- 24 Jan 2013 00:47
#14155677
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen”
— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it polite?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’. And there comes a point when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor polite, nor popular, but one must take it because his conscience tells him that it is right.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
"ISN'T MAN AN AMAZING ANIMAL?
He kills wildlife — birds, kangaroos, deer, and all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes, and dingoes — by the millions in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billion and eats them. This in turn kills man by the millions, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative — and fatal — health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases.
Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out cards praying for 'Peace on Earth.'"
— from Old Mac Donald's Factory Farm by C. David Coats
''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, Traité sur la tolerance
“Farm[ed] animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.”
— Jane Goodall
"Our grandchildren will ask us one day: Where were you during the Holocaust of the animals? What did you do against these horrifying crimes? We won't be able to offer the same excuse for the second time, that we didn't know."
-Dr. Helmut Kaplan
''Waking up to the animal holocaust is deeply painful. Not only are you confronted by the sheer size of it all, 10 billion land animals in the US, 58 billion globally each year, but when you share what you have learned with your friends and family members, who you deeply respect and love, they show indifference at best. You feel like you have come upon a genocide that everyone is trying to hide and ignore. And you can no longer participate. And you can no longer keep quiet. And then you are painted as militant, extreme, judgmental, et al. It is deeply painful on so many levels.''
- Gary Smith
“It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.”
— Mark Twain
Sorry, I've been collecting quotes about animals recently.
“People think of education as something they can finish.”
Isaac Asimov
"I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."
Ettiene De Grellet
“To forgive and accept injustice is cowardice.”
— Gandhi
“We are terrible animals, I think that the Earth’s immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.”
— Kurt Vonnegut.
"Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act." - Albert Einstein