Quotes Concerning Ethics / Philosophy
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(13 Quotations)

• Cleveland Armory (Fund for Animals founder: Larry King Show, October 29, 1987) - "I would not knowingly have an animal hurt for me, or my children, or anything else."

• Marcus Aurelius (Antoninus 121 - 180 AD) – “One man is proud when he has caught a poor hare and another when he has taken a little fish in a net, and another when he has taken wild boars, and another when he has taken bears... Are not these robbers?”

• Sri Aurobindo (Scholar, Literary critic, Philosopher, Revolutionary, Poet, Yogi and 'Rishi') – “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.”

• Right Reverend John Austin Baker (Bishop of Salisbury, England; commenting on the cruelty of modern animal agriculture) "Yet saddest of all fates, surely, is to have lost that sense of the holiness of life altogether; that we commit the blasphemy of bringing thousands of lives to a cruel and terrifying death or of making those lives a living death - and feel nothing."

• Jeremy Bentham (Philosopher: Utilitarian) - "The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand tyranny. [Humanity has] already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be realized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum (fur or tail) are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. 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 a 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?"

• Dr. Steven Best (Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy at University of Texas, El Paso) - "The human species is driving itself full speed into an evolutionary dead-end. We are destroying the planet and everything we do kills animals. We have lost our moral compass. We think in terms of profit and power rather than ethics and compassion. We no longer have any reverence for life or any sense of connection with the natural world. We think we are made in the image of God and that God made everything for us. We see ourselves as conquerors of nature rather than citizens of a vast biocommunity. We are technologically sophisticated and morally retarded. We have no conception of the importance of nonhuman life forms in sustaining ecosystems. We fail to realize that what we do to the animals we do to ourselves. And all the while, we live in the fantasyland of entertainment and distractions whereby we focus more on the sex lives and surgical make-overs of movie stars than the greatest challenge our species has ever faced. I believe that animal liberation is the next great liberation movement on this planet, and that by promoting respect for nonhuman animals, we are advancing human moral evolution."

• Henry Beston (The Outermost House, 1928) – “The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with 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 splendor and travail of the earth.”

• Charles Darwin (Evolutionist, Naturalist) – "There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.... The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.”

• Charles Darwin – "Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal."

• Albert Einstein (Physicist) – "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.”

• Loren Eisley (Archeologist, Anthropologist, Author) – "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.”

• Mohandas K. Gandhi (The Story of My Experiments With Truth) - "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 the lamb for the sake of the human body. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man."

• Mohandas K. Gandhi - "The basis of my vegetarianism is not physical but moral. If anybody said that I should die if I did not take beef-tea or mutton, even under medical advice, I would prefer death. That is the basis of my vegetarianism . . . Not for the world should you sacrifice a moral principle."

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