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Liberation Quotes

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Liberation Quotes

“...the transition from capitalism to Socialism and the liberation of the working class from the yoke of capitalism cannot be effected by slow changes, by reforms, but only by a qualitative change of the capitalist system, by revolution. Hence, in order not to err in policy, one must be a revolutionary, not a reformist.”

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Author:J. Stalin
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“It is only your self-identification with your mind that makes you happy or unhappy. Rebel against your slavery to your mind, see your bonds as self-created and break the chains of attachment and revulsion. Keep in mind your goal of freedom, until it dawns on you that you are already free, that freedom is not something in the distant future to be earned with painful efforts, but perennially one's own, to be used! Liberation is not an acquisition but a matter of courage, the courage to believe that you are free already and to act on it.”

MindBelieveSelfMatterWisdomSpiritualUsedGoalEffortBreakSlaveryPainfulUnhappyChainsLiberationDawnAttachmentRebelMake You HappyAcquisitionIdentificationRevulsion
Author:Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
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“The God of the Bible is the God of liberation rather than oppression; a God of justice rather than injustice; a God of freedom and humanity rather than enslavement and subservience; a God of love, righteousness and community rather than hatred, self-interest and exploitation.”

SelfSpiritualHumanityInterestCommunityJusticeHatredInjusticeOppressionLiberationRighteousnessExploitationSelf InterestEnslavementSubservience
Book:Black theology, black power
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“Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.”

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Author:Audre Lorde
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“...chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are thinking, self-aware beings, capable of planning ahead, who form lasting social bonds with others and have a rich social and emotional life. The great apes are therefore an ideal case for showing the arbitrariness of the species boundary. If we think that all human beings, irrespective of age or mental capacity, have some basic rights, how can we deny that the great apes, who surpass some humans in their capacities, also have these rights?”

IfsThinkingHumansSelfAgeFormSocialHuman BeingsAnimalCasesRichRightsEmotionalCapableCapacityIdealsSpeciesDenyPlanningBoundariesLiberationLastingApesAnimal LiberationChimpanzeesGorillasEmotional LifeBasic RightsBonobosPlanning AheadOrangutansSocial Bonds
Author:Peter Singer
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“Habits of thought lead us to brush aside descriptions of cruelty to animals as emotional, for "animal-lovers only"; or if not that, then anyway the problem is so trivial in comparison to the problems of human beings that no sensible person could give it time and attention. This too is a prejudice - for how can one know that a problem is trivial until one has taken the time to examine its extent?”

IfsKnowsGivingHumansPersonsProblemHuman BeingsAnimalAttentionTakenEmotionalHabitLoversPrejudiceCrueltyLiberationDescriptionComparisonSensibleBrushesAnimal CrueltyAnimal LiberationAnimal Lover
Book:Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals
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“It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road...A stone has no interests because it cannot suffer. The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is, however, not only necessary, but also sufficient for us to say that a being has interests - at an absolute minimum, an interest in not suffering. A mouse, for example, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road because it will suffer if it is.”

IfsDoeWould BeSufferingInterestAnimalExampleCapacityStonesAbsolutesLiberationSufficientEnjoymentNonsenseMinimumMiceAnimal Liberation
Author:Peter Singer
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“The statement "I am in pain" may be one piece of evidence for the conclusion that the speaker is in pain, but it is not the only possible evidence, and since people sometimes tell lies, not even the best possible evidence. Even if there were stronger grounds for refusing to attribute pain to those who do not have language, the consequences of this refusal might lead us to reject the conclusion. Human infants and young children are unable to use language. Are we to deny that a year-old child can suffer?”

PeopleIfsYearsHumansMayChildrenSometimesUseMightPainYoungLyingSufferingLanguageAnimalPiecesEvidenceConsequenceStrongerDenyStatementsConclusionLiberationRejectsAttributesSpeakersInfantRefusalYoung ChildrenOne PieceAnimal Liberation
Book:Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals
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“Sometimes animals may suffer more because of their more limited understanding. If, for instance, we are taking prisoners in wartime we can explain to them that although they must submit to capture, search, and confinement, they will not otherwise be harmed and will be set free at the conclusion of hostilities. If we capture wild animals, however, we cannot explain that we are not threatening their lives. A wild animal cannot distinguish an attempt to overpower and confine from an attempt to kill; the one causes as much terror as the other.”

IfsMaySometimesSufferingCausesUnderstandingAnimalTerrorConclusionInstanceLiberationPrisonerCaptureSubmitThreateningHostilityWild AnimalAnimal LiberationConfinementWartime
Author:Peter Singer
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“...the proposed air force and army experiments were designed so that many animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering and death would save a single human life or benefit humans in any way at all; but the same can be said of millions of their experiments performed each year in the United States alone.”

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Book:Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals
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“People tend to care about dogs because they generally have more experience with dogs as companions; but other animals are as capable of suffering as dogs are. Few people feel sympathy for rats. Yet rats are intelligent animals, and there can be no doubt that rats are capable of suffering and do suffer from countless painful experiments performed on them. If the army were to stop experiments on dogs and switch to rats instead, we should not be any less concerned.”

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Author:Peter Singer
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“There has been opposition to experimenting on animals for a long time. This opposition has made little headway because experimenters, backed by commercial firms that profit by supplying laboratory animals and equipment, have been able to convince legislators and the public that opposition comes from uninformed fanatics who consider the interests of animals more important than the interests of human beings.”

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Author:Peter Singer
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“It may be thought justifiable to require tests on animals of potentially life-saving drugs, but the same kinds of tests are used for products like cosmetics, food coloring, and floor polishes. Should thousands of animals suffer so that a new kind of lipstick or floor wax can be put on the market? Don't we already have an excess of most of these products? Who benefits from their introduction, except the companies that hope to profit from them?”

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Author:Peter Singer
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“As for cages themselves, an ordinary citizen who kept dogs in similar conditions for their entire lives would risk prosecution for cruelty. A pig producer who keeps an animal of comparable intelligence in this manner, however, is more likely to be rewarded with a tax concession or, in some countries, a direct government subsidy.”

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Book:Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals
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“With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.”

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Author:Peter Singer
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“If animals are no longer quite outside the moral sphere, they are still in a special section near the outer rim. Their interests are allowed to count only when they do not clash with human interests. If there is a clash - even a clash between a lifetime of suffering for a nonhuman animal and the gastronomic preference of a human being - the interests of the nonhuman are disregarded. The moral attitudes of the past are too deeply embedded in our thought and our practices to be upset by a mere change in our knowledge of ourselves and of other animals.”

IfsHumansStillsPastSufferingInterestHuman BeingsAnimalAttitudeMoralPracticeSpecialMereLifetimeLiberationUpsetSpheresOur ThoughtsSectionsPreferenceClashEmbeddedAnimal LiberationRimsDisregarded
Book:Animal Liberation
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“It is an indication of the extent to which people are now isolated from the animals they eat that children brought up on storybooks that lead them to think of a farm as a place where animals wander around freely in idyllic conditions might be able to live out their entire lives without ever being forced to revise this rosy image.”

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Author:Peter Singer
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“The newspapers do little better. Their coverage of nonhuman animals is dominated by "human interest" events like the birth of a baby gorilla at the zoo, or by threats to endangered species; but developments in farming techniques that deprive millions of animals of freedom of movement go unreported.”

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Book:Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals
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“Even people who are aware that the traditional family farm has been taken over by big business interests, and that some questionable experiments go on in laboratories, cling to a vague belief that conditions cannot be too bad, or else the government or the animal welfare societies would have done something about it.”

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Book:Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals
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“Whatever the reason, for most of the present century, the literature and publicity of the old established [animal welfare] groups made a significant contribution to the prevailing attitude that dogs and cats and wild animals need protection, but other animals do not. Thus people came to think of "animal welfare" as something for kindly ladies who are dotty about cats, and not as a cause founded on basic principles of justice and morality.”

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Author:Peter Singer
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“No consideration at all is given to the interests of the "pests" - the very word "pest" seems to exclude any concern for the animals themselves. But the classification "pest" is our own, and a rabbit that is a pest is as capable of suffering, and as deserving of consideration, as a white rabbit who is a beloved companion animal.”

SeemsSufferingGivenInterestWhiteAnimalCapableConcernLiberationBelovedConsiderationCompanionRabbitsDeservingClassificationAnimal LiberationPestsCompanion Animals
Book:Animal Liberation
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“Once we ask why it should be that all human beings - including infants, the intellectually disabled, criminal psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest - have some kind of dignity or worth that no elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that justifies the inequality of humans and other animals.”

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Author:Peter Singer
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“We ought to consider the interests of animals because they have interests and it is unjustifiable to exclude them from the sphere of moral concern; to make this consideration depend on beneficial consequences for human beings is to accept the implication that the interests of animals do not warrant consideration for their own sakes.”

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Author:Peter Singer
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“Love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed "ecstasy," not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an on-going exodus out of the closed inward-looking self toward its liberation through self-giving... toward authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.”

GivingLooksSelfMomentsInspirationFaithLove IsJourneyEternalDiscoveryChristian InspirationalSelf DiscoveryLiberationEcstasyInwardAuthentic SelfIntoxicationEternal LoveExodusSelf Giving
Author:Pope Benedict XVI
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“They will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal.”

LawStruggleIdentityCriminalsStealingLabelsLiberationDecentIndividualismRobotsAbidingTrue Identity
Book:Skylark Sing Your Lonely Song: An Anthology of the Writings of Bobby Sands
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“A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).”

IfsArtRealityIndividualForceSocialVirtueFateTransformationOpeningLiberationRevolutionaryWorks Of ArtHorizonAestheticPrevailingExemplary
Book:Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse
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