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The following are some famous environmental quotes centered on the theme of animal rights. If you would like to go to the online environmental forum Click Here.
“Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are like us.' Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.”
- Charles R. Magel
“The question is not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?”
- Jeremy Bentham
“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
“Every year tens of thousands of animals suffer and die in laboratory tests of cosmetics and household products...despite the fact that the test results do not help prevent or treat accidental or purposeful misuse of the products.”
- Woody Harrelson
“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
“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
“There are viable (and usually better) alternatives to the use of animals for food, sport, clothing, and experimentation.”
- Richard Melville Hall
“It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life. Towards this end, experiments on living animals in classrooms should be stopped. To encourage cruelty in the name of science can only destroy the finer emotions of affection and sympathy, and breed an unfeeling callousness in the young towards suffering in all living creatures.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
“It may be suggested by some books that it is not a sin to kill an animal, but it is written in our own hearts - more clearly than in any book - that we should take pity on animals in the same way as we do on humans.”
- Leo Tolstoy
“Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.”
- Franz Kafka
“Love of animals is a universal impulse, a common ground on which all of us may meet. By loving and understanding animals, perhaps we humans shall come to understand each other.”
- Louis J. Camuti
“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. One does not meet one's self until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”
- Loren Eisley
“There can be no justification for causing suffering to animals simply to serve man's pleasure or simply to enhance man's lifestyle.”
- Dean of York
“Cruelty to animals is one of the most significant vices of a low and ignoble people. Wherever one notices them, they constitute a sign of ignorance and brutality which cannot be painted over even by all the evidence of wealth and luxury.”
- Alexander Von Humbolt
“A good deed done to an animal is as meritorious as a good deed done to a human being, while an act of cruelty to an animal is a bad as an act of cruelty to a human being.”
- Mohammed
“We should remember in our dealings with animals that they are a sacred trust to us from our heavenly Father. They are dumb and cannot speak for themselves.”
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
“The medical argument for animal testing doesn't stand up. Even if it did, I don't think we should kill other species. We think we're so much better; I'm not sure we are. I tell people, We've beaten into submission every animal on the face of the Earth, so we are the clear winners of whatever battle is going on between the species. Couldn't we be generous? I really do think it's time to get nice. No need to keep beating up on them. I think we've got to show that we're kind.”
- Paul McCartney
“Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.”
- Michael Fox
“I know what it feels like to be hurt,and I don't want to cause that pain to any other person or creature. But somehow, in society, we numb ourselves in order to make money or to feel better about ourselves, such as with cosmetics or food. We say to ourselves, I'm going to use this animal. I'm going to say it doesn't have much worth so that I can allow myself to do these cruel things. And that just isn't fair.”
- Alicia Silverstone
“I feel very sorry for women who continue to purchase real fur coats. They are lacking in a woman's most important requisites, heart and sensitivity.”
- Jayne Meadows
“Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude toward those who are at tis mercy: animals. And in this respect, human kind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”
- Milan Kundera
“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
“Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.”
- Albert Schweitzer
“During my medical education at the University of Basle I found vivisection horrible, barbarous and above all unnecessary.”
- C.G.Jung
“It is totally unconscionable to subject defenseless animals to mutilation and death, just so a company can be the first to market a new shade of nail polish or a new, improved laundry detergent. It's cruel, it's brutal, it's inhumane, and most people don't want it.”
- Abigail Van Buren
“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. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever.”
- Ashley Montague
“What are we doing when we brainwash children in schools to cut open their fellow animals? Are we dangerously desensitizing them? Some of the most warped and blunted people I know are those who have gone through training of this sorts.”
- Richard D. Ryder
“People get offended by animal rights campaigns. It's ludicrous. It's not as bad as mass animal death in a factory.”
- Richard Gere
“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.”
- George Orwell
“The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
- Charles Darwin
“As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”
- Leo Tolstoy
“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
“Look deep into the eyes of any animal, and then for a moment, trade places, their life becomes as precious as yours and you become as vulnerable as them. Now smile if you believe all animals deserve our respect and our protection, for in a way, they are us, and we are them.”
- Philip Ochoa
“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.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
“Killing an animal to make a coat is sin. It wasn't meant to be, and we have no right to do it.”
- Doris Day
“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
“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
“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. Please help to stop this madness.”
- Richard Gere
“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.”
- Mark Twain
“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.”
- Peter Singer
“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
“Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“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
“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.”
- St. Francis of Assisi
“Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they're in the game.”
- Paul Rodriguez
“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
“Mercy to animals means mercy to mankind.”
- Henry Bergh
“It's really important to me to show the interconnectedness of things. I always try to illustrate how environmentalism, humanitarianism, animal rights -- all those things -- are one and the same.”
- Daryl Hannah
“Animals do not survive by rational thought (nor by sign languages allegedly taught to them by psychologists). They survive through inborn reflexes and sensory-perceptual association. They cannot reason. They cannot learn a code of ethics. A lion is not immoral for eating a zebra (or even for attacking a man). Predation is their natural and only means of survival; they do not have the capacity to learn any other.”
- Edwin A. Locke
“No one in the world needs a mink coat but a mink.”
- Murray Banks
“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“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
“I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“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.”
- C.S. Lewis
“The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.”
- Hippocrates
“In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.”
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
“To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“I became very critical of zoos and circuses and keeping animals in captivity. I wish it was against the law.”
