Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destory; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign for vilification.
Interpretation
The quote discusses the justification of violence through dehumanization and vilification of others.
Farley Mowat reflects on the troubling tendency of humans to rationalize violence, particularly against animals and other people, by painting them as less worthy or more evil. This vilification often escalates in proportion to the lack of justification for the violence itself, suggesting that moral reasoning is frequently manipulated to support harmful actions.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion on animal rights to highlight moral inconsistencies in justifying violence.
A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it according to the necessity of the case.
Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.
I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life. Man was made for action and for bustle too, I believe.
As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.
We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt
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