Quotes Concerning Society
Page 3

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

Page  | 1 | 2 | 3 |
Previous

(25 Quotations)

• William Penn (Proprietor, Pennsylvania's founder, Quaker)- "I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness or abilities that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

• Pythagoras (Philosopher and Mathematician) - "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”

• Romain Rolland (Nobel Prize Recipient 1915) - "To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the suffereings 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."

• John Jacques Rousseau - "The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger after sweet and gentle creatures who harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service"

• Agnes Ryan (social justice worker and pacifist; For the Church Door) - "Wars will never cease while men still kill other animals for food, since to turn any living creature into a roast, a steak, a chop, or any other form of 'meat' takes the same kind of violence, the same kind of bloodshed and the same kind of mental process required to change a living man into a dead soldier."

• Arthur Schopenhauer - "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."

• Dr. Albert Schweitzer M.D. (Philosopher, medical missionary, Nobel Peace Prize 1952) - "Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace."

• Seneca – "All cruelty springs from weakness."

• George Bernard Shaw - "Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom."

• George Bernard Shaw - "While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?"

• Melissa Silvestre – "People need to be desensitized to the suffering of others gradually. A society that teaches that the suffering of animals doesn't matter is well on its way to raising future sadists. Virtually every serial killer in America will tell you tales of a childhood spent tormenting frogs, cats, and dogs. This is no coincidence. The scale from swatting flies to knowingly eating the results of farmers who treat animals inhumanely to cold-blooded murder is a continuum with a slippery slope. How much blood is on your hands?"

• Isaac Bashevis Singer (Author, Nobel 1978) – "Early in my life I came to the conclusion that there was no basic difference between man and animals. If a man has the heart to cut the throat of a chicken or a calf, there’s no reason he should not be willing to cut the throat of a man."

• Isaac Bashevis Singer (Author, Nobel 1978) – "There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is."

• Marjorie Spiegel (The Dreaded Comparrison: Human and Animal Slavery) - "As long as humans feel they are forced to defend their own rights and worth by placing someone" (animals) "beneath them, oppression will not end."

• Marjorie Spiegel (The Dreaded Comparrison: Human and Animal Slavery) - "Comparing the suffering of animals to that of blacks (or any other oppressed group) is offensive only to the speciesist: one who has embraced the false notions of what animals are like."

• Robert Louis Stevenson - "We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear."

• Robert Louis Stevenson - "Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own."

• Rabindranath Tagore (Nobel Prize, 1913) – "We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do[. . .] cruelty [. . .] is a fundamental sin, and admits of no arguments or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, it protests against cruelty, is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us – in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a crank."

• Edwin Way Teale (Circle of the Seasons, 1953) – "Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more."

• Count Leo Tolstoy - "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."

• Mark Twain - "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 (What Is Man, 1906) – "The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot."

• Leonardo Da Vinci – "Truly man is the king of beast for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others. We are burial places."

• Jon Wynne-Tyson - "Until we establish a felt sense of kinship between our own species and those fellow mortals who share with us the sun and shadow of life on this agonized planet, there is no hope for other species, there is no hope for the environment, and there is no hope for ourselves."

• Emile Zola – "The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men."

Page  | 1 | 2 | 3 |
Previous