Animal Ethics Quotes - Page 3

• 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

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• Standing before you as the advocate of the lower races, I declare what I believe cannot be gainsaid...that just so soon and so far as we pour into all our schools the songs, the poems, and literature of mercy toward these lower creatures, just so soon and so far shall we reach the roots not only of cruelty, but of crime.

  George Thorndike Angell

  Song, Believe, School

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• The abuse of a harmless thing is the essence of sin.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Animal, Essence, Christian Inspirational

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• Thus godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were only made for man, to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered or enslaved.

  John Muir

  Teaching, School, Mean

  John Muir (1997). “Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, Selected Essays”, p.56, Library of America

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• We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.

  Anna Sewell

  Animal, Dumb, Pet

  Anna Sewell (2015). “Black Beauty”, p.141, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Loyalty, Respect, Honesty

  451 Copy quote

• 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

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• If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering - insofar as rough comparisons can be made - of any other being. So the limit of sentience is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. To mark this boundary by some other characteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in an arbitrary manner. Why not choose some other characteristic, like skin color?

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Skin Color, Suffering

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• To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.

  Isaac Asimov

  Animal, Humanity, Pet

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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

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• We must never allow the voice of humanity within us to be silenced. It is humanity's sympathy with all creatures that first makes us truly human.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Sympathy, Animal, Voice

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• Pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being that suffers is not a member of our own species.

  Peter Singer

  Pain, Animal, Suffering

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• Men will be just to men when they are kind to animals.

  Henry Bergh

  Animal, Men, Pet

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• 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

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• Mercy to animals means mercy to mankind.

  Henry Bergh

  Mean, Animal, Pet

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• I believe that pity is a law like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness. That which is weak has a right to the kindness and pity of that which is strong. In the relations of man with the animals...there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to humans ethics. Are there not here unsounded depths for the thinker? Is one to think oneself mad because one has the sentiment of universal pity in one's heart?

  Victor Hugo

  Strong, Kindness, Believe

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• We cannot have two hearts, one for the animals and one for men. In cruelty towards the former and cruelty to the latter there is no difference but in the victim.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Heart, Animal, Men

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• I've always felt you don't have to be completely detached, emotionally uninvolved to make precise observations. There's nothing wrong with feeling great empathy for your subjects.

  Jane Goodall

  Animal, Empathy, Feelings

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• There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.

  Anna Sewell

  Kindness, Animal, Men

  Anna Sewell (2011). “Black Beauty: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.51, Penguin

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• Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account?

  Jean Paul

  Heart, Rapper, Animal

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