Animals Quotes

So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.

~ Charles Darwin

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

~ Matthew Scully

Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?

~ Pierre Troubetzkoy

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

~ Karen Davis

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

~ Al-Hafiz B.a. Masri

Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote.

~ Gary Steiner

Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awareness, animals are the untouchable caste, those whom human others would rather not acknowledge, let alone render assistance.

~ Gary Steiner

Often, when a human suffers through major emotional traumas, a lack of well being follows if their feelings about the trauma are not completely expressed. When the trauma is severe and the suffering is continuous, their animal companion’s condition may deteriorate too.

~ Colleen M. Flanagan

Dr. John Nash Ott had discovered by 1987 that glass, artificial light sources, electricity and electronic systems were having extensive detrimental effects on plants, animals and humans.

~ Steven Magee

We poetically construct our identity as human beings, together with our values, largely through reciprocal relationships with animals. They provide us with essential points of reference, as well as illustrations of the qualities that we may choose to emulate or avoid in ourselves. Any major change in our relationships with animals, individual or collective, reverberates profoundly in our character as human beings, in ways that go far beyond immediately pragmatic concerns. When a species becomes extinct, something perishes in the human soul as well.

~ Boria Sax

We don't like security rules and laws, but without them men will be animals, perhaps the most dangerous animals.

~ Amit Kalantri

Animals cannot have any high thoughts, nor can the Angels or Devas attain to direct freedom without human birth.

~ Swami Vivekananda

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.

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

My favorite animal is steak.

~ Fran Lebowitz

We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn't require that we pretend we are going to have a collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what's right for us personally and even about what's right for others, we all know in advance that our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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.

~ Matthew Scully

Rationally, factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all of my reading and conversations, I've yet to find a credible defense of it. But food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

~ Evan Baldonado

Fed by plants, fed up with the world

~ Evan Baldonado

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

~ Robert Cheeke

You bite the hand that feeds, Speedy said.Humans don't like that.They view it as a sign of ingratitude.I never asked anyone to feed me.That doesn't seem to matter to them.

~ Patrick Jennings

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

Get out of bed and feed me already, person!

~ Rachel Cohn

There I was out in the barn playing midwife to a pregnant mare. I remember sitting there, spinning yarn in the light of a little oil lamp, a city girl who knew nothing about farming, sitting on the deel beside that mother in pain, already beginning the birthing process. All around me there was darkness and perfect silence, except for the mother's pain. It was as if the war didn't exist in those hours.

~ Diet Eman

Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how are bank accounts describe us. What’s obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional resumes but what’s bedrock and current in us: aggression, fear, insecurity, happiness, or equanimity. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary ticks and scents, we’re transparent to them and thus exposed—we’re finally ourselves.

~ Gretel Ehrlich

Killing animals to make a fashion statement = a sickening + cold-blooded vanity.

~ Jess C. Scott

Wolves and Doves mate for life. I hope in the next life I am one of the two.

~ Amanda Mosher

Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out.

~ Jeannette Walls

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

And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or the ape in him than the man.

~ Hermann Hesse

Why was it, she asked herself, that animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast?

~ Diane Ackerman

They have achieved a level of organization far beyond others of their species. Unfortunately, it is being used for destructive purposes at the moment. Don't look so surprised my dear, it's in the nature of the beast.''But these squirrels are not beasts!' Amber protested. 'Oh pish-posh, we are all of us beasts,' the professor replied lightly. 'The trouble comes when we try to pretend that we're not.

~ Janet Taylor Lisle

Most creatures run when they sense danger. People grab a six-pack and a folding chair.

~ Nenia Campbell

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.

~ Temple Grandin

Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?

~ Voltaire

Lacking a shared language, emotions are perhaps our most effective means of cross-species communication. We can share our emotions, we can understand the language of feelings, and that's why we form deep and enduring social bonds with many other beings. Emotions are the glue that binds.

~ Marc Bekoff

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

We humans are such complicated and confused beings that we call the animals beasts.

~ Cristiane Serruya

As far as I'm concerned, the gator that ate T.C. deserves a medal from Crime Stoppers.

~ Carl Hiaasen