Animal quotes
6.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn."
"It's very important that we have a president who is mindful of the cruelty that is perpetrated on animals."
"And whenever you feel that essence in another, you also feel it in yourself."
"For a long time humans probably were in touch on a deeper level with the depths of their being, unconsciously so, the same way an animal or a tree is. Gradually, though, more and more of their identity went into the movement of thought. They identified more and more with the movement of thinking."
"The consciousness of the animal begins to change when it interacts with a human who's gone beyond thinking. It's not only the animals assisting us; we are also assisting the animals."
"The animals certainly like to be close to humans, especially as humans go through the shift in consciousness."
"A capitalist economy hums when leading businessmen are bubbling with animal spirits and are prepared to sink their money into risky ventures."
"We don't eat anything that has to be killed for us. We've been through a lot and we've reached a stage where we really value life."
"This isn't a hunt that's going to kill just four or five gray whales. The repercussions of this will have an effect on tens of thousands of whales that will be killed by the Japanese and Norwegians."
"Unlike aboriginal hunters, commercial seal hunters leave the carcasses on the ice to rot."
"Pigs eat more tuna than all the planet's sharks combined."
"Each stone, each bend cries welcome to him. He identifies with the mountains and the streams, he sees something of his own soul in the plants and the animals and the birds of the field."
"For arousing compassion, the nineteenth-century yogi Patrul Rinpoche suggested imagining beings in torment - an animal about to be slaughtered, a person awaiting execution. To make it more immediate, he recommended imagining ourselves in their place. Particularly painful is his image of a mother with no arms watching as a raging river sweeps her child away. To contact the suffering of another being fully and directly is as painful as being in the woman's shoes."
"Let the advocate of animal food, force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say, Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent."
"It is true that the reluctance to abstain from animal food, in those who have been long accustomed to its stimulus, is so great in some persons of weak minds, as to be scarcely overcome; but this is far from bringing any argument in its favour"
"Medicine is magical and magical is art, the boy in the bubble, and the baby with the baboon heart."
"It was mainly a growing farm, although we did have chickens and a few animals, but I did help to some degree with that. I have to say that it was not my favorite association.I did what I was asked to do."
"As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant."
"But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation."
"Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break."
