Quotes Concerning Ethics / Philosophy
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(25 Quotations)

• Mohandas K. Gandhi (Political and Human Rights Activist: Pacifist) - "I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl upon the earth."

• Dick Gregory (Civil Rights activist, Comedian) - "Animals and humans suffer alike. If you had to kill your own hog before you ate it, most likely you would not be able to do it. To hear the hog scream, to see the blood spill, to see the baby being taken away from its momma, and to see the look of death in the animal’s eye would turn your stomach. So you get the man at the packing house to do the killing for you. In like manner, if the wealthy aristocrats who are perpetrating conditions in the ghetto actually heard the screams of ghetto suffering, or saw the slow death of hungry little kids, or witnessed the strangulation of manhood and dignity, they could not continue the killing. But the wealthy are protected from such horror [. . .] If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one."

• Ashley Montagu (Anthropologist, Scientific Generalist) – "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.”

• Philip Ochoa (All for Animals board member) - "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."

• Rabbi Pinchas Peli – "We cannot treat any living thing callously, and we are responsible for what happens to other beings, human or animal, even if we do not personally come into contact with them.”

• Dr. Humphrey Primatt (1776) - "Pain is pain, whether it be inflicted on man or beast; and the creature who suffers it, whether man or beast, being sensible to the misery of it, while it lasts, suffers evil [. . .] a man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast."

• Tom Regan (Philosopher: Animal Rights View) - "It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands in the case of animals used in science, for example, but empty cages: not "traditional" animal agriculture, but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not "more humane" hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices. For when an injustice is absolute, one must oppose it absolutely. It was not "reformed" slavery that justice demanded, not "re- formed" child labor, not "reformed" subjugation of women. In each of these cases, abolition was the only moral answer. Merely to reform injustice is to prolong injustice.”

• Tom Regan (Philosopher: Animal Rights View) - "It is true, therefore, that women do not exist to serve men, blacks to serve whites, the poor to serve the rich, or the weak to serve the strong. The philosophy of animal rights not only accepts these truths, it insists upon and justifies them.”

• Jean Paul Richter (Author) – "Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account?”

• Richard Ryder - "Some will take refuge in the old cliché that humans are different from other animals. But when did a difference justify a moral prejudice? When did those with black hair have a right to mistreat those with red hair...or even those with blue or purple hair...Surely the crucial similarity that men share with other animals is the capacity to suffer? Regardless of the number of legs or the woolliness of our fur, we can all suffer..."

• Richard Ryder - "Because one species is more clever than another, does it give it the right to imprison or torture the less clever species? Does one exceptionally clever individual have a right to exploit the less clever individuals of his own species? To say that he does is to say with the Fascists that the strong have a right to abuse and exploit the weak - might is right, and the strong and ruthless shall inherit the earth."

• Dr. Carl Sagan & Dr. Ann Druyan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) - "Humans--who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other work for us, wear them, eat them--without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeeling 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."

• Henry Salt (1894) – "It is only by the spread of the same democratic spirit that animals can enjoy the ‘rights’ for which even [humans] have for so long struggled in vain. The emancipation of [humans] from cruelty and injustice will bring with it in due course the emancipation of animals also. The two reforms are inseparably connected, and neither can be fully realized alone."

• Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopherThe Basis of Moral Duty) – "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."

• Dr. Albert Schweitzer - "The thinking [person] must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another..."

• Isaac Bashevis Singer (Author, Nobel 1978) - "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."

• Peter Singer (professor of philosophy at Monash University Melbourne, Australia; Utilitarian) - "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 - "All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals."

• Peter Singer – "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 - "Those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed have no right to be shielded from the slaughterhouse or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy. If it is distasteful for humans to think about, what can it be like for the animals to experience it?"

• Peter Singer - "[The tyranny of human over non-human animals] has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans. The struggle against this tyranny is a struggle as important as any of the moral and social issues that have been fought over in recent years."

• Marjorie Spiegel (The Dreaded Comparrison: Human and Animal Slavery) - "The only relevant requirement which should be necessary to keep us from unnecessarily inflicting pain and suffering on someone is that individual’s ability to feel pain and to suffer. Similarly, the only qualification individuals should need to make it wrong for us to dominate their lives is that they possess life, that they are alive."

• St. Francis of Assisi – "Not to hurt our humble brethren [the animals] is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission: to be of service to them whenever they require it."

• Christine Stevens – "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."

• Count Leo Tolstoy – "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."

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