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Animals Quotes

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Animals Quotes

“Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves-for they are a little vain, knowing themselves to be the most beautiful creatures in all the world, and magic besides. They mate very rarely, and no place is more enchanted than one where a unicorn has been born. The last time she had seen another unicorn the young virgins who still came seeking her now and then had called to her in a different tongue; but then, she had no idea of months and years and centuries, or even of seasons. It was always spring in her forest, because she lived there, and she wandered all day among the great beech trees, keeping watch over the animals that lived in the ground and under bushes, in nests and caves, earths and treetops. Generation after generation, wolves and rabbits alike, they hunted and loved and had children and died, and as the unicorn did none of these things, she never grew tired of watching them.”

BeautifulTimeNatureBornMagicSpringAloneVainPoolAnimalsVirginsForestEnchantedUnicornWatchingMateUnicorns
Book:The Last Unicorn
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“And then he draws the lamb in one smooth strong stroke, and slaps and rakes its wet mosslike fur to make it breathe, feels the power of its fast heartbeat in the chicken-bone cage of its ribs, still wet in his hands from the grease of birth, all these things of life, from jissom to mucus slavered between thighs to the wet sack of birth and glistening oiled newborn thing—all of these things of life awatered.”

BirthAnimalsNew LifeMiracle Of Birth
Book:The Dig
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“It's just the way things are. Take a moment to consider this statement. Really think about it. We send one species to the butcher and give our love and kindness to another apparently for no reason other than because it's the way things are. When our attitudes and behaviors towards animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined, we can safely say we have been fed absurdities. It is absurd that we eat pigs and love dogs and don't even know why. Many of us spend long minutes in the aisle of the drugstore mulling over what toothpaste to buy. Yet most of don't spend any time at all thinking about what species of animal we eat and why. Our choices as consumers drive an industry that kills ten billion animals per year in the United States alone. If we choose to support this industry and the best reason we can come up with is because it's the way things are, clearly something is amiss. What could cause an entire society of people to check their thinking caps at the door--and to not even realize they're doing so? Though this question is quite complex, the answer is quite simple: carnism.”

FoodMeatAnimalsCowsPigsDogsCatsPetsCarnism
Book:Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism
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“Confronted with the problems that characterize our herding culture, we are perhaps like the metaphorical man wounded by an arrow that the Buddha discussed with his students. He said that the man would be foolish if he tried to discover who shot the arrow, why he shot it, where he was when he shot it, and so forth, before having the arrow removed and the wound treated, lest he bleed to death attempting to get his questions answered. We, likewise, can all remove the arrow and treat the wound of eating animal foods right now. We don't need to know the whole history. We can easily see it is cruel and that it is unnecessary; whatever people have done in the past, we are not obligated to imitate them if it is based on delusion. Perhaps in the past people thought they needed to enslave animals and people to survive, and that the cruelty involved in it was somehow allowed them. It's obviously not necessary for us today, as we can plainly see by walking into any grocery store, and the sooner we can awaken from the thrall of the obsolete mythos that we are predatory by nature, the sooner we'll be able to evolve spiritually and discover and fulfill our purpose on this earth.”

HistoryFoodEatingMeatAnimalsEating AnimalsCarnism
Book:The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
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“We are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance.”

FoodIgnoranceIndustryMeatEggsAnimalsDairyFactory Farming
Book:The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food
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“In any case I just cannot imagine attaching so much importance to any food or treat that I would grow irate or bitter at the mention of the suffering of animals. A pig to me will always seem more important than a pork rind. There is the risk here of confusing realism with cynicism, moral stoicism with moral sloth, of letting oneself become jaded and lazy and self-satisfied--what used to be called an 'appetitive' person.”

FoodEatingEthicsMeatAnimals
Book:Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
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“The link between beast and plate was always made clear, in very unsentimental terms; all the creatures on the farm were for milking or eating, save Humphrey, an overweight and irritable sheep who had escaped the abattoir though pure strength of character. Cruelty to any beast was unthinkable and still remains one of the most important lessons I learned; if we eat meat, we must ensure it was raised in the most humane way possible.”

FoodAnimal RightsAnimals
Book:The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes
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“In the late 1960s, a park could purchase an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin for about $300. Today, that same species will cost more than $100,000. Indeed, this spike in price has forced zoos to change their entire philosophy. “The attitude was these marine mammals were an expendable commodity,” a former vice president of Sea World confided. “If these animals perished, you’d just go out and replace them. The ease didn’t drive a great deal of research of what they needed to keep them healthy.[...] Yet if “expendability” was the industry’s previous philosophy, “reproduction” came to be its new one.”

