Animal Rights Quotes

I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean.We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment.

~ J.m. Coetzee

Roaches should never trust humans. We’re all doomed.

~ La Tisha Honor

Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws.

~ Marc Bekoff

To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.

~ Peter Singer

Who knows what the long-term effects of saving rescue dogs are and the healing lessons and love they bring to Earth? Each one of us has the capacity to influence hundreds - even thousands of people or animals through the way we live our lives.

~ Jadi Kindred

The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba’athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city.

~ Lawrence Anthony

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

If you want to test cosmetics, why do it on some poor animal who hasn't done anything? They should use prisoners who have been convicted of murder or rape instead. So, rather than seeing if perfume irritates a bunny rabbit's eyes, they should throw it in Charles Manson's eyes and ask him if it hurts.

~ Ellen Degeneres

We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?

~ Peter Singer

My blood was boiling, which is not a good thing for a coldblood.Dracula was dead. Rex was dying or dead.Breakfast was dying. And I was caring about it all. Meanwhile, that blasted Gunnar did nothing but sit and stare at his teevee all day. He was the reason we were all here, the reason we were suffering and dying, and he barely noticed us.I hissed so hard it hurt.

~ Patrick Jennings

A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing. Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The choice-obsessed modern West is probably more accommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any other culture has ever been, but ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore - “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” - can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society. Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. society didn’t ban child labor because it’s impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it’s corrupting. When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it’s corrupting.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I am very proud of the fact that 20 years [sic] on people tell me they became a vegetarian as a result of 'Meat is Murder'. I think that is quite literally rock music changing someone's life - it's certainly changing the life of animals. It is one of the things I am most proud of.

~ Johnny Marr

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

~ David Foster Wallace

I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.

~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

~ Theodor W. Adorno

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

~ Milan Kundera

To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.

~ Dmitry Merezhkovsky

We have to speak up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves.

~ Peter Singer

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Although other animals may be different from us, this does not make them LESS than us

~ Marc Bekoff

We have the power to build a new consensus, which rejects killing as a method for achieving results. And we can look forward to a time when the wholesale slaughter of animals in shelters is viewed as a cruel aberration of the past. We have a choice.

~ Nathan Winograd

It seems everything in nature that has beauty, also has a price.Let the value of our planets wildlife be to nature and nature alone.

~ Paul Oxton

Vegan is just pure love. Love for animals, love for the planet, and love for yourself.

~ Mischa Temaul

Most frequently asked question at my AI talks: Will robots be conscious? We slaughter 60 billion animals/year, but are concerned for robots?

~ Piero Scaruffi

I really don't think it's a case of not caring at all about animals. Instead, I think it's a case of caring so much about one's own self that everything else becomes immaterial.

~ Micheal Slusher

Animal welfare - yes. Animal rights - don't make me laugh. I'm not an animals rights activist. I certainly do not love animals. In fact, I secretly mistrust all four-legged / furry / two-winged / feathered / shelled ar scaly brothers and sisters. If I were them, I would by now be plotting ultimate revenge on a scale previously unknown to man. ... I stick to a vegan diet only for reasons of self-preservertion. Call it insurance. When the time of the great animal uprising comes, I may have a small chance of escaping ...

~ Sharon Dodua Otoo

Places of confinement providing free food and medical care are called prisons.

~ John Lilly

I've broken an arm before, but no one wanted to shoot me!' Suzie says. 'I mean, when you go to the emergency room I hope to God the doctors don't decide it might cost too much to care for.' -Suzie Schwab co-owner of East Maui Animal Refuge

~ Toni Polancy

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

~ E.e.d. Horton

If black and white are too different and separate calories zebras wouldn't have both.

~ Mohamed Nur Hashi

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals... They are not our brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life...

~ Henry Beston

Farmers today keep themselves in ignorance of the needs and true nature of pigs precisely because to know would put their conscience in a terrible bind. Wilful ignorance of this kind is no better than complicity.

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

We, animal and human, come to this time and space to have an experience embedded with our own divine purpose.

~ Amy Miller

No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness that we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?

~ J.m. Coetzee

It’s almost funny, isn’t it?”“What is?”“How some animals are worth more than others?”“Well,” he handed Konrad a sugar cube from a tin on the shelf. “It isn’t just the animal; it’s the type of animal.”“Color, shape, size? If people pay for an animal based on what it looks like, what does that say about them?”“It isn’t necessarily what they look like.” He frowned. “It’s about where they come from.”“That’s silly,” she said.

~ Amanda Lance

Anthropomorphism originally meant the attribution of human characteristics to God. It is curious that the word is now used almost exclusively to ascribe human characteristics--such as fidelity or altruism or pride, or emotions such as love, embarrassment, or sadness--to the nonhuman animal. One is guilty of anthropomorphism, though it is no longer a sacrilegious word. It is a derogatory, dismissive one that connotes a sort of rampant sentimentality. It’s just another word in the arsenal of the many words used to attack the animal rights movement.

~ Joy Williams