Animals Quotes

An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.

~ Martin Buber

Never break a promise to an animal. They're like babies—they won't understand.

~ Tamora Pierce

Whoever said you can't buy Happiness forgot little puppies.

~ Gene Hill

We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be –the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourself.

~ Farley Mowat

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

~ Henry Beston

Animals are such agreeable friends―they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

~ George Eliot

Animals don’t lie. Animals don’t criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do.

~ Betty White

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

~ Milan Kundera

Discipline isn't about showing a dog who's boss, it's about takingresponsibility for a living creature you have brought into your world.

~ Cesar Millan

The problem with cats is that they get the same exact look whether they see a moth or an ax-murderer.

~ Paula Poundstone

I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.

~ David Sedaris

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

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

...only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them....

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

People who really appreciated animals always asked their names.

~ Lilian Jackson Braun

When animals express their feelings they pour out like water from a spout. Animals' emotions are raw, unfiltered, and uncontrolled. Their joy is the purest and most contagious of joys and their grief the deepest and most devastating. Their passions bring us to our knees in delight and sorrow.

~ Marc Bekoff

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.

~ Robert Benchley

Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.

~ Stephen King

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 is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

~ Milan Kundera

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

Every dog must have his day.

~ Jonathan Swift

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

~ James Thurber

Often, vegan advocates assume that a person's defensiveness is the result of selfishness or apathy, when in fact it is much more likely the result of systematic and intensive social conditioning.

~ Melanie Joy

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Platypus? I thought it was pronounced platymapus. Has it always been pronounced platypus?

~ Jessica Simpson

I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.

~ Margaret Atwood

Any man with money to make the purchase may become a dog's owner. But no man --spend he ever so much coin and food and tact in the effort-- may become a dog's Master without consent of the dog. Do you get the difference? And he whom a dog once unreservedly accepts as Master is forever that dog's God.

~ Albert Payson Terhune

We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog has made an alliance with us.

~ Max Depree

As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.

~ Yann Martel

Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? … It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.

~ Plutarch

Did I ever tell you my pet peeve?'No,' I said.People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it's not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle.

~ Jerry Spinelli

Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit.

~ William S. Burroughs

Hi! handsome hunting manFire your little gun.Bang! Now the animalis dead and dumb and done.Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again,Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!

~ Walter De La Mare

The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?Such a house could even be the whole world.

~ Lydia Millet

I can give or take elephants, I never can find the cheetah-but the zebras captivate me. They'd be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that's black or white.

~ Jodi Picoult

Animals, like us, are living souls. They are not things. They are not objects. Neither are they human. Yet they mourn. They love. They dance. They suffer. They know the peaks and chasms of being.

~ Gary Kowalski

A killer with the manners of a rabbit - this is the most dangerous kind.

~ Frank Herbert

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer