These are general quotes about animal cruelty and the ethical treatment of animals.
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, Black Beauty
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, The Lives of Animals
To insult someone we call him "bestial." For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult.
-Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations
Of all the creatures, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
-Mark Twain
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
-William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays
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 Liberation
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
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not "Can they reason?" nor "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?"
-Jeremy Bentham
I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
-Abraham Lincoln
...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, Black Beauty
As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer
When man learns to respect even the smallest being of creation...nobody has to teach him to love his fellow man. Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
-Albert Schweitzer
Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by what is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?
-Pierre Troubetzkoy
I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of the whole human being.
-Abraham Lincoln
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, Animal Liberation
We ate no flesh in Eden, but afterwards, when things got hard, we forgot the peaceful kinship of that ancient kingdom. As our teeth sank into their flesh, we had to deny them. So we said they had no souls, no reason, no thumbs, no speech. We were so different. We made a chain of things to protect us — fire, medicine, our locking houses, many kinds of clothes. And we renamed them — farm product, fur crop, renewable resource. Pray that we will see their faces again in the mirror of creation, the miracle of animals, their clear eyes meaning more than profit to our own.
-Author unknown
I must say...that more unmanly, brutal treatment of a little pony it was never my painful lot to witness; and by giving way to such passion, you injure your own character as much, nay more, than you injure your horse, and remember, we shall all have to be judged according to our works, whether they be towards man or towards beast.
-Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?
-George Bernard Shaw
Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.
-Bion, Plutarch
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless, is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.
-Albert Schweitzer
For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
-Pythagoras
The abuse of a harmless thing is the essence of sin.
-A. W. Tozer
You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.
-James D. Miles
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 T. Angell
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, The Lives of Animals
Concern for animals is a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage.
-Sri Aurobindo
In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.
-C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock
In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics.
-Pete Singer
The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our dominant position.
-Christine Stevens
The thinking man must oppose all the cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo...We need a boundless ethic which will also include the animals.
-Albert Schweitzer
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently because time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life.
-Elizabeth Goudge
The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret. It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.
-Albert Schweitzer, Novel Peace Prize address, "The Problem of Peace in the World Today"
People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines. It appears to me, besides, that [such people] can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.
-Voltaire, Trate sur la tolerance
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
-Schopenhauer
Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! 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 on the murder of men.
-Leonardo Da Vinci
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
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
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 Marie-Louis d'Lamartine
Any religion not based on a respect for life is not a true religion. Until he extend his circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures, man will not himself find peace.
-Albert Schweitzer
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
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated...I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.
-Mahatma Gandhi
I tremble for my species when I reflect that god is just.
-Thomas Jefferson
It seems, in fact, that if I am obliged to do no harm to my fellow man, it is less because he is a rational being than because he is a sensitive being, since sensitivity is a quality which is common to man and beast and should at least give the beast the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the man.
-Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality
When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.
-Ingrid Newkirk
Men will be just to men when they are kind to animals.
-Henry Bergh
He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
-Immanuel Kant
When we turn to the protection of animals, we sometimes hear it said that we ought to protect men first and animals afterwards...By condoning cruelty to animals, we perpetuate the very spirit which condones cruelty to men.
-Henry Salt
Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
-Albert Einstein
Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.
-His Holiness The Dalai Lama
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, The Lives of Animals
Mercy to animals means mercy to mankind.
-Henry Bergh
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
The bad news for animals is twofold. First, in all of these cases — women's rights, the abolition of slavery, ending apartheid — a good part of the political momentum comes from the oppressed themselves. Progress in South Africa never would have begun if blacks there hadn't perceived their own dignity and fought for it. Second, in all these cases, empathy for the oppressed by influential outsiders came because the outsiders could identify with the oppressed — because, after all, they're people, too. With animal rights, in contrast, (1) the oppressed can never by themselves exert leverage; and (2) the outsiders who work on their behalf, belonging as they do to a different species, must be exquisitely, imaginatively compassionate in order to be drawn to the cause. To judge by history, this is not a recipe for success.
-Robert Wright
A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life he is able to assist and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.
-Albert Schweitzer
If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act is abstinence of injury to animals.
-Leo Tolstoy
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 Richter
Deliberate cruelty to our defenseless and beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being can be guilty.
-William Ralph Inge
The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever.
-Ashley Montague
There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer
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
Pain is pain, whether it be inflicted on man or on beast; and the creature who suffers it, whether man or beast, being sensible to the misery of it, whilst it lasts, suffers evil...The white man...can have no right, by virtue of his color, to enslave and tyrannize over a black man...For the same reason, a man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast.
-Dr. Humphrey Primatt
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, The Lives of Animals
He who will not be merciful to his beasts is a beast himself.
-Thomas Fuller
Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether its victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in this world...We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.
-Rachel Carson