- Christopher Walken
“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
“The wild, cruel animal is not behind the bars of a cage. He is in front of it.”
- Axel Munthe
“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.”
- Rachel Carson
“The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.”
- P.G. Wodehouse
“Animals are being exploited in such an unbelievable way; it's not acceptable. PETA is trying to get your attention, and they're successful at it. If you talk to people who grew up on a farm, they'll tell you that they had an experience where they were taking care of a cow, and one day their parents took it away and killed it. It's a torturous experience for them, and that's when they became hard. People are taught to be grown-up or whatever, and that's dumb. That bond they had with that cow or chicken was real.”
- Alicia Silverstone
“Deliberate cruelty to our defenceless and beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being can be guilty.”
- William Ralph Inge
“In my opinion, one of the greatest animal-welfare problems is the physical abuse of livestock during transportation. Typical abuses I have witnessed with alarming frequency are; hitting, beating, use of badly maintained trucks, jabbing of short objects into animals, and deliberate cruelty.”
- Dr. Temple Grandin
“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?”
- George Bernard Shaw
“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
“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.”
- Schopenhauer
“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
“It's sad. That's a living creature. We don't have the right to take their life away for fashion.”
- Carmen Electra
“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
“If you look at the course of western history you'll see that we're slowly granting basic rights to everyone. A long time ago only kings had rights. Then rights were extended to property-owning white men. Then all men. Then women. Then children. Then the mentally retarded. Now we're agonizing over the extension of basic rights to homosexuals and animals. We need to finally accept that all sentient creatures are deserving of basic rights. I define basic rights as this --the ability to pursue life without having someone else's will involuntarily forced upon you. Or, as the framers of the constitution put it, the ability to have "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". By what criteria can you justify denying basic rights to any living thing? Realize that by whatever criteria you employ someone could deny basic rights to you if they objected to your species, sexual preferences, color, religion, ideology etc. Would you eat your housecat, or force a mentally retarded child to ingest oven cleaner? If not, then why is it ok to eat cows and test products on sentient animals? I believe that to knowingly commit actions that cause or condone suffering is reprehensible in the extreme.I call upon you to be compassionate and treat others as you want to be treated. If you don't want to be beaten, imprisoned, mutilated, killed or tortured then you shouldn't condone such behavior towards anyone, be they human or not.”
- Richard Melville Hall
“I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat. It is only some carnivorous animals that have to subsist on flesh. Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventures, and for hides and furs is a phenomenon which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging in such acts of brutality.”
- Dalai Lama: Tenzin Gyatso
“The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that we really are the selfish tyrants that the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said we are? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible? The way in which we answer this question depends on the way in which each one of us, individually, answers it.”
- Peter Singer
“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 Anthony Froude
“Once people spend time with farm animals in a loving way ... a pig or cow or a little chicken or a turkey, they might find they relate with them the same way they relate with dogs and cats. People don't really think of them that way because they're on the plate. Why should they be food when other animals are pets? I would never eat my doggies.”
- Alicia Silverstone
“Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellowman, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.”
- Dr. Albert Schweitzer
“According to the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, fish have feelings too. Whenever my sons go fishing they always tell me, 'Dad it doesn't hurt a fish to get hooked.' Well I watch and I see and I believe it's painful for the fish.”
- Donald Trump
“Support your right to arm bears.”
- Cleveland Amory
“We fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of fear and pain.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
“Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight. And after I've finished "shooting," my unharmed victims are still around for others to enjoy. I have developed a deep respect for animals. I consider them fellow living creatures with certain rights that should not be violated any more than those of humans.”
- Jimmy Stewart
“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
“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
“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 of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. 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.”
- Henry Beston
“The fidelity of a dog is a precious gift demanding no less binding moral responsibilities than the friendship of a human being.”
- Konrad Lorenz
“We don't live the lives of Eskimos. We don't need to kill animals for fashion.”
- Charlize Theron
“We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.”
- Albert Schweitzer
“Six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses.”
- Ingrid Newkirk
“As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.”
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
“All beings seek for happiness; so let your compassion extend itself to all.”
- Mahavamsa
“You know, we all oppose animal cruelty. But sometimes we forget that animals on farms suffer and feel pain like all other animals. They, too, deserve to be protected from harm and cruelty.”
- Charlotte Ross
“As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower 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.”
- Pythagorus
“I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“The Animals of the planet are in desperate peril and they are fully aware of this. No less than human beings are doing in all parts of the world, they are seeking sanctuary.”
- Alice Walker
“We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.”
- William Ralph Inge
“If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution - and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity.”
- Jane Goodall
“Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.”
- Bradley Millar
“When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.”
- Joseph Wood Krutch
“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 A. Edison
“The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”
- Leonardo da Vinci
“Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport. Sport is when individuals or teams compete against each other under equal circumstances to determine who is better at a given game or endeavor. Hunting will be a sport when deer, elk, bears, and ducks are...
given 12-gauge shotguns. Bet we'd see a lot fewer drunk yahoos (live ones, anyway) in the woods if that happened.”
- R. Lerner
“Cruelty is one fashion statement we can all do without.”
- Rue McClanahan
“Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.”
- Albert Schweitzer
“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
“For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them. The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment.”
- Peter Singer
“Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made [man] is the most detestable. 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
“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
“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
“Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
- Mahatma Gandhi