Quotes 1

AR Quotes 1

"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."
    -- Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President

"If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth -- beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals -- would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?"
    -- George Bernard Shaw, playwright, Nobel 1925

"In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought."
    -- Isaac Bashevis Singer, author, Nobel 1978

"I must interpret the life about me as I interpret the life that is my own. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see, however strange it may be to mine. . . . We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also."
     -- Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, Nobel 1952

"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."
       -- Leonardo da Vinci, artist and scientist

Thanks to K.Godel for the following information: According to: http://www.ivu.org/history/davinci the following quote is from a work of fiction written by Merijkowsky in the 1920s - it has been established that this is not an authentic quote. The attributions for the quote above and the one below were interposed in Jon Wynne-Tyson's book - and have been misquoted ever since. "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."
-- Merijkowsky, Romance of Leonardo da Vinci

"Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: We are burial places!"
-- from da Vinci's 'Notes'

"In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig ... I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse."
-- HG Wells. A Modern Utopia

"[The day should come when] all of the forms of life...will stand before the court -- the pileated woodpecker as well as the coyote and bear, the lemmings as well as the trout in the streams."
   -- William O. Douglas, late U.S. Supreme Court Justice

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
   -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist

"As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."
   "What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty."
   -- Leo Tolstoy, author

"I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished."
   -- Henry David Thoreau, author

"While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?"
   "Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are call medical research."
    -- George Bernard Shaw

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
    "To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being."
     -- Mahatma Gandhi, statesman and philosopher

"Our task must be to free ourselves . . . by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."
    "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
   -- Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel 1921

"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."
   -- Mark Twain, author

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
   -- Frederick Douglass, slavery abolitionist

"For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
   -- Pythagoras, mathematician

"What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
    "The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny."
   -- Jeremy Bentham, philosopher

"Life is life--whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage..."
   -- Sri Aurobindo, poet and philosopher

"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
   -- Thomas Edison, inventor

"To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime."
   -- Romain Rolland, author, Nobel 1915