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Animal Rights Quotes

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Animal Rights Quotes

“Throughout the late '80s, me and a handful of friends just like you people here, we started to break windows, we started to slash tires, we started to rescue animals from factory farms and vivisection breeders, and we graduated to breaking into laboratories . As long as we emptied the labs of animals, they were still easily replaced. So that's when the ALF in this country, and my cell, started engaging in arson.”

“Tom Regan’s now classic Case for Animal Rights blends careful argument with intense moral concern. For two decades, where Regan has been taken seriously, animals have been better off and people have become better persons. This new edition is a welcome sign of this influence continuing.”

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and his feelings as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.”

“Family organisation is broken and young animals are increasingly being denied a mother to turn to for comfort and for grooming. One of the saddest and most pathetic of farm practices - inevitable at the present time for the supply of dairy produce - is the separation of the calf from the cow at birth or soon after.”

“To argue that we humans are capable of complex multifarious thought and feeling, whereas the sheep's perception is probably limited by lowly sheepish perceptions, is no more to the point than if I were to slaughter and eat you on the grounds that I am a sophisticated personality able to enjoy Mozart, formal logic and cannibalism, whereas your imaginative world seems confined to True Romances and tinned spaghetti.”

“The Anti-Vivisector does not deny that physiologists must make experiments and even take chances with new methods. He says that they must not seek knowledge by criminal methods, just as they must not make money by criminal methods. He does not object to Galileo dropping cannon balls from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa; but he would object to shoving off two dogs or American tourists.”

“...we sacrifice other species to our own not because our own has any objective metaphysical privilege over others, but simply because it is ours. It may be very natural to have this loyalty to our own species, but let us hear no more from the naturalists about the "sentimentality" of anti-vivisectionists. If loyalty to our own species - preference for man simply because we are men - is not sentiment, then what is?”

“Why who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know nothing else but miracles, whether they be animals feeding in the fields, Or, birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; These, with the rest, one and all, are to me, miracles.”

“My view is that consciousness, the seat of "personalness," is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights).”

“Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life.”

“. . . it is difficult for Europeans to appreciate the sentiment. Other nations kill animals by wholesale and kill one another; they exist in a sea of blood. A European said that the reason why in India animals were not killed was because it was supposed that they contained the spirits of ancestors. This reason was worthy of a savage nation who are not many steps from the brute.”

“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.”

“I believe that to knowingly commit actions that cause or condone suffering is reprehensible in the extreme. I call upon you to be compassionate and treat others as you want to be treated. If you don't want to be beaten, imprisoned, mutilated, killed or tortured then you shouldn't condone such behavior towards anyone, be they human or not.”

“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.”

“I've got some incredible fans actually - so loyal and they make me birthday cards and Christmas cards. I got this package of poems and artwork based around Jennifer Bofinger, media spokeswoman for the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said despite the shabby treatment of deer just loves it!”

“The first man . . . ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?”

“I'm a vegetarian and very much active in regards to how I feel about animal rights and protecting animals and giving animals a voice. But at the same time, I appreciate and respect other people's decisions to eat meat. The only thing that I hope is that people are educated, that they're aware, that they're living a conscious lifestyle.”

“What I build upon I shall be told is a folly that wise men are not guilty of: I own it; but whilst it proceeds from a real passion inherent in our nature, it is sufficient to demonstrate that we are born with a repugnancy to the killing, and consequently the eating of animals; for it is impossible that a natural appetite should ever prompt us to act, or desire others to do, what we have an aversion to, be it as foolish as it will.”

“Christian theology provides some of the best arguments for respecting animal life and for taking seriously animals as partners with us within God's creation. It may be ironical that this tradition, once thought of as the bastion of human moral exclusivity, should now be seen as the seed-bed for a creative understanding of animal liberation.”