Animal rights activists

1714 quotes found

"I could never really make the connection between Christian and Catholic. I always imagined that Christ would look down upon the Catholic church and totally disassociate himself from it. I went to severe schools, working class schools, where they would almost chop your fingers off for your own good, and if you missed church on Sunday and went to school on a Monday and they quizzed you on it, you'd be sent to the gallows. It was like 'Brush you teeth NOW or you will DIE IN HELL and you will ROT and all these SNAKES will EAT you'. And I remember all these religious figures, statues, which used to petrify every living child. All these snakes trodden underfoot and blood everywhere. I thought it was so morbid. I mean the very idea of just going to church anyway is really quite absurd. I always felt that it was really like the police, certainly in this country at any rate, just there to keep the working classes humble and in their place. Because of course nobody else but the working class pays any attention to it. I really feel quite sick when I see the Pope giving long, overblown, inflated lectures on nuclear weapons and then having tea with Margaret Thatcher. To me it's total hypocrisy. And when I hear the Pope completely condemning working class women for having abortions and condemning nobody else... to me the whole thing is entirely class ridden, it's just really to keep the working classes in perpetual fear and feeling total guilt."

- Morrissey

0 likesAlternative rock singersSinger-songwriters from EnglandNovelists from EnglandActivists from EnglandAnimal rights activists
"A few attempts have been made to argue that a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union might not have been wholly disadvantageous to the Western powers, and that therefore a second phase of appeasement after 1941 might have been preferable to continued war. Some British Tories, notably the late Alan Clark, have suggested that the British Empire might have been spared ignominious bankruptcy, decline and fall, had a separate peace been made along the lines Rudolf Hess seems to have envisaged and Hitler repeatedly mused about in his evening monologues; in a similar vein, some American conservatives argue that the Cold War might have been avoided had Roosevelt kept the United States out of the shooting war in Europe. On the whole, however, most writers have tended to take the view that a Nazi victory would have been a worse outcome than that of 1945. Even if a victorious Third Reich had opted for peace with Britain and America - which cannot be regarded as very probable - the price would have been horrendously high for the millions of people left under Nazi rule. All nine million of the Jews of Europe might have been murdered, rather than the nearly six million who actually were, to say nothing of the vast human suffering that would have been inflicted on other ethnic groups by the implementation of the Generalplan Ost, which envisaged deporting around fifty million East Europeans to Siberia."

- Alan Clark

0 likesMembers of the Parliament of the United KingdomGovernment ministersHistorians from EnglandDiaristsAnimal rights activists
"It's dangerous & humiliating. The whalers killed whales while green peace watched. Now, you don't walk by a child that is being abused, you don't walk by a kitten that is being kicked to death and do nothing. So I find it abhorrent to sit there and watch a whale being slaughtered and do nothing but "bear witness" as they call it. I think it was best illustrated a few years ago, the contradictions that we have, when a ranger in Zimbabwe shot and killed a poacher that was about to kill a black rhinoceros and uh human rights groups around the world said "how dare you? Take a human life to protect an animal". I think the rangers' answer to that really illustrated a hypocrisy. He said "Ya know, if I lived in, If I was a police officer in Harare and a man ran out of Barclays Bank with a bag of money and I shot him in the head in front of everybody and killed him, you'd pin a medal on me and call me a national hero. Why is that bag of paper more valued than the future heritage of this nation?" This is our values. WE fight, WE kill, WE risk our lives for things we believe in... Imagine going into Mecca, walk up to the black stone and spit on it. See how far you get. You’re not going to get very far. You’re going to be torn to pieces. Walk into Jerusalem, walk up to that wailing wall with a pick axe, start whacking away. See how far you’re going to get, somebody is going to put a bullet in your back. And everybody will say you deserved it. Walk into the Vatican with a hammer, start smashing a few statues. See how far you’re going to get. Not very far. But each and every day, ya know, people go into the most beautiful, most profoundly sacred cathedrals of this planet, the rainforests of the Amazonia, the redwood forests of California, the rainforests of Indonesia, and totally desecrate & destroy these cathedrals with bulldozers, chainsaws and how do we respond to that? Oh, we write a few letters and protest; we dress up in animal costumes with picket signs and jump up and down; but if the rainforests of Amazonia and redwoods of California, were as, or had as much value to us as a chunk of old meteorite in Mecca, a decrepit old wall in Jerusalem or a piece of old marble in the Vatican, we would literally rip those pieces limb from limb for the act of blasphemy that we’re committing but we won’t do that because nature is an abstraction, wilderness is an abstraction. It has no value in our anthropocentric world where the only thing we value is that which is created by humans."

- Paul Watson

0 likesAnimal rights activistsActivists from CanadaEnvironmentalists from CanadaVeganism activistsTelevision personalities
"Law represents from age to age the code of the dominant or ruling class, slowly accumulated, no doubt, and slowly modified, but always added to and always administered by the ruling class. Today the code of the dominant class may perhaps best be denoted by the word Respectability—and if we ask why this code has to a great extent overwhelmed the codes of the other classes and got the law on its side (so far that in the main it characterises those classes who do not conform to it as the criminal classes), the answer can only be: Because it is the code of the classes who are in power. Respectability is the code of those who have the wealth and the command, and as these have also the fluent pens and tongues, it is the standard of modern literature and the press. It is not necessarily a better standard than others, but it is the one that happens to be in the ascendant; it is the code of the classes that chiefly represent modern society; it is the code of the Bourgeoisie. It is different from the Feudal code of the past, of the knightly classes, and of Chivalry; it is different from the Democratic code of the future—of brotherhood and of equality; it is the code of the Commercial age and its distinctive watchword is—property. The Respectability of today is the respectability of property. There is nothing so respectable as being well-off."

- Edward Carpenter

0 likesPhilosophers from EnglandPacifistsActivists from EnglandAnimal rights activistsLGBT rights activists
"Plato in his allegory of the soul—in the Phaedrus—though he apparently divides the passions which draw the human chariot into two classes, the heavenward and the earthward—figured by the white horse and the black horse respectively—does not recommend that the black horse should be destroyed or dismissed, but only that he (as well as the white horse) should be kept under due control by the charioteer. By which he seems to intend that there is a power in man which stands above and behind the passions, and under whose control alone the human being can safely move. In fact if the fiercer and so-called more earthly passions were removed, half the driving force would be gone from the chariot of the human soul. Hatred may be devilish at times—but after all the true value of it depends on what you hate, on the use to which the passion is put. Anger, though inhuman at one time is magnificent and divine at another. Obstinacy may be out of place in a drawing-room, but it is the latest virtue on a battlefield when an important position has to be held against the full brunt of the enemy. And Lust, though maniacal and monstrous in its aberrations, cannot in the last resort be separated from its divine companion, Love. To let the more amiable passions have entire sway notoriously does not do: to turn your cheek, too literally, to the smiter, is (pace Tolstoy) only to encourage smiting; and when society becomes so altruistic that everybody runs to fetch the coal-scuttle we feel sure that something has gone wrong. The white-washed heroes of our biographies with their many virtues and no faults do not please us. We have an impression that the man without faults is, to say the least, a vague, uninteresting being—a picture without light and shade—and the conventional semi-pious classification of character into good and bad qualities (as if the good might be kept and the bad thrown away) seems both inadequate and false."

- Edward Carpenter

0 likesPhilosophers from EnglandPacifistsActivists from EnglandAnimal rights activistsLGBT rights activists
"My goal is simple. All I want to do is re-connect people with animals. Awaken some emotions and some feelings and some logic, that is been buried and suppressed, intentionally, by our society. And the reason why I say re-connect it's because each and every person in this room used to be a real animal rights person at one time, a true animal lover, and a real friend to the animal kingdom. And it's when we were kids! When we were young... When we were kids! We used to be in awe of animals."They used to make us laugh, and giggle and smile. They made us pretty happy! And there was a time in our lives, when we would do just about anything in the world to make them happy as well. To protect them from cruelty! Or to, at least, acknowledge the cruelty they were receiving. I mean, if somebody was mean to an animal in front of us when we were little, we would have screamed and cried. And that's because we all used to understand right from wrong, when it came to the treatment of animals. Until somebody told us, and taught us differently. You better believe that somebody told us to ignore their suffering! To mock and excuse, their pain, and their misery. To make fun of their very existence. And this is something I want you to focus on - today, tomorrow and beyond... What in the hell happened along the way?! Who taught us to be so mean, and nasty and vicious and hateful, or indifferent towards animals when they used to be our friends? These are innocent beings, who have done nothing wrong to us."

