Quotes on Animal Ethics

Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage.

Men will be just to men when they are kind to animals.

By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.

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 fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.

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.

Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.

Until we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether its victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in the world. There can be no double standard. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

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.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him.

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility with regard to everything that has life.

Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.

Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.

To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.

Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.

We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.