When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice.
Isaac Bashevis SingerRead
When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the hypocrisy in human behavior regarding justice and mercy towards animals and God.
Isaac Bashevis Singer's quote critiques the contradiction in human nature where individuals often seek mercy while failing to extend it to others, particularly in the context of killing animals for food. It emphasizes the moral responsibility of humans to show compassion and justice in their actions, suggesting that expecting mercy from a higher power is unjust if one is unwilling to practice it themselves.
In practice
During a speech on animal rights, one could use this quote to provoke thought about our dietary choices.
When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice.
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.
Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.
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.
Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions.
I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.
Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
It is an error to believe that Christ did not teach a determined body of doctrine applicable to all times and to all men, but rather that He inaugurated a religious movement adapted, or to be adapted, to different times and different places.
The Divine realm extends to the earthly; but the later, illusory in nature, does not contain the essence of Reality.
I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.
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