J. Howard Moore

"We, you, reader, and I, are parts of nature, and are as liable to deserve the suspicion of infallibility as any other part. Why not? We represent the boldest and most elaborate evolutions. Why should we be the authors of the most disreputable phenomena?"

"Each living being of the universe, therefore, sustains to every other living being the relation of possible right and wrong, but to the insentient universe no such relation exists. Right is that relation which is conducive to happiness, or welfare, or complete living, or whatever synonym is preferred. Wrong is that which conduces to the opposite of happiness—misery, ill-fare, maladaptation."

"Each being is an integer in the stupendous scheme of consciousness."

"All conscious beings are struggling, struggling to keep themselves in joint with their environment. Those things and creatures and events that aid them in their struggles are desirable and they call them good, and those things and creatures and events that oppose and defeat the satisfaction of desires are called bad. Right and wrong exist as conceptions of mind, because there are portions of the universe capable of happiness and misery. Erase sentiency from the universe and you erase the possibility of ethics. Every conscious portion of the universe, therefore, has ethical relations to every other conscious portion (man, woman, worm, Eskimo, oyster, ox), but not to inanimate portions (clod, cabbage, river, rose), because the ones are sentient and the others are not."

"[O]ne being is not alone in the universe, nor anything like it. What creatures there may be on other spheres, we know not. The noiseless sapphires that cavalcade the midnight firmament may be, for all we know, loaded with wretches like ourselves, or they may be sepulchres which coffin the ashes of races that wailed and wondered and went out ages upon ages ago. We know not."

"The inanimate universe is related to the animate as means to end. We conscious individuals manipulate it in manners best adapted to the satisfaction of our desires. We barricade its rivers, plow its seas, ingulf its vegