If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.

To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.

The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.

We have to speak up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves.

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie...

But those who are incapable ofpitying animals are, as a matter of fact, incapable of pitying men.A physician who would cut a living rabbit in pieces — laying barethe nerves, denuding them with knives, pulling them out withforceps — would not hesitate to try experiments with men and womenfor the gratification of his curiosity.

I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we’ve got to do it right. We’ve got to give those animals a decent life and we’ve got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.

Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies…that which to us is merely an evening’s meal, but to them is life itself.

…there was a difference between killing for nourishment and killing for curiosity or sport.

My blood was boiling, which is not a good thing for a coldblood.Dracula was dead. Rex was dying or dead.Breakfast was dying. And I was caring about it all. Meanwhile, that blasted Gunnar did nothing but sit and stare at his teevee all day. He was the reason we were all here, the reason we...

Although other animals may be different from us, this does not make them LESS than us

Often, the greater our ignorance about something, the greater our resistance to change.

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their...

Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied – they don’t after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else.

The day may come when the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of...

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It’s not as though the rest of us don’t countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason...

People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices

victimless” crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of birds and animals die in transit in the most horrible circumstances imaginable. Just because they cannot communicate with us does not mean they are not victims....

crave” animal-based meat, dairy, and eggs, but we do crave fat, salt, flavor, texture, and familiarity.

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.

One’s interest or need does not annul other’s right.

From a nonpatriarchal metaethical standpoint, however, Singer’s and Regan’s theoretical similarities are as significant as their differences. In particular, both Singer’s utilitarian theory and Regan’s rights approach are developed within a framework of patriarchal norms, which includes the subordinatin of emotion to reason, the privileging of abstract principles of conduct, the perception of ethical discussion...

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.

The right to lead a life free of fear is a fundamental right of all living beings. But this fundamental right is being brutally violated by humans in animal testing, meat and dairy industry, circus, zoos, aquariums, and sports.

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by...

saved” because we choose not to save ourselves.

Real women fight for something, other than their own emotions.

What’s with all the cheering over the apocalypse, anyway? Oh, yay, we get to kill poor helpless humans.””The excitement over the apocalypse had nothing to do with humans.””Could have fooled me.””Humans are incidental.””Killing and destroying an entire species is incidental?” I can’t help but sound like I’m accusing him (Raffe), even though I know he...

We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?

The only good cage is an empty cage.

The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba’athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city.

The recognition that human beings are specifically and deliberately responsible for whatever aberrances farm animals may embody, that their discordances reflect our, not their, primary disruption of natural rhythms, and that we owe them more rather than less for having stripped them of their birthright and earthrights has not entered into the environmentalist discussions that...

Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind’s intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn’t it?

When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what’s left?

Many animals experience pain, anxiety and suffering, physically and psychologically, when they are held in captivity or subjected to starvation, social isolation, physical restraint, or painful situations from which they cannot escape. Even if it is not the same experience of pain, anxiety, or suffering undergone by humans- or even other animals, including members of...

There’s plenty of food, other than non-vegetarian, here, on this earth. So, don’t hurt, kill and eat animals to increase your girth

You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort....

To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

If people were Superior to Animals, they’d take better care of the world

A postsexist environment is not something that animal liberationists need passively await, in the meantime deferring to present sexism in the manner of our presentation.

Si chinò per accarezzarmi. Fece scorrere la mano lungo la schiena e poi sotto al mento. «Ogni cane dovrebbe iniziare la giornata con una bella grattatina sotto il mento» dichiarò. Spostò la mano sopra la testa. «Posso accarezzarti qui?» mi chiese. «Sulla testa? So che non piace a tutti i cani».Rimasi immobile, e chiusi gli...

Sie töten so gerne Tiere, weil es unter Strafe steht, Menschen umzubringen, und weil sie doch so gerne auslöschen, am liebsten sich. Wie die Augen blind werden, im Augenblick des Übergangs von einem beseelten Lebewesen zu einem Fleisch. Seele. Das Wort für den Herzschlag.

The vegan lifestyle is a compassionate way to live that supports life, supports fairness and equality, and promotes freedom.

So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I’l never sing, but this stuff...

Know that the same spark of life that is within you, is within all of our animal friends, the desire to live is the same within all of us…

Out there is South Dakota,” Kitch had said, “Matt said they treated Fern like some kind of animal.

But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.

I have been impressed by the realization that a few men have virtually ‘decided’ what experiences count and even exist in the world. The language of Western science–the reigning construct of male hegemony–precludes the ability to express the experiential realities it talks about. Virtually all the actual experiences of this world, expressed through the manifest...

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.

We generally accept that it’s natural for carnivorous wild animals to kill other animals in order to live. But people don’t often think (or even know) about the extraordinary and unnatural suffering that humans inflict on the animals that we freely harvest for food, with the help of modern high technology and the animal food...