Quotes Concerning Society
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The quotes on this page are wide ranging. Most statements here I have tried to relate to individuals and the societies they comprise.

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(25 Quotations)

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Author, Spiritualist) - "At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society."

• Thomas A. Edison (Scientist, Inventor) – "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.”

• Albert Einstein (Physicist) - "If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals."

• Loren Eisley (Archeologist, Anthropologist, Author) – "One does not meet one's self until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (Author, Poet, Philosopher: Fate) - "You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."

• Gary L. Francione (Professor of Law and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University Law School; Introduction to Animal Rights – Your Child or the Dog?) – "Of course, our acceptance of the moral significance of animal interests would imply a profound change in the human condition [. . .] We would surely pay a price for such a different world. We would have to forgo the unnecessary pleasure of eating animals and having their fat clog our arteries, the fun of watching them being tormented in rodeos or circuses, the excitement of walking into the woods and blowing them apart or wounding them with arrows, and the very questionable science involved in making them addicted to drugs that they would never have used except in laboratories. We would finally have to treat our moral schizophrenia about animals, which leads us to love some animals, treat them as members of our family, and never once doubt their sentience, emotional capacity, self-awareness, or personhood, while at the same time we stick dinner forks into other animals who are indistinguishable in any relevant sense from our animal companions. In many ways, our prevailing ways of thinking about animals should make us skeptical of our claim that it is our rationality that distinguishes us from them."

• Edward Augustus Freeman, PhD. (Historian, Oxford Prof. of modern religious history) - "The awful wrongs and sufferings forced upon the innocent, faithful animal race, form the blackest chapter in the whole world's history."

• Mohandas K. Gandhi (Political and Human Rights Activist: Pacifist) - "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be measured by the way its animals are treated."

• Dr. Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish (1844-1936, founder of the Mazdaznan religion) - "It is strange to hear people talk of Humanitarianism, who are members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and animals, and who claim to be God-loving men and women, but who, nevertheless, encourage by their patronage the killing of animals merely to gratify the cravings of appetite."

• Ruth Harrison (Animal Machines) - "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."

• Franz Kafka (Existentialist) - “Now I can look at you (animals) in peace; I don't eat you any more.”

• Immanuel Kant (German philosopher) - "We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals."

• W.E.H. Lecky (The History of European Morals) – "At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity; and finally its influence is felt in the dealing of [humans] with the animal world. In each of these cases a standard is formed different from that of the preceding stage, but in each case the same tendency is recognized as a virtue."

• C.S. Lewis (Author)– "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.”

• Abraham Lincoln (16th President of the U.S.) - "I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."

• John Locke (Philosopher) – "This tendency [to cruelty] should be watched in them [children], and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing other animals will, by degrees, harden their hearts even towards men [. . .] And they, who delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind. Children should from the beginning be brought up in an abhorrence of killing or tormenting living beings [. . .] And indeed, I think people from their cradles should be tender to all sensible creatures [. . .] All the entertainment and talk of History is of nothing but fighting and killing; and the honour and renown that is bestowed on conquerors, who, for the most part, are but the great butchers of mankind, further mislead youth.”

• Paul and Linda McCartney - "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we're not contributing to their pain."

• Fred A. McGrand (Senate of Canada Subcommittee on Childhood Experiences as Causes of Criminal Behavior: Chairman) - "Cruelty has cursed the human family for countless ages. It is almost impossible for one to be cruel to animals and kind to humans. If children are permitted to be cruel to their pets and other animals, they easily learn to get the same pleasure from the misery of fellow-humans. Such tendencies can easily lead to crime."

• Jayne Meadows (Actress) – "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.”

• John Stuart Mill (Philosopher, Utilitarian) – [Animals are] "those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind."

• John Stuart Mill (Philosopher, Utilitarian) - "The reasons for legal intervention in favor of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves -- the animals"

• Ashley Montagu (Anthropologist, Scientific Generalist) - "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. In the societies of the Western world compassionate intelligence is encouraged in girls - in boys it is taboo. The taboo on tenderness in which boys are conditioned, the emphasis on "manliness", "machoism", plays havoc with the male's capacity for compassionate intelligence. Tenderness is considered to be feminine, and that is sufficient to remove it from the repertoire of masculine behavior. Indeed, things have reached such a pass in the Western world that many men seem to have lost all understanding of its meaning. The masculine world would substitute for it the idea of "justice". The difficulty with that is that there is not much compassion in their justice, and justice without compassion is not justice at all...”

• Axel Munthe (Physician, Psychiatrist, Writer)- "The wild, cruel animal is not behind the bars of a cage. He is in front of it.”

• Ogonyok (Soviet anti-cruelty magazine, 1979) - "Out of 135 criminals, including robbers and rapists, 118 admitted that when they were children they burned, hanged and stabbed domestic animals."

• Miyun Park (Compassion Over Killing Co-Director) - "Until we embrace the fact that animals aren't mere commodities to serve us in whatever way we see fit, until we stop wearing their skins and hair, until we stop subjecting them to systematic beatings and psychological to get them to perform tricks for our entertainment, until we stop experimenting on them, and most importantly, until we stop eating them, we're collectively guilty of animal abuse.”

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