Animal Quotes - Page 10

If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?

If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.

What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.

Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic- and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

We need an extreme movement because what is happening to animals is so extreme. Some misinformed people claim that animal rights activists are terrorists, but these people are simply ignorant of who the real terrorists are - the companies and industries that torture literally billions of animals each year.

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.

Concord, solidarity, and mutual help are the most important means of enabling animal species to survive.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The wild, cruel beast is not behind the bars of the cage. He is in front of it.

We’re constantly being bombarded by problems that we face and sometimes we can get completely overwhelmed. [But] we should always feel like a hummingbird. I may feel insignificant, but I don’t want to be like the other animals watching the planet go down the drain. I’ll be a hummingbird, I’ll do the best I can.

To be 'for animals' is not to be 'against humanity.' To require others to treat animals justly, as their rights require, is not to ask for anything more nor less in their case than in the case of any human to whom just treatment is due. The animal rights movement is a part of, not opposed to, the human rights movement. Attempts to dismiss it as anti human are mere rhetoric.

All breathing beings are spiritual; this includes everyone who breathes, whether they are animals or humans, carnivores or vegetarians.

There is no doubt that man is a competitive animal and there is no place where this fact is more obvious than in the ring. There is no second place. Either you win or you lose. When they call you a champion, it's because you don't lose. To win takes a complete commitment of mind and body.

Children have an anxious concern for living beings, and the satisfaction of this instinct fills them with delight. It is therefore easy to interest them in taking care of plants and especially of animals. Nothing awakens foresight in a small child such as this. When he knows that animals have need of him, that little plants will dry up if he does not water them, he binds together with a new thread of love today's passing moments with those of the morrow.

We all love animals. Why do we call some 'pets' and others 'dinner?'

No animal needs to die in order for me to live. And that makes me feel good.

Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.

If cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys go into slaughterhouses alive and come out chopped up into hundreds of pieces, how could anyone claim that animals aren't being mistreated, abused, tortured, terrorized and savagely murdered in these places? How in the world could SLAUGHTERING BILLIONS of INNOCENTS be done with love, humanity and concern?

Veganism gives us all the opportunity to say what we "stand for" in life- the ideal of healthy, humane living. Add decades to your life, with a clear conscience as a bonus.

I became very critical of zoos and circuses and keeping animals in captivity. I wish it was against the law.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

Since we humans have the better brain, isn't it our responsibility to protect our fellow creatures from, oddly enough, ourselves?

Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.

In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.