Treating Other Living Beings
With
Equality And Respect As Spirit Souls
Non-injury, truthfulness, freedom from theft, lust, anger,
and greed, and an effort to do what is agreeable and beneficial to all
creatures - this is the common duty of all castes.
Srimad-Bhagavatam (Hindu)
We bow to all beings with great reverence in the thought
and knowledge that God enters into them through fractioning Himself as
living creatures.
Mahabharata (Hindu)
The soul is the same in all living creatures, although
the body of each is different.
Hippocrates (?460 BC - ?377 BC)
There is not an animal on the earth, nor a flying creature
on two wings, but they are people like unto you.
Qur'an (Islam)
Give a drink of water as alms to the birds which go forth
at morning, and deem that they have a better right than men [to thy charity].
For their race brings not harm upon thee in any wise, when thou fearest
it from thine own race.
Ma'Arri (973-1058)
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation
may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them
but by the hand of tyranny.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
The more I see of men the more I like dogs.
Madame De Stael (1766-1817)
...the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our
brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of
the pony and man--all belong to the same family... The White Man must treat
the beasts of this land as his brothers.
Chief Seattle (c.1786-1866)
Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and
that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living
thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that
see the sun!
Artur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights.
That is the way of a whole human being.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various
emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity,
imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient,
or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
There is no fundamental difference between man and the
higher mammals in their mental faculties ... The difference in mind between
man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree
and not of kind.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice ... While
I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different
sort of man, that's all.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as
to a human being.
Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)
Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous
power ... but then, so should every other living creature.
George Elliot (1819-1880)
In studying the traits and dispositions of the so-called
lower animals, and contrasting them with man's, I find the result humiliating
to me.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call
an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than
the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the
fate of men.
Emile Zola (1840-1902)
The establishment of the common origin of all species
logically involves a readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging the
application of what has been called the Golden Rule from the area of mere
mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
A lifelong intimacy with animals has got me out of the
common notion that they are automata with a slight infusion of intelligence
in their composition. The mind inbeast and bird, as in man, is the main
thing.
W.H.Hudson (1841-1922)
It was said that the 'brutes' cannot reason. Only persons
who do not themselves reason about the subject, with the facts before them,
can any longer occupy such a position. The evidence of reasoning power
is overwhelming for the upper rank of animals, and yearly the downward
limits are being extended the more the inferior tribes are studied.
Dr Wesley Mills (1847-1915)
I have observed that almost all those whose labour lies
in the field, and who go down to their business in the green meadows, admit
the animal world to a share in the faculty of reason. It is the cabinet
makers who construct a universe of automatons.
John Richard Jeffries (1848-1887)
Our treatment of animals will someday be considered barbarous.
There cannot be perfect civilisation until man realises that the rights
of every living creature are as sacred as his own.
Dr David Starr Jordan (1851-1931)
The old assumption that animals acted exclusively by instinct,
while man had a monopoly of reason, is, we think, maintained by few people
nowadays who have any knowledge at all about animals. We can only wonder
that so absurd a theory could have been held for so long a time as it was,
when on all sides the evidence if animals' power of reasoning is crushing.
Ernest Bell (1851-1933)
I cannot see how there can be any real and full recognition
of Kinship as long as men continue either to cheat or to eat their fellow
beings.
Henry Salt (1851-1939)
I am ashamed of the race of beings to which I belong.
It is so cruel and bigoted, so hypocritical, so soulless and insane. I
would rather be an insect ... a bee or a butterfly ... and float in dim
dreams among the wild-flowers of summer than be a man and feel the horrible
and ghastly wrongs and sufferings of this wretched world.
Professor J.Howard Moore (1862-1916)
I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with
the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life,
even with such things as crawl upon earth.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
... money ... is really the difference between men and
animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but
animals do not know about money.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
That's my private ant. You're liable to break its legs.
Dr Albert Sweitzer (1875-1965) (to a ten year old boy.)
Animals have their tragic and their comic side, and resemble
us in many ways. They, too, have their distinctions and individualities.
Many people believe that there is a huge gap separating them from the animals,
but it is only really a step in the Wheel of Life, for we are all children
of the One. To understand a fellow creature, we must regard him as a brother.
Manfred Kyber (1880-1933)
Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are
not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children? Hear
me, four quarters of the world ... a relative I am! Give me strength to
walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! ... all over the earth,
the faces of living things are all alike.
John G.Neihardt (1881-1973)
If an animal does something we call it instinct; if we
do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.
Will Cuppy (1884-1949)
To this day the more conventional biologists suffer from
an obsessional fear of anthropomorphism, and even put such words as "hunger"
and "fear" between quotes (a literary solecism in any case) when writing
about animals. The quotes are a way of saying "I cannot get on without
Anthropomorphism, but I am ashamed to be seen with her in public".
C.W.Hulme (1886-1981)
Beneath this stone are deposited the remains of one who
possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without
Ferocity, and all the virtues of a man without his vices.