HealthGreedNeglectAnimalsAnimal CrueltyDolphinsAquariumsCommoditization
Book:Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
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“I quit eating meat in 1976, the same year I turned fifteen, came out, and went to my first gay rights rally (not in that order). When I say that I 'came out,' I mean that I resolved to never lie about my love for women, never deliberately pass for straight, and never deny a lover by calling her 'him.' To do so, I felt, would be to betray not only the women I desired, but my deepest self. My decision to quit meat was equally simple. Somehow, through the confluence of midseventies influences, I knew that vegetarianism was a particularly healthy way to eat. One day, quite suddenly, I realized: If I didn't need to eat meat to stay alive, then eating meat was killing for pleasure. I couldn't live with myself, wouldn't be the nonviolent person I believed myself to be, if I killed other beings--beings who had their own desires--merely to satisfy my desire for the taste of their flesh. Looking back, I see that both decisions, coming out and quitting meat, are about the interplay of desire and integrity. Sometimes integrity means being true to your desires, and sometimes integrity requires you to refuse your desires. I also notice that both decisions were about bodies and consent. A primary tenet of gay liberation is that what consenting people do with each other's bodies is nobody else's business. And, of course, eating meat is something you do to somebody else's body without their consent.”

IntegrityMeatComing OutAnimalsConsent
Author:pattrice jones
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“Veganism is merely the continuation of Christianity by other means. It’s the Sermon on the Mount extended from the poor, weak and meek to animals. It gives every vegan the opportunity to posture as a Messiah, saving the poor little animals from Leviathan. Vegans are addicted to having a Messiah Complex. The powerless often posture as activists on behalf of the even more powerless. It makes them feel better about themselves.”

ChristianityPetMoralsAnimal RightsAnimalsVegansMessiah Complex
Book:The Wolf Tamers: How They Made the Strong Weak
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“Whenever I met a collared lemming on a summer day and took its stare I would think: Here is a tough animal. Here is a valuable life. In a heedless moment, years from now, will I remember more machinery here than mind? If it could tell me of its will to survive, would I think of biochemistry, or would I think of the analogous human desire? If it could speak of the time since the retreat of the ice, would I have the patience to listen?”

ListeningPatienceAnimalsEcologyArcticHuman Desire
Book:Arctic Dreams
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“Seu maior aliado nessa incrível expansão de poder e influência foi o cavalo. Usando cordas, chicotes e qualquer tática cruel que pudesse engendrar, Genghis Khan utilizou a força, a estamina e a velocidade do cavalo. Os cavalos não tinham como reagir àquela crueldade. Eles não tinham voz. Mas... eles tinham uma língua. Ninguém viu isso, ninguém tentou ver isso, mas ela estava lá; ela existia naqueles tempos como existe hoje.”

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Book:The Man Who Listens to Horses
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“The natural tendency of man is war. The world is dominated by patriarchy, capitalism and war. Man hankers for any excuse to fight, to destroy and to be destructive. If he cannot find a real excuse, he will invent an excuse, because he cannot live without war. In modern times, there has been a war every 5-10 years. And what has man achieved? What has man achieved through all this violence, bloodshed and destructivity? The whole past of man has been pathological, and the reason is that we go on listening to the mind. The mind has grown out of man's animal heritage. Man is part of evolution. Man may be the highest animal, but he is still an animal. And through the evolution, the mind has become conditioned to function in a particular way. The mind knows only how to fight. The mind knows only the way of violence. Unless man learns how to go beyond the mind, he will never become truly human. Then he will remain an animal. To be truly human, man has to stop the way of fight, violence, destructivity and war. He has to move beyond the animal in him, and for the first time reach for the human. The human has tremendous potential for love, joy, silence, intelligence and beauty, The human is also the beginning of the divine. But the first step is to get rid of the animal heritage.”

WarViolenceCapitalismAnimalsPatriarchyDestructiveness
Book:Man is Part of the Whole: Silence, Love, Joy, Truth, Compassion, Freedom and Grace
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“We climbed under the chain fence and knelt around Dad while he petted the cheetah. By then a few people had begun to gather. One man was calling to us to get back behind the chain fence. We ignored him. I knelt close to the cheetah. My heart was beating fast, but I wasn’t scared, only excited. I could feel the cheetah’s hot breath on my face. He looked right at me. His amber eyes were steady but sad, as if he knew he’d never see the plains of Africa again.”

QuotesSadAnimalsThe Glass CastleJeannette Walls
Book:The Glass Castle
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“We treat each other with exceeding courtesy; we says, it’s great to see you after all these years. Our tigers drink milk. Our hawks tread the ground. Our sharks have all drowned. Our wolves yawn beyond the open cage. Our snakes have shed their lightning, our apes their flights of fancy, our peacocks have renounced their plumes. The bats flew out of our hair long ago. We fall silent in mid-sentence, all smiles, past help. Our humans don’t know how to talk to one another.”

HumansPoetryTalkingCommunicationPoemSpeechAnimals
Book:View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems
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