Animal Rights Quotes

Bad is that often wildlife trafficking is described as a “victimless” crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of birds and animals die in transit in the most horrible circumstances imaginable. Just because they cannot communicate with us does not mean they are not victims. They feel, fear and die, just like humans.

~ Christopher Gérard

You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort. I couldn’t go because I started crying the one time I tried. All those eyes and the barks like sobs.

~ Francesca Lia Block

This, for many people, is what's 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

~ Michael Pollan

Even if only one person’s respect for animals increases, then writing Talon would have been worthwhile.

~ Christopher Gerard

I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die.

~ Derrick Jensen

The only good cage is an empty cage.

~ Lawrence Anthony

But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.

~ Lawrence Anthony

The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.

~ Peter Singer

We use horses as our slaves; we chain dogs; we steal eggs from the chickens, honey from the bees; we make wallets out of crocodiles; we imprison the birds; we torture the bulls in the arenas; we whip the lions and beat the tigers in the circuses! What are we? Definitely not ethical creatures!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

There is no particular merit in being nice to one's fellow man... We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is a result of our emotions - love apathy, charity of malice - and what part is predetermines by the constant power play among individuals. True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buries from view), consists of attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental débâcle, a débâcle so fundamental all others stem from it.

~ Milan Kundera

Humans are unique in having the astonishing capacity to extend our sympathies far beyond the here and now. through time and space, to anywhere and anything we choose. It is our culture that decides how large and inclusive our moral circle is, but it is each of us who makes up our culture. (p.250)

~ Andrew Westoll

Writer Brigid Brophy exposes [their motives] with great precision:Whenever people say 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it. These slogans have a long history. After being used to justify slave traders, ruthless industrialists, and contractors who had found that the most economically 'realistic' method of cleaning a chimney was to force a small child to climb it, they have now been passed on, like an heirloom, to the factory farmers. 'We mustn't be sentimental' tries to persuade us that factory farming isn't, in fact, cruel. It implies that the whole problem had been invented by our sloppy imaginations.

~ Peter Cox

Animal welfarism is a blatant lie. Anyone who truly cares for the welfare of another, would never dream of exploiting them. For just as when slavery is deeply set into the psyche of a nation, those crying for slave welfare and not abolitionism, argue in favour of slavery and exploitation, and thus push eventual abolitionism further into the future.

~ Mango Wodzak

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

~ C.s. Lewis

So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I'l never sing, but this stuff was just atrocious. For example:I love youYou love meThank God for thatI'm so happyAnd Ty's personal favorite (which he helped me on): Otter! Otter! Otter!Don't lead cows to slaughterI love you and I knowI should've told you soon-aBut you didn't buy the dolphin-safe tuna!TY asked me if I got the hidden message in his poem. I told him it was loud and clear.

~ T.j. Klune

There is a blackout in media coverage of issues concerning whales and dolphins in Japan, with the exception of the government's viewpoint. It is simply amazing how little good information (and how much bad information) the public in Japan gets about the worldwide controversy over whaling and dolphin killing, all because the media bows to the wishes of the Japan Fisheries Agency.

~ Richard O'barry

In so far as the purported use of violence by the Animal Liberation Front in the furtherance of its fundamental mission is concerned; The fact of the matter is that violence cannot be committed against an inanimate object.

~ Will Hazlitt

If you consume animal derived foods or use other animal derived products you are by no stretch of the imagination an environmentalist. You are a rank hypocrite.

~ Will Hazlitt

I've seen all kinds of things done to dolphins in my travels around the world, but I have never seen anything as horrible as this dolphin drive hunt in Taiji.

~ Richard O'barry

The future of wildlife and the habitat that they depend on is being destroyed. It is time to make nature and all the beauty living within it our priority.

~ Paul Oxton

No one in the world needs a Rhino horn but a Rhino.

~ Paul Oxton

There was a young lady called Peaches,who simply loved animals to pieces.She ate pigs and sheep,and for cows she would weep,when baked in a sauce of rich greases.

~ Mango Wodzak

Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment.

~ Paul Watson

A postsexist environment is not something that animal liberationists need passively await, in the meantime deferring to present sexism in the manner of our presentation.

~ Brian Luke

Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.

~ Gerald Durrell

What we see in the world around us is just a reflection of what is inside of us.

~ Sharon Gannon

By saying that human issues are more important than non-human issues, that violence to humans is more relevant than violence to animals, one forgets that the animal liberation movement implies a message of peace for every being on earth and the opposition against the mindset of oppression. To make a distinction between one violence and another is exactly the root of all violence: Some wouldn't do any harm to those who share with them a flag, a religion, a language, etc. but would easily condemn to suffering and death those who are different. This tragic use of diversity as an excuse to inflict pain on others for a matter of profit and convenience is the cause of suffering for both human and non-human animals.

~ Mango Wodzak

To be 'for animals' is not to be 'against humanity.' To require others to treat animals justly, as their rights require, is not to ask for anything more nor less in their case than in the case of any human to whom just treatment is due. The animal rights movement is a part of, not opposed to, the human rights movement. Attempts to dismiss it as anti human are mere rhetoric.

~ Tom Regan

Americans care more about the rights of animals than about what happens to us!

~ Joe Sacco

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.Can we tell a new story?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.” And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, “Treblinka – 100% human stereate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is

~ J.m. Coetzee

I'm fighting now only for individual captive dolphins and dolphins in general but also for people, for the mind and sensibilities of future generations toward the world itself.

~ Richard O'barry

Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied - they don't after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else.

~ Morrissey