dawn that gilds the horizon of his hopes! And age when all forms of religious thought shall be a thing of the past: when chemistry and biology shall be the ABC of a State of education enforced on all; 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 has made of this fair green earth, if not a heaven for man, at least a hell for animals. "
  -- C.E. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), 1832-1898
  
  
  
• " First they ignore you.
  Then they laugh at you.
  Then they fight you.
  Then you win. "
  -- Gandhi
  
  
  
• " Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. "
  -- Albert Einstein
  
  
  
• " A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from rest. A kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
  -- Albert Einstein
  
  
  
• "To What Purpose This Waste?
  And other eyes than ours
  Were made to look on flowers,
  Eyes of small birds and insects small:
  The deep sun-blushing rose
  Round which the prickles close
  Opens her bosom to them all.
  The tiniest living thing
  That soars on feathered wing,
  Or crawls among the long grass out of sight
  Has just as good a right
  To its appointed portion of delight As any King."
  -- Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894
  
  
  
• "When the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again. The loss of a species, whether fish, sparrow or whale, diminishes all of us and compels us to reconsider our role in the complex web that entwines all life on earth."
  -- William Beebe
  Ornithologist, Aquanaut and Conservationist
  
  
  
• "The one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world, the one who never deserts him, the one who never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is the dog."
  -- Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia
  
  
  
• "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 civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the 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." ~ "The Outermost House"
  -- from Henry Beston, Author (1888-1968)
  
  
  
• Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace-
  -- Albert Schweitzer
  
  
  
• "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
  
  
  
• Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equals.
  -- Charles Darwin
  Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind
  
  
  
• All the arguments to prove human superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals.
  -- Peter Singer,
  author of Animal Liberation
  
  
  
• Animals should 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 splendor and travail of the earth.
  -- Harry Beston
  
  
  
• "The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of humans."
  -- Charles Darwin
  
  
  
• "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
  -- Gandhi
  
  
  
• "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
  
  
  
• "The cruel wild beast is not behind the bars of the cage. He stands in front of it."
  -- Axel Munthe
  
  
  
• "Cruelty to animals is one of the most significant vices of a low and ignoble people. Wherever one notices them, they constitute a sure sign of ignorance and brutality which cannot be painted over even by all the evidence of wealth and luxury. Cruelty to animals cannot exist together with true education and true learning."
  -- Alexander von Humboldt
  
  
  
• "The love of animals, like the love of our neighbor, is not a gift to be condescendingly bestowed, but a profound and humble acceptance of their kinship."
  -- Robert R. Logan
  
  
  
• "Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power .. but then, so should every other living creature."
  -- George Eliot
  
  
  
• "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."
  -- Artur Schopenhauer
  
  
  
• Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
  -- Albert Einstein
  
  
  
• The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That's the essence of inhumanity.
  -- George Bernard Shaw
  
  
  
• 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 created for men.
  -- Alice Walker

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