- Gary Yourofsky

0 likesActivists from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsVeganism activistsOrators from the United States
"The desire to protect animals derives inevitably from better acquaintance with them, from the realization that they are sensitive and intelligent creatures, affectionate and seeking affection, powerless in a cruel and incomprehensible world, exposed to all the whims of the master species. According to the animal haters, those who are fond of animals are sick people. To me it seems just the other way around, that the love for animals is something more, not something less. As a rule, those who protect animals have for them the same feeling as for all the other defenseless or abused creatures: the battered or abandoned children, the sick, the inmates of penal or mental institutions, who are so often maltreated without a way of redress. And those who are fond of animals don't love them for their "animality" but for their "humanity" — their "human" qualities. By which I mean the qualities humans display when at their best, not at their worst. Man's love for the animal is, at any rate, always inferior in intensity and completeness to the love the animal has for the human being that has won its love. The human being is the elder brother, who has countless different preoccupations, activities and interests. But to the animal that loves a human being, this being is everything. That applies not only to the generous, impetuous dog, but also to the more reserved species, with which it is more difficult to establish a relationship without personal effort and plenty of patience."

- Hans Ruesch

0 likesAnimal rights activistsRace car driversAuthors from SwitzerlandPeople from Naples
"Y: Do you include those animals which are guilty of the same crime themselves by living on prey? Should we not then save a thousand lives by killing one? Z: We must never suppose a person or an animal guilty until they are found in the act, and then we must investigate the nature of the crime. It is true that the animal living by slaughter may be less entitled to our consideration than the animal which is harmless; but recollect, the former may plead the same excuse itself, unless his slaughter be only of those animals which live on vegetables; and then, though justice may require their destruction, it would be repugnant to the feelings of humanity to slaughter them with that plea, unless we could quite assure our conscience that our design in killing them was more to prevent their doing mischief than for our own benefit: besides, we might then extend this principle still further, and kill our own species because they are also animals of prey. It is moreover to be observed, that if one carnivorous animal kills another, he may save lives by it also, and the nature of the act will be different according to circumstances [...] And, further, it will frequently be impossible to discover when the animal becomes guilty or innocent, as it depends on such a variety of circumstances: we should therefore be more safe from infringing the laws of moral rectitude, not to interfere in this case."

- Lewis Gompertz

0 likesActivists from EnglandAnimal rights activistsInventorsJews from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from England
"Yet we are not always justified in concluding that the killing of animals causes a less number to exist; because some of them are carnivorous, and by being killed they can no longer kill others: while others are graminivorous, and when they can no longer eat up the fruits of the soil, other animals may live upon such fruits instead; still there is no justification of slaughter, as the identical lives are certainly thereby destroyed; and if such an excuse be admitted, it must apply by the same rule to the slaughter even of human beings. But however this may be, it is evident that by far the greatest number of animals live in terror and die by violence from their devourers, and the males also by the attacks of each other, besides pestilence, diseases, accidents and starvation, few living their natural time; while by means of many being sacrificed, a few are enabled to live like in a ship of short provision, though without an equitable casting of lots, but by the law of force over weakness; and this law not being confined to dumb animals, but ruling the lots of man as well as of animals, though its operations on human life may be more concealed, but here also population is kept in check by want of food and by warfare; among mankind itself justice is little more than a name, might being the chief law observed: here, too, the strong destroy and oppress the weak; some are enabled to live and multiply, while many starve and live in celibacy to prevent an overflow, which, notwithstanding, does arise: dispute and warfare then result in which some are destroyed and some preserved. But no person, however virtuous, can live in comfort without consuming more than his share. Such is the world we live in, however Pope may contend that "virtue alone is happiness below.""

- Lewis Gompertz

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"The economy of life seems to be that man and most animals if in peace and plenty, would soon overstock the world with their produce, and that most species continue to increase till they exceed the food provided for their support, or till killed to make way for others. Some moralists admire this system of one animal devouring another as they say by this means more can live, and consequently they infer more happiness results. But that more can live by this means we doubt, and still more that the degree of happiness is increased; first, they must convince us that life generally abounds in pleasure, as to us the reverse seems to be the fact; though necessarily admitted by the Almighty for reasons beyond our reach to discover. If we look at the forest, the ocean, the air, or a drop of water in a microscope, all is found teeming with life, and to a superficial eye all is in active enjoyment; but a nice observer soon discovers the universal discord, trepitude and destruction proceeding everywhere: the strong oppressing the weak, one party half starved and ravenously pursuing another, some terrified devoted victims vainly endeavouring to escape the hungry jaws of their pursuer, some perished by want, others devoured alive, thousands destroyed every instant, and few allowed to remain, but those few so nicely balanced as to preserve the species through numerous ages; every fly or reptile, however contemptible in the eyes of some persons being possessed of a pedigree more remote than the most ancient nobility can emblazon, great grandfathers and mothers from time immemorial; and notwithstanding they are in the midst of their enemies, including man, who use every means and violence to destroy them; here by the care of God, they remain preserved from thousands of years back, as uninjured as if in a bandbox!!"

- Lewis Gompertz

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"Suppose it were so; so much, then, the better, as we should not want then to show that the soul could become torpid and recover; because, then, it would never be torpid> and, consequently, would be immortal, which is all we want to prove. And this opinion, I believe, is that of the majority of thinking persons, but unfortunately mixed up with divers principles, not orthodox, some of them acknowledging a soul m man, but not in any other living being; others going one step further, and admitting a soul in other animals too, but imagining that it is a different sort of soul to that of man, instead of considering that one soul is similar to another, and that all the difference between one individual and another is corporeal,—the organization of the body or brain, by its variations, alone producing, it would appear, all the varieties of character, without any variation of soul, to which conclusion we are led by the fact that we cannot produce any thought or feeling in the mind but through the instrumentality of the body; and it seems only on the bodily organs, and physical agents upon them, that every perfection and defect of mind depends; an idiot, a philosopher, and a mouse, appearing to have quite similar souls, the difference only being in the organs of sense, which act upon the souls, and are in themselves different. No person can deny that different sensations are produced by bodily causes; why, then, must we look to something else to produce them—namely, to variations of the soul ? Bodily causes are enough, and we are not driven to seek for further causes. The soul is always, if I am correct, the same. It does not grow, it does not decay; and is as perfect in an infant as In a man—the improvement and growth of mind being only of the corporeal part."

- Lewis Gompertz

0 likesActivists from EnglandAnimal rights activistsInventorsJews from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from England
"When I was in eighth grade there was a movie called Willard, about a rat, and I fell in love with rats. I wanted one … so one guy suggested that I call Hershey Medical Center … So I called and they said … "What experiment is it for?" I said, "I don't wanna experiment on it, I just want it for a pet!" And they said, "Well, we can't do that." … About two weeks later, I go out to the mailbox, and there's this thing from the [American Anti-Vivisection Society]. Lo and behold, I'm looking through all these different experiments and I see a rat there, spread wide open, and it said some of the experiments [were] done at Hershey med center. So boom! I put two and two together, and I decided to do a report in school about it. I took advanced bio and you had to dissect cats, and I started [asking] questions, "Where'd the cat come from?", and that really ruffled some feathers. "I'm not gonna do this, you know." So basically I got thrown out of advanced bio. From that point on I became an antivivisectionist. … [Things] are changing. When I went vegetarian it was really hard on the road, and that was just eight years ago. And I see people doing it twenty, twenty-five years, traveling, and it's like, wow! … I think on a very basic level people wanna do the right thing. And if we continue to focus on that part of them that wants to do the right thing, we can win maybe at the next generation or the one after that."

- Rikki Rockett

0 likesActivists from the United StatesMusicians from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsDrummers from the United StatesGlam metal
"Even if vegetarian dishes are less palatable than meat-based dishes, and it is not clear that they are, we have to weigh up humans' loss of certain pleasures of the palate against what the animals we eat have to give up because of our predilection for meat. Most obviously, of course, they have to give up their lives, and all the opportunities for the pursuing of interests and satisfaction of preferences that go with this. For most of the animals we eat, in fact, death may not be the greatest of evils. They are forced to live their short lives in appalling and barbaric conditions, and undergo atrocious treatment. Death for many of these animals is a welcome release. When you compare what human beings would have to 'suffer' should vegetarianism become a widespread practice with what the animals we eat have to suffer given that it is not, then if one were to make a rational and self-interested choice in the original position, it is clear what this choice would be. If one did not know whether one was going to be a human or an animal preyed on by humans, the rational choice would surely be to opt for a world where vegetarianism was a widespread human practice and where, therefore, there was no animal husbandry industry. What one stands to lose as a human is surely inconsequential compared to what one stands to lose as a cow, or pig, or lamb."

- Mark Rowlands

0 likesAcademics from WalesAnimal rights activistsPhilosophers from WalesEducators from WalesNon-fiction authors from Wales
"Well may we be dazed by the horrific metamorphosis. Dark days are upon us. The pendulum of civilization trembles, as if to swing back to the inglorious twilight of the past. Imperialistic tendencies are laying their damning clutches on the unsuspecting form of the republic. Fearful questions confront us. Whether we are to be compelled henceforth to read with downcast gaze the matchless axioms of Jefferson and to mumble in confusion the heroic history of our dead—whether the Fourth of July is to be henceforth a day of embarrassment and shame instead of, as hitherto, an occasion for spontaneous and boundless pride—whether Yorktown and Monmouth are to become events which, instead of inspiring a continent to eulogy and song, shall provoke no higher eloquence than that which gutturals from the limping lips of apology—whether the political wisdom of the founders of the republic, gleaned in terrible hours, by anxious eyes, from the travail of ages past, shall be swept away by the heartless levity of upstart statesmen—whether, in short, we shall turn our backs inexorably upon the past—a past glorious achievement and unrivaled in precept—and become the wretched exemplars of a policy, ruinous to ourselves and to our children, repulsive to every truly civilized mind and destructive of the fairest hopes of humanity—these. are questions that assail with relentless emphasis the consciences of a great people."

- J. Howard Moore

0 likesActivists from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsAnti-vivisectionistsAtheists from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United States
"The universe, so far as we can make out, is neither all wise nor all foolish. It is both good and bad. It maintains some of the most careful economies side by side with the most reckless. The defects of the universe are just as apparent to him who is not cowardly or incompetent as are its excellencies. It is the rogue and the ignoramus who argue in justification of existing barbarisms that these barbarisms are beautiful because they represent the procedures of "nature." As a matter of fact, all ways are nature's ways, the unconscious and clumsy as truly as the intelligent and exquisite. The philosophers of laissez faire, who would have human beings disuse what little intelligence has, during the past twenty millions of years, been developed on the earth, and would have them derive their ethics from the regions of biological somnambulism, are the philosophers to be heeded when humanity goes mad. It is childish to assume that we upper intelligences can not improve on the unconscious conditions about us. It is the very thing that is being done every hour of time. The whole effort of industry is nothing else than an effort to improve the attitudes of the material universe. And it is just as sagacious to suppose that living beings are incompetent to improve their relations to the inanimate universe as to suppose they may not reform and enhance their relations to each other."

- J. Howard Moore

0 likesActivists from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsAnti-vivisectionistsAtheists from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United States
"Look at the manner in which the aborigines are swept away from continent after continent by the sword and beverage of the Aryans. See how the red children of America have been cheated and debauched and driven from homes where they and their fathers had lived from immemorial generations. When the banner of Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, America was inhabited by a noble, magnanimous, and happy people. They were not like the sodden, suspicious, revengeful remnants that to-day huddle on barricaded reserves, the vindictive survivors of four centuries of injustice. They were kind and generous. They came to the invading Europeans as children, with minds of wonder and with hands filled with presents. They were treated by the invaders like refuse. They were plundered, and their outstretched hands cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. They are gone from the valleys where once their camp-smokes curled to heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle the moonlight of the rivers no more. They that remain are too weak to rise in warlike challenge to the aggressions of the mighty white. But the story of the meeting of the pale and the red, and of the wrongs of the vanquished red, will remain as one of the mournful tales of this world when the kindred of Lo, like fleecy clouds, have melted into the infinite azure of the past.""

- J. Howard Moore

0 likesActivists from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsAnti-vivisectionistsAtheists from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United States
"Look at human industry! See the pounds of flesh daily torn by men everywhere from the skeletons of each other in the awful riot of business." Just look at it! The inequity, the unconsciousness, the hard-heartedness, the ruffianism, and the infernalism of the industrial relations and conditions of men! Watch an unfortunate approach a rich man's mansion and ask in the most graceful manner for a necessary of life. Observe the egoism the baron shows as he sends the sufferer away unfed. See the lord in his marble palace, upholstered with all the comforts of civilization and stuffed with the dainties of the zones, and around him the men and women who made his wealth feeding on garbage, suffocating in shanties, and working like wretches from morning till night. See the multi-millionaire, scraping the palms of his slaves till the blood starts for the last farthing their struggles have produced, not because he is hungry and would buy, but because he is a ruffian and can. No attention whatever is paid to the fact that some have all they can utilize in the satisfaction of their desires and multiples more, while others just as good-looking and more worthy have nothing. No attention is paid to the fact that this little pill of a world is to man the only accessible portion of the universe; that he is cut off from other balls by leagues of impassable space."

- J. Howard Moore

0 likesActivists from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsAnti-vivisectionistsAtheists from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United States
"[M]an is an animal. It was away out there on the prairies, among the green corn rows, one beautiful June morning—a long time ago it seems to me now—that this revelation really came to me. And I repeat it here, as it has grown to seem to me, for the sake of a world which is so wise in many things, but so darkened and wayward regarding this one thing. However averse to accepting it we may be on account of favourite traditions, man is an animal in the most literal and materialistic meaning of the word. Man has not a spark of so-called 'divinity' about him. In important respects he is the most highly evolved of animals; but in origin, disposition, and form he is no more 'divine' than the dog who laps his sores, the terrapin who waddles over the earth in a carapace, or the unfastidious worm who dines on the dust of his feet. Man is not the pedestalled individual pictured by his imagination—a being glittering with prerogatives, and towering apart from and above all other beings. He is a pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organism, differing in particulars, but not in kind, from the pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organisms below and around him. Man is neither a rock, a vegetable, nor a deity. He belongs to the same class of existences, and has been brought into existence by the same evolutional processes, as the horse, the toad that hops in his garden, the firefly that lights its twilight torch, and the bivalve that reluctantly feeds him."

- J. Howard Moore

0 likesActivists from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsAnti-vivisectionistsAtheists from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United States
"Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being."

- J. Howard Moore

0 likesActivists from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsAnti-vivisectionistsAtheists from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United States
"The story of Eden is a fabrication, bequeathed to us by our well-meaning but dimly-lighted ancestors. There has been no more miracle in the origin of the human species than in the origin of any other species. And there is no more miracle in the origin of a species than there is in the birth of a molecule or in the breaking of a tired wave on the beach. Man was not made in the image of the hypothetical creator of heaven and earth, but in the image of the ape. Man is not a fallen god, but a promoted reptile. The beings around him are not conveniences, but cousins. Instead of stretching away to the stars, man's pedigree slinks down into the sea. Horrible revelation! Frightful antithesis! Instead of celestial genesis and a 'fall'—long and doleful promotion. Instead of elysian gardens and romance—the slime. Instead of a god with royal nostrils miraculously animating an immortal duplicate—a little lounging cellule, too small to be seen and too senseless to distinguish between midnight and noon. But the situation is not half so horrible as it looks to be to those who see only the skin of things. Is it not better, after all, to be the honourable outcome of a straightforward evolution than the offspring of flunky-loving celestials? Are the illustrious children of the ape less glorious than the sycophants of irrational theological systems? Darwin dealt in his quiet way some malicious blows to human conceit, but he also bequeathed to a misguided world the elements of its ultimate redemption."

- J. Howard Moore

0 likesActivists from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsAnti-vivisectionistsAtheists from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United States
"In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer, some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a commion mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?"

- J. Howard Moore

0 likesActivists from the United StatesAnimal rights activistsAnti-vivisectionistsAtheists from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United States
"Oh, men! You who are struggling and longing for that which is denied you and that which belongs to you—the right to live, to be free, and to enjoy your legitimate share of the only world you have access to—will you not open your hearts to this plea—this plea for beings whose lot, like yours, is a bitter one, and whose miseries spring from the same cruel sources as your own miseries? You know what it is to be despoiled, to be stung by cruel overlings, to be misunderstood, to tug and sweat day after day until your poor goaded bodies are ready to drop from weariness. You know what it means to be bossed and held up and walked on, to be insulted and despised by the very beings who rob you, to have the last drops wrung from your ravished lives by the brutal hands of pompous usurpers. Will you be indifferent to granting to others those blessings which you know from your own sad and empty existences are all that make life really worth living? Shake off your own chains! Be free! Take your inalienable rights! Is this not your world as much as anybody's? Be men, not doormats! Light the red hell of revolution, if need be! For what is life if it is but the accursed privilege of wearing yourselves out in the service of cannibals, of man-eating millionaires, of monsters who eat you up alive, you and your wives and children? But don't forget to grant to your poor broken co-sufferers in harness the same blessed measure you claim for yourselves."

- J. Howard Moore

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"No man has a right to a million dollars. If so where did he get the right? Not from Nature nor reason, but from man-made legislatures—from the same immaculate source from which he got the right a little while ago to cut the blood out of the backs of poor helpless Africans with hippopotamus whips. No man has a right to monopolise the world to the extent of a million dollars. It is more than one man's share—much more. We are brothers. The world belongs to all of us, not to any one class. A million dollars in one hand means over-appropriation—plunder, too often scaped with fiendish unconcern from the bleeding palms of the poor. Every millionaire or multi-millionaire that wallows in golden mud-puddles compels hundreds of other men to go through life deprived of their birthright. I would be ashamed to be rich, and I would be ashamed to know that I had my share of the world and the shares of hundreds or thousands of my fellow-men besides. If there is one thing that ought to be plain, even to simpletons, it is the fact that the privilege of being born carries with it the right to an inalienable equity in the world in which we at birth find ourselves. It is not true, however prevalently it may be practised, that men acquire the right to own and hold and use the earth, and to exclude others from its use, by being born with the power or opportunity to get possession of it."

- J. Howard Moore

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"In addition to becoming vegan, the second powerful choice a person can make is the political choice to broaden resistance and become part of a planetary justice and liberation movement. First, veganism has to be connected to broader social issues such as food justice, community empowerment, class, race, and sustainability. Second, we need to create a broader shift from veganism to anti-speciesism, which facilitates real political action. This creates a profound paradigm shift, for veganism has already been thoroughly co-opted and commodified by capitalist industries, media, and culture. The mainstreaming of veganism removes it from the sphere of inter-species justice and politics to the zone of human health and individual consumption, into a lifestyle practice that challenges neither consumer nor speciesist identities. In direct contrast, anti-speciesism assaults human supremacism and shifts the focus from products and markets to the animal holocaust and the need for political struggle. Unlike “veganism,” anti-speciesism is also . Thus, third, we need to connect the anti-speciesist/animal liberation movement to other social and environmental movements, with an emphasis on the emergency and systemic consequences of climate change. This two-fold shift in focus transforms veganism from a domesticated, toothless, apolitical form of consumer capitalism to vital leg of a new total liberation movement."

- Steven Best

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"Fuelled by new forms of science and technology, military expansion, and aggressive colonization of southern nations and the developing world, capitalism evolved into a truly global system. Global capital is inspired by neoliberal visions of nations as resource pools and open markets operating without restrictions. The process euphemistically termed "globalization" is driven by multinational corporations such as and ; financed by financial goliaths such as the and the (IMF), and legally protected by the World Trade Organization (WTO). It homogenizes nations into a single economic organism and trading bloc through arrangements such as the (NAFTA), the (FTAA), and the European Union (EU). Multinationals seduce, bribe, and coerce nations to open their markets and help drive down labor costs to a bare minimum, and rely heavily on corrupt dictators, loans and debt, and “hit men” and armies to enforce the rule of their “structural transformations” of societies into conduits for the flow of resources and capital. Globalization has produced trade laws that protect transnational corporations at the expense of human life, biodiversity, and the environment. It is accompanied by computerization of all facets of production and expanding automation, generating heightened , corporate downsizing, and greater levels of unemployment, inequality, insecurity, and violence."

- Steven Best

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"There are key similarities between what has been called "radical environmentalism" — which includes , , , , and — and what we term "revolutionary environmentalism." Among other things, both approaches reject mainstream environmentalism, attack core ideologies and/or institutions that have caused the ecological crisis, often adopt spiritual outlooks and see nature as sacred, reject the binary opposition separating humans from nature, and in many cases defend or adopt illegal tactics such as civil disobedience or monkeywrenching. However, a key distinguishing trait of revolutionary environmentalism is that it supports and/or employs illegal tactics ranging from for the purpose of economic sabotage to and armed struggle, recognizing that violent methods of resistance are often appropriate against fascist regimes and . Revolutionary environmentalism seeks to counter forces of oppression with equally potent forms of resistance, and uses militant tactics when they are justified, necessary, and effective. With the advance of the global capitalist juggernaut and increasing deterioration of the Earth's ecological systems, ever more people may realize that no viable future will arise without militant actions and large-scale social transformation, a process that requires abolishing global capitalism and imperialism, and would thereby embrace revolutionary environmentalism."

- Steven Best

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"Detractors insist that it is only a matter of time before the ALF inadvertently kills someone or pursues a course of violence. Some critics argue that the ALF has already injured or killed people, but they confuse the ALF with ultra-radical English groups such as the and the . While in solidarity with the ALF on many points, the Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department, and the feel the ALF is too conservative in its policy of nonviolence. In contrast, they openly espouse physical violence against animal oppressors, unable to fathom why some believe that a human life has absolute value, especially if it involves a person inflicting violence upon animals. Consequently, these pro-violence groups employ fake poisoning scares to force companies to pull their products from the shelves. They target exploiters with booby-trapped letters fitted with poisoned razor blades. They set off bombs and they issue death threats. The Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department, and the Revolutionary Cells graduated from the “all is justified” school, and they aim to ratchet up the conflict between activists and industry to new levels. Razor blade letters, bomb threats or bomb attacks, arson, harassment, death threats, and physical assaults have proven to be effective means of preventing and ending animal exploitation, and therefore will continue to be used by the most militant elements of the struggle."

- Steven Best

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"A man who has made a tolerable progress in humanity, will adopt, and ever bear in mind, the principle of increasing, as far as lies within his power, the quantity of pleasure in the world, and diminishing that of pain: he will establish this to himself as a constant and inviolable rule of action, and in carrying it into practice he will not overlook one created thing that is endowed with faculties capable of perceiving pleasure and pain. He will reflect on who it was that gave these faculties and remember that they were not given to be sported with. He will not esteem the meanest of animals beneath the notice of his humanity because, in the meanest of them, the wisdom and power of the all-benevolent Being are displayed. This is the Being without whom not a single sparrow shall fall to the ground and whose bounty feeds the young ravens that call upon him. His sensibility will be tremblingly alive to the sensations of all animated nature, and he will feel for everything that is capable of feeling: he will look upon pity, kindness, and mercy toward his own species as the weightier matters of humanity, but at the same time, he will consider the humane treatment of animals as more than the tithe of the anise and cummin of it. He will scrupulously do his duty in the former, and in the latter, he will not leave it undone."

- Thomas Young (writer and theologian)

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