Animal Rights Quotes

Sadly, we live in a world where if you do good things, there are no financial rewards. If you poison the earth, there is a fortune to be made.

~ June Stoyer

Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil.

~ Colin Mcginn

There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

~ J.m. Coetzee

But those who are incapable ofpitying animals are, as a matter of fact, incapable of pitying men.A physician who would cut a living rabbit in pieces -- laying barethe nerves, denuding them with knives, pulling them out withforceps -- would not hesitate to try experiments with men and womenfor the gratification of his curiosity.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

A simple act of kindness and compassion towards a single animal may not mean anything to all creatures, but will mean everything to one.

~ Paul Oxton

...there was a difference between killing for nourishment and killing for curiosity or sport.

~ Nenia Campbell

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognitions of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

~ Frans De Waal

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognition of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

~ Frans De Waal

Some animal rights activists are demanding vegetarianism, even veganism now, or nothing. But since only 4 or 5 percent of Americans claim to be vegetarians, 'nothing' is the far more likely outcome. I ask these activists to weigh the horrors of Bladen County's industrial farms and the Tar Heel slaughterhouse against the consequences of doing nothing to alleviate the hour-to-hour sufferings of its victims. Is not a life lived off the factory farm and a death humanely inflicted superior to the terrible lives we know they lead and the horrible deaths we know they suffer in Bladen County today?

~ Steven M. Wise

The most striking quality that humans and animals have in common is the capacity to experience suffering.

~ Matthieu Ricard

The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.

~ Ashley Montagu

When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left?

~ Matthew Scully

Often, the greater our ignorance about something, the greater our resistance to change.

~ Marc Bekoff

To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

~ J.m. Coetzee

Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it's hopeless. It's like the end is always there, you can't escape it. But things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything's been stripped away, their bodies and happiness and hope. Things just don't know when to die, I wish they did. I wish my friends had known that, sort of anyway. But I'm glad they tried, that's part of being human right? Part of being any living thing. You hold onto life until it gets ripped away from you, even if it gets ripped away in pieces, you just hold on.

~ Nick Cutter

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

~ Immanuel Kant

Animal rights are not a gift we give to animals. They are a birthright we have taken from them.

~ Ryan Phillips

Especially when it comes to animals used for food, humanity’s reasoning power and concern about fairness plummets.

~ Karen Davis

My view [is] that what morality boils down to is, 'Don’t harm, and do help.' And now the question is, 'Can creatures like chickens and cows be harmed?' And the answer is, 'Of course they can.' Consequently, I think it’s immoral to harm them. And that seems to me to provide a very strong moral reason to be vegetarian, to not wear leather... it seems to me that our treatment of animals is morally appalling... and that we ought to radically revise the way we live, precisely because they feel pain, they can be hurt, and we’re constantly hurting these creatures!

~ Shelly Kagan

One's interest or need does not annul other's right.

~ Al-Hafiz B.a. Masri

Religion asks followers to believe in things nobody can see, however, animal activists ask people to see things they can prove. When Christian animal and environmental activists finally demand that their church be better stewards over the world, we will see change. Until then, one percent of sermons will teach parishioners about the importance of being stewards over our animals in a year. Mega churches and corporate religious empires will continue to own stock in companies that pollute our earth and exploit our animals. Ignorance and hypocrisy will continue to corrupt the pureness of the Gospel. From here, we will not be truly “saved” because we choose not to save ourselves.

~ Shannon L. Alder

It should be noted, as with so many legends and popularly accepted truths created out of political motivation: There, in fact, is no evidence that the hundreds of murders historically attributed to the werewolves of Gévaudan were actually caused by wolves. As with all witchhunts, the endless battle against ignorance requires one to always keep an open mind and sharp wits when considering such rumors - especially the rumors we choose to enjoy.

~ Zeena Schreck

A reduction of meat consumption by only 10% would result in about 12 million more tons of grain for human consumption. This additional grain could feed all of the humans across the world who starve to death each year- about 60 million people!

~ Marc Bekoff

We generally accept that it's natural for carnivorous wild animals to kill other animals in order to live. But people don't often think (or even know) about the extraordinary and unnatural suffering that humans inflict on the animals that we freely harvest for food, with the help of modern high technology and the animal food sciences.

~ Marc Bekoff

Meat may taste good, but the guilt of eating it tastes far worse.

~ Evan Baldonado

We don’t “crave” animal-based meat, dairy, and eggs, but we do crave fat, salt, flavor, texture, and familiarity.

~ Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

The vegan lifestyle is a compassionate way to live that supports life, supports fairness and equality, and promotes freedom.

~ Robert Cheeke

Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies…that which to us is merely an evening’s meal, but to them is life itself.

~ T. Casey Brennan

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.

~ Michael Pollan

Humans as a whole are but an unwholesome hole with a sorry ass. In short, a**holes.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

One saw a bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected other dead birds. He was chattering with his friend and seemed so utterly indifferent. All that he was concerned with was bringing down so many birds, and it was over as far as he was concerned. They are killing all over the world. Those marvellous, great animals of the sea, the whales, are killed by the million, and the tiger and so many other animals are now becoming endangered species. Man is the only animal that is to be dreaded.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

What's with all the cheering over the apocalypse, anyway? Oh, yay, we get to kill poor helpless humans.The excitement over the apocalypse had nothing to do with humans.Could have fooled me.Humans are incidental.Killing and destroying an entire species is incidental? I can't help but sound like I'm accusing him (Raffe), even though I know he wasn't part of the plan to wipe us out.Or at least, I think he wasn't personally involved, but I don't really know that, do I?Your people have been doing it to all kinds of species.That's not the same.Why not?

~ Susan Ee

As long as humans feel they are forced to defend their own rights and worth by placing someone beneath them, oppression will not end.

~ Marjorie Spiegel

I've known humans, and I know beasts. The beast is better. It is unpretentious. It kills for food. Humans do 'cause they're just not any good.

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

We look at the world through our own eyes, naturally. But by looking from the inside out, we see an inside-out world. This book takes the perspective of the world outside us—a world in which humans are not the measure of all things, a human race among other races. ...In our estrangement from nature we have severed our sense of the community of life and lost touch with the experience of other animals. ...understanding the human animal becomes easier in context, seeing our human thread woven into the living web among the strands of so many others.

~ Carl Safina

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

~ Albert Schweitzer

You wouldn't walk with your underpants stuck in your bottom, you'd adjust them. So don't treat the inconvenience in your life like ill-fitting wandering underpants, adjust it to be comfortable again.

~ Conversations With A Pigeon

It all begins with faith. If we believed animal went to heaven, we wouldn't send them there prematurely

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept us safe among them... The animals had rights - the right of man's protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man's indebtedness. This concept of life and its relations filled us with the joy and mystery of living; it gave us reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all.

~ Chief Luther Standing Bear

In the preface of The Rifles Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing. Barnabas PiryuaqWell, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created. Jan Welzi 1933.

~ William T. Vollmann