animal quotes Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9The animals of the planet are in desperate peril…without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. Alice Walker Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored. Alice Walker Kindness and compassion toward all living things is the mark of a civilized society. Cesar Chavez 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 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 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. Isaac Bashevis Singer Even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God. Isaac Bashevis Singer One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it. Margaret Mead In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. Pete Singer People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines….It appears to me, besides, that [such people] can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel. Voltaire, Trate sur la tolerance |