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The Issues - Famous Quotes About Animals


"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being"
-Abraham Lincoln

"The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'"
-Jeremy Bentham

"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men."
-Alice Walker

"I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence."
-Mahatma Gandhi

"We cannot just do whatever we want with them. ... Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible."
-Pope Benedict XVI (current Pope)

"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."
-Leonardo Da Vinci

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

"Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight."
-Albert Schweitzer

"If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut upimbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons."
-C.S. Lewis

"The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest."
-Henry David Thoreau

"Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character."
-George Bernard Shaw

"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 A. Edison

"We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace."
-Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization

"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men."
-St. Francis of Assisi

“Animals have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance. Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God. There is something so very dreadful, so Satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.”
-St. John Newman

"We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs as our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear."
-Robert Louis Stevenson

"To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to Nirvana."
-Buddha

”Cruelty to animals is an abuse of power, and when people take advantage of animals and do cruel and wicked things to them, they debase themselves.”
-Matthew Scully, speechwriter for George W. Bush

"In their behaviour 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, Nobel Prize winner

"People think of animals as if they were vegetables, and that is not right. We have to change the way people think about animals. I encourage the Tibetan people and all people to move toward a vegetarian diet that doesn't cause suffering."
-Dalai Lama

"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 for their cruelty."
-Leo Tolstoy