Animals Quotes

“Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.”
― Carl Sagan

“Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“If ever you feel like an animal among men, be a lion.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“...only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them....”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“My favorite animal is steak.”
― Fran Lebowitz

“Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.”
― Robert Benchley

“Intelligence is more important than strength, that is why earth is ruled by men and not by animals.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.”
― Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals

“Killing animals to make a fashion statement = a sickening + cold-blooded vanity.”
― Jess C. Scott, Skins, Animal Stories

“Let us remember that animals are not mere resources for human consumption. They are splendid beings in their own right, who have evolved alongside us as co-inheritors of all the beauty and abundance of life on this planet”
― Marc Bekoff, Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect

“Peanut was a hamster. He was furry, had four legs, a big tummy and his favourite food was, you guessed it, peanuts”
― Molly Arbuthnott, Peanut the Hamster

“..the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“We should always be clear that animal exploitation is wrong because it involves speciesism. And speciesism is wrong because, like racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, classism, and all other forms of human discrimination, speciesism involves violence inflicted on members of the moral community where that infliction of violence cannot be morally justified. But that means that those of us who oppose speciesism necessarily oppose discrimination against humans. It makes no sense to say that speciesism is wrong because it is like racism (or any other form of discrimination) but that we do not have a position about racism. We do. We should be opposed to it and we should always be clear about that.”
― GaryLFrancione

“Only those few who are able to surpass their fear of death completely can fully experience the highest forms of life; not the mundane life of the mortal, but the godly life of the resurrected.”
― Zeena Schreck

“Anybody who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.”
― Leo Rosten

“We can no more justify using nonhumans as human resources than we can justify human slavery. Animal use and slavery have at least one important point in common: both institutions treat sentient beings exclusively as resources of others. That cannot be justified with respect to humans; it cannot be justified with respect to nonhumans—however “humanely” we treat them.”
― Gary L. Francione

“But, he duly ate the peanut and whoosh!”
― Molly Arbuthnott, Peanut the Hamster

“They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“More often than not, what animals require our protection from is not hurricanes or fires, but abuse at the hands of other people".”
― Julie Klam, Love at First Bark: How Saving a Dog Can Sometimes Help You Save Yourself

“Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him.

The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind.

Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“Veganism is an act of nonviolent defiance. It is our statement that we reject the notion that animals are things and that we regard sentient nonhumans as moral persons with the fundamental moral right not to be treated as the property or resources of humans.”
― GaryLFrancione

“He could tell by the way animals walked that they were keeping time to some kind of music. Maybe it was the song in their own hearts that they walked to.”
― Laura Adams Armer, Waterless Mountain

“But why must the system go to such lengths to block our empathy? Why all the psychological acrobatics? The answer is simple: because we care about animals, and we don't want them to suffer. And because we eat them. Our values and behaviors are incongruent, and this incongruence causes us a certain degree of moral discomfort. In order to alleviate this discomfort, we have three choices: we can change our values to match our behaviors, we can change our behaviors to match our values, or we can change our perception of our behaviors so that they appear to match our values. It is around this third option that our schema of meat is shaped. As long as we neither value unnecessary animal suffering nor stop eating animals, our schema will distort our perceptions of animals and the meat we eat, so that we feel comfortable enough to consume them. And the system that constructs our schema of meat equips us with the means by which to do this.”
― Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism