Animal Activist Quotes

Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, we'd be against it, ~ Ingrid Newkirk

We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals. ~ Wayne Pacelle

Eating meat is primitive, barbaric, and arrogant. ~ Ingrid Newkirk

Eventually companion animals would be phased out, and we would return to a more symbiotic relationship, enjoyment at a distance. ~ Ingrid Newkirk

In the end, I think it would be lovely if we stopped this whole notion of pets altogether, ~ Ingrid Newkirk

Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses. ~ Ingrid Newkirk

If man attempts to suppress the animal side of his nature by a sheer effort of conscious will, nature finds a hundred unexpected and unpleasant ways to take its revenge. ~ Christopher Dawson

I think that sacrifices of animals in the name of religion are barbarous and they degrade the name of religion. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

I always enjoy animal acts. ~ Calvin Coolidge

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.
Can we tell a new story? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Human Beings are the only animals that blush, or need to. ~ Mark Twain

You see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that just happen. By comparison, human life is really, really complicated. We're gifted animals, but we are so complicated. Nothing is easy for us, except maybe eating too much. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming

The power to assimilate crude inorganic matter as it is found in the soil, and convert it into living protoplasm and other organic substances, or to use such substances in performing physiological function, does not belong to the animal organism. It is the office of plant life or vegetation to convert the primary elements from their crude inorganic state into the organic state. This conversion cannot be accomplished by any synthetic process known to the laboratory.
After the plant has raised the crude inorganic matter of the soil into plant protoplasm, the animal may take these and raise them to a still higher plane - that of animal protoplasm. But the animal cannot do the work of the plant. He must get his food either directly or indirectly from the plant kingdom. That is, the animal must either eat the plant or its fruits, or he must eat the animal that has eaten the plant. Food must be in the organic form. Air and water form the only exceptions to this rule. ~ Herbert M. Shelton

I am sorry for only two things. These two things are I am sorry that I have mistreated some few animals in my life-time and I am sorry that I am unable to murder the whole damned human race. I wish the entire human race had one neck and I had my hands around it! ~ Carl Panzram

You have no fucking idea, little bit of a thing, so old are you that you know everything? So worldly with the round eyes and the way you see the good in everything, even me. Forget everything you fucking think you know. The second I was inside you people would know, you'd be different, they'd treat you differently, tarred with my fucking ruined brush, all the rumors flying around, people who had once been your friends because they'd know I had hands all over you. I don't fuck like a gentleman, little bit, I fuck like an animal, that stains a little girl like you. You want pretty-fucking-romance, to show off a man to your friends, to go to parties with him on your arm, so fucking meek and boring, that's not me, will never be me. I'm not normal, the wiring is not right in my head, and I'm not for you, walk away before I've had my mouth on that pussy and drank down your honey, because if you don't and I taste you, I feel how it is to shove my cock as deep and as hard as I can inside you, it's all over, you get me? You hearing what I'm telling you? Game over, 'cause I don't play by anyone's rules but my own and my rules are nasty, my rules are fucking filthy. ~ V. Theia

That pretty much describes the life of a foreign man living in Bangkok. Except instead of pressing a lever, he's digging into his wallet for a few more baht. The same principle is at work, though. The same mindless obedience to their pleasure centers. Yet if pleasure were the path to happiness then the farang, the foreigner, in Thailand would achieve bliss, and so would the Canadian rats. Yet neither has. Happiness is more than animal pleasure. ~ Eric Weiner

The Christian Coalition of Alabama will work to ensure that reckless trial lawyers and activist judges will not be able to open the floodgates to increase taxes and that private, Christian, parochial and home-school families will be protected. ~ Johnny Giles

Even the humble Wabash has its terror, for at Huntington, Indiana, three truthful damsels of the town saw its waters churned by a tail that splashed from side to side, while far ahead was the prow of the animal - a leonine skull, with whiskers, and as large as the head of a boy of a dozen years. As if realizing what kind of a report was going to be made about him, the monster was overcome with bashfulness at the sight of the maidens and sank from view. In ~ Charles Montgomery Skinner

In order to produce learned fear, you take a neutral stimulus like a tone, and you pair it with an electrical shock. Tone, shock. Tone, shock. So the animal learns that the tone is bad news. But you can also do the opposite - shock it at other times, but never when the tone comes on. ~ Eric Kandel

I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. ~ Anonymous

I was learning to track rhinoceroses in Africa and tracked right up on an animal that really I thought was going to kill me. ~ Martha Beck

Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There's a conflict of dominant personalities. There's a group of ringleaders without a ring. There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is 'Don't do what you will, do what I say.' The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can't avoid it. ~ Terry Pratchett

The fast-food hamburger has been brilliantly engineered to offer a succulent and tasty first bite, a bite that in fact would be impossible to enjoy if the eater could accurately picture the feedlot and slaughterhouse and the workers behind it or knew anything about the 'artificial grill flavor' that made the first bite so convincing. This is a hamburger to hurry through, no question. By comparison, eating a grass-fed burger when you can picture the green pastures in which the animal grazed is a pleasure of another order, not a simple one, to be sure, but one based on knowledge rather than ignorance and gratitude rather than indifference.
To eat slowly, then, also means to eat deliberately, in the original sense of the word: 'from freedom' instead of compulsion. ~ Michael Pollan

The glory of man is that he is a thinking being. It is the nature of man to think and therein he differs from animals ~ Swami Vivekananda

Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters
who, like deer, goats and divers other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity. ~ Washington Irving

It has been argued that man is not an animal, but I tell you, the animal in man is what makes man an animal. ~ Lawrence Okafor

I think I've kind of been mistaken for somebody who's trying to be a spokesperson for animal rights, and the fact is I'm not qualified to be a spokesperson. I am passionate about it, but I'm not trying to make other people do what I do. ~ Neko Case

All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The younger man stepped away from the table and came toward me, his whole posture radiating menace. Every Darre woman is taught to deal with such behavior from men. It is an animal trick that they use, like dogs ruffling their fur and growling. Only rarely is there an actual threat behind it, and a woman's strength lies in discerning when the threat is real and when it is just hair and noise. ~ N.K. Jemisin

I also readily admit that there are animals, taken in the ordinary sense, that are incomparably larger than those we know of, and I have sometimes said in jest that there might be a system like ours which is the pocketwatch of some enormous giant. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Julia's fears of coming forward with the violence were based on anticipated as well as actual responses from friends and acquaintances. I also recognized Julia's introverted and moody side, but I knew she wasn't capable of inciting her husband to kick, choke, and lock her in her home like an animal. Besides, considering how she was being treated, it was not surprising that she seemed moody, sensitive, even depressed. More important, nothing any woman could do could justify such behavior. ~ Susan Weitzman

I want to be an activist professor. ~ Tariq Ramadan

I always befriended animals and have said many a good word for them. Even to the least-loved mosquitoes I gave many a meal, and told them to go in peace. ~ John Muir

Practice love on animals first; they react better and more sensitively. ~ G.I. Gurdjieff

I can no more explain why I like "natural history" than why I like California canned peaches; nor why I do not care for that enormous brand of natural history which deals with invertebrates any more than why I do not care for brandied peaches. All I can say is that almost as soon as I began to read at all I began to like to read about the natural history of beasts and birds and the more formidable or interesting reptiles and fishes. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for. ~ Franz Kafka

How dirty she was, how thin, what a wild look she had! I have never seen a wilder-looking creature. Her eyes were bright. They were like the eyes of a wild animal. ~ Sherwood Anderson

Look, Pa, look!" Laura said. "A wolf!"
Pa did not seem to move quickly, but he did. In an instant he took his gun out of the wagon and was ready to fire at those green eyes. The eyes stopped coming. They were still in the dark, looking at him.
"It can't be a wolf. Unless it's a mad wolf," Pa said. Ma lifted Mary into the wagon. "And it's not that," said Pa. "Listen to the horses." Pet and Patty were still biting off bits of grass.
"A lynx?" said Ma.
"Or a coyote?" Pa picked up a stick of wood; he shouted, and threw it. The green eyes went close to the ground, as if the animal crouched to spring. Pa held the gun ready. The creature did not move.
"Don't, Charles," Ma said. But Pa slowly walked toward those eyes. And slowly along the ground the eyes crawled toward him. Laura could see the animal in the edge of the dark. It was a tawny animal and brindled. Then Pa shouted and Laura screamed.
The next thing she knew she was trying to hug a jumping, panting, wriggling Jack, who lapped her face and hands with his warm wet tongue. She couldn't hold him. He leaped and wriggled from her to Pa to Ma and back to her again.
"Well, I'm beat!" Pa said.
"So am I," said Ma. "But did you have to wake the baby? ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient. ~ David Foster Wallace