Epitaph to Pompey the dog (1891-1902)
I think the rapidly growing tendency to regard animals
as born for nothing except slavery to so-called humanity absolutely disgusting.
Sir Victor Gollancz (1893-1967)
I personally can see no reason for conceding mind to my
fellow men and denying it to animals ... I at least cannot doubt that the
interests and activities of animals are correlated with awareness and feeling
in the same way as my own, and which may be, for aught I know, just as
vivid.
Lord (Walter Russel) Brain (1895-1966)
I ask upon what pinnacle do we base human life and wellbeing
that denies all rights whatsoever to every species but our own? ...Those
who refuse to help errect the milestones are not on the march.
Lord (Douglas) Houghton (1898- )
Life is one, said the Buddha, and the Middle Way to the
end of suffering in all its forms is that which leads to the end of the
illusion of separation, which enables man to see, as a fact as clear as
sunlight, that all mankind, and all other forms in manifestation, are one
unit, the infinitely variable appearance of an indivisible Whole.
Christmas Humphreys (1901-1983)
As we increasingly become aware of the One Life breathing
in each brother form of life, we learn the meaning of compassion, which
literally means to 'suffer with' ... How does [the] self cause the desire
which causes suffering?...by the illusion of separateness, the unawareness
of One.
Christmas Humphreys (1901-1983)
If an animal's not equipped to make sounds like talking,
it doesn't mean it can't think. All we have to do is to figure out how
to make it convey its thoughts.
Alice Hopf (1904- )
As long as human beings go on shedding the blood of animals,
there will never be any peace.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904- )
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 living things whatsoever.
Ashley Montagu (1905- )
One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection
from an eye other than human.
Loren Eiseley (1907- )
To say the you behaved like animals is offensive to the
animal creation because animals of the farmyard and field have an innate
sense of decency.
Mr Justice Cusack (1916-1978)
The realisation that our small planet is only one of many
worlds gives mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our
own world belongs to all its creatures.
Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - )
Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned
with animals suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't
vote.
Paul Harvey (1918- )
It is a sobering thought that animals could do without
man, yet man would find it almost impossible to do without animals.
Ruth Harrison (1920- )
In the end we must, I think, somehow conclude that they
[the animals] have as much right to this planet as we have.
Prince Philip. Duke of Edinburgh (1921- )
Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing
distinct from our attitude to 'lesser' life on this planet.
John Fowles (1926- )
To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers
should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed
the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally
incredible that we not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals.
Brigid Brophy (1929- )
For too long we have occupied ourselves with responding
to the consequences of cruelty and abuse and have neglected the important
task of building up an ethical system in which justice for animals is regarded
as the norm rather than the exception. Our only hope is to put our focus
on the education of the young.
John Hoyt (1932- )
Man cannot pretend to be higher in ethics, spirituality,
advancement, or civilisation than other creatures, and at the same time
live by lower standards than the vulture or hyena.
H.Jay Dinsah (1933- )
The weakness of humanity is our blindness, a cultural
blind spot which some call ignorance, in which a selfish and immature ego
claims the world as ours and prevents us from seeing ourselves as a part
of the world. Kinship with all life is a biological (evolutionary) fact,
but our culture ways of doing, perceiving and relating, blind us to this
reality.
Dr Michael W. Fox (1937- )
I feel more comfortable with gorillas than people. I can
anticipate what a gorilla's going to do, and they're purely motivated.
Dian Fossey (1940- )
They [gorillas] are brave and loyal. They help each other.
They rival elephants as parents and whales for gentleness. They play and
have humor and they harm nothing. They are what we should be. I don't know
if we'll ever get there.
Pat Derby (1942- )
If we hold genuine moral principles about animals, these
will not differ in substance from those we hold about human beings ...
If humans have natural rights, then so do animals.
Roslind Godlovitch (1944- )
If we are to understand the animals with whom we share
the world, we need to watch them, interact with them, without too much
prejudice. Undestanding them, we may also understand ourselves a little
more. By seeing what constrains and motivates our kindred we may, perhaps,
discover what the morals and manners of the human beasts might be.
Professor Stephen L.Clark (1945- )
Affection towards clan-mates, love of children, deference
to authority, disinclination to kill those who have reminded us of common
humanity, even some respect for property; these features of human life
do not, it seems, stem from our intellectual gifts. We share them with
our cousins.
Professor Stephen L.Clark (1945- )
All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter
this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.
Peter Singer (1946- )
We cannot talk with [animals] as we can with human beings,
yet we can communicate with them on mental and emotional levels. They should,
however, be accorded equality in that they should receive both compassion
and respect; it is unworthy of us to exploit them in any way.
Rebecca Hall (1947- )
... As a so-called "civilized" people, and as members
of a society in search of lasting peace in the world, we cannot remain
callous to our responsibility toward nature and insensitive to the inherent
rights of the animals.
Nathaniel Altman (1948- )
To serve the creatures is to serve the Bhuddha
Indian Proverb
