‘Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.’
Carl Sagan
~
‘Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.’
Samuel Butler
~
Animals are my friends…and I don’t eat my friends.’
George Bernard Shaw
~
‘If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life.’
Howard Lyman
~
‘All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?’
Buddha
~
’But for the sake of some little mouthful of meat, 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.’
Seneca
~
‘All beings are fond of life, like pleasure, hate pain, shun destruction, like life, long to live. To all life is dear.’
Acharanga Sutra
~
‘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
~
"Kad godumas, all nature is insufficient.’
Seneca
~
‘The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.’
George Bernard Shaw
~
‘Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies . . . that which to us is merely an evening’s meal, but to them is life itself.’
T. Casey Brennan
~
‘From beasts we scorn as soulless,
In forest, field and den,
The cry goes up to witness
The soullessness of men.’
M. Frida Hartley
~
‘Meat is murder’.
Morrissey
~
‘It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of appetite is nothing but an act of murder. ‘
Edward Sanchez
~
‘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
~
‘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
~
‘If we don’t NEED to eat animals to survive, is taste a good enough reason to murder them without pity?’
Edward Sanchez
~
‘Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: we are burial places! I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.’
Leonardo da Vinci
~
‘When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity.’
George Bernard Shaw
~
‘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
~
‘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
~
‘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
George Sequoia ‘Edison seems to have personally felt that its the harming (not killing) of other living beings that is consistant with one being termed a savage. Interesting?’
Karen Lakeman ‘He became vegetarian during an illness (so for health reasons) but remained so afterwards. I dont know whether he wrote this before or after and whether he was referring to cruelty….’
George Sequoia ‘I’m sure Edison lived and learned like the rest of us . But I’m just hoping it was after he tried out his electric equipement on dog’s, that he wrote that quote.’
Karen Lakeman ‘Oh! I didn’t know he did that…’
George Sequoia ‘ Yes, from what I’v read there was quite a hoohaa about his giving massive electric shocks to animals. I’m sure Edison regretted this part of his life, and I can’t condemn a man no matter what he’s done, if he realises his wrong and changes his way of living and thinking.
You cant get much worse than this….’
“1887 – Edison conducts demonstration in West Orange, New Jersey, in which he kills large numbers of cats and dogs by luring the animals onto a metal plate wired to a 1,000 volt AC generator.”
http://ccadp.org/electricchair.htm
Karen Lakeman ‘Thats awful. I hope he regretted all this and made his famous quote about non-violence afterwards too’
great quotes 🙂 the leonardo di vinci quote speaks to me a lot! i also like the following quotes 🙂
“The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass.”
-Pythagoras
In all the round world of utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And in a population that is all educated and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic aspect of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.” -H.G. Wells
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.” -Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
“One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr
“Could you look an animal in the eyes and say to it, ‘My
appetite is more important than your suffering’? – Moby
Thank you for these wonderful quotations Katie. I will put them on here.
Until one has loved an animal,
a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
– Anatole France
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be
judged by the way its animals are treated.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Thanks Kate
How can we stop the barbaric Koreans to breed dogs for human consumption. They even wanted to ask the government to legalise the dog meat industry – this is too barbaric and too cruel as dosgs have brains and are humans’ friends.
I agree Shirley this is a barbaric and disgusting practice. How can people be that greedy and cruel?
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
― Mahatma Gandhi