J. M. Coetzee Quotes About Animals

Quotes about: Animals

• Children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don't see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Children, Animal, Pet

  J. M. Coetzee (2016). “The Lives of Animals: The Lives of Animals [Princeton Classics]”, p.61, Princeton University Press

• Anyone who says that life matters less to an animal than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being animals to have an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh...I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Fighting, Animal, Hands

  J. M. Coetzee (2016). “The Lives of Animals: The Lives of Animals [Princeton Classics]”, p.65, Princeton University Press

• The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Animal, Rights, Law

• They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?...all this discussion of consciousness and whether animals have it is just a smokescreen. At bottom we protect our own kind. Thumbs up to human babies, thumbs down to veal calves.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Baby, Animal, Thumbs Down

• Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write this book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom...Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Book, Writing, Thinking

• To me, a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether you have a white or a black skin, and a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether or not you know the difference between a subject and a predicate, are more alike than they are unlike.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Animal, White, Differences

  J M Coetzee (2015). “Elizabeth Costello”, p.111, Random House

• ...the program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week...If I as a human being were told that the standards by which animals are being measured in these experiments are human standards, I would be insulted.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Animal, Mazes, Would Be

  J M Coetzee (2015). “Elizabeth Costello”, p.108, Random House

• It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Christian, Cat, Animal

  J. M. Coetzee (1999). “Disgrâce”, Random House (UK)

• If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Writing, Heart, Animal

• Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Heart, Animal, Rights

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