Animal quotes
6.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"It takes 16 lbs of grain to make 1 lb of beef. It takes 1 lb of grain to make 1 lb of bread. So, how many more plants are you eating if you eat a pound of beef? Secondly, I've harvested cabbages and pulled up carrots out of the ground and I've been in slaughter-houses and seen the animals have their brains bashed out with sledgehammers and their throats cut - the experiences are not comparable."
"No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged."
"Man is man because he is free to operate within a framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy."
"I can assure you no whales are going to be killed today."
"I personally chose to go vegan because I educated myself on factory farming and cruelty to animals, and I suddenly realized that what was on my plate were living things, with feelings. And I just couldn't disconnect myself from it any longer. I read books like 'Diet for a New America' and saw documentaries like 'Earthlings' and 'Meet your Meat,' and it became an easy choice for me."
"I think I was drawn to comedy originally because when I was really young, by the time I was eight I had seen movies like The Jerk, Animal House, and Planes, Trains & Automobiles with my dad, and I knew them by heart. I loved them and my dad loved them, and we would laugh together, and I would think, 'This is love.' I just wanted to make people feel like that."
"Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain."
"It's really important to me to show the interconnectedness of things. I always try to illustrate how environmentalism, humanitarianism, animal rights - all those things - are one and the same."
"Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral."
"To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will-to-life. At the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life as his own. He accepts as being good: to preserve life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of thought."
"I often had to pass over photographs because in a mass of animals invariably one would be wandering in the wrong direction, thereby disrupting the pattern I was trying to achieve. Today the ability to digitally alter this disruption is at hand."
"Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls."
"To me nature is... spiders and bugs, and big fish eating little fish, and plants eating plans, and animals eating... It's like an enormous restaurant, that's the way I see it."
"The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal"
"A kindly gesture bestowed by us on an animal arouses prodigies of understanding and gratitude."
"In every man and in every animal, however weak or wicked, great or small, resides the same omnipresent, omniscient soul. The difference is not in the soul, but in the manifestation. Between me and the smallest animal, the difference is only in manifestation, but as a principle he is the same as I am, he is my brother, he has the same soul as I have. This is the greatest principle that India has preached."
"Being a thoughtful vegan makes our time on this Earth more peaceful and joyous, because you get to have a hand in promoting and increasing the happiness, good health and well-being of others -- both animal and human -- rather than being an instrument of their suffering and death."
"Animals are nicer than humans and they're conscious beings. If you stick your grandmother in an oven, she will probably be tasty. But is that any reason to eat your grandmother?"
"God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies [which] we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne, did not I think it better to pass it by."
"Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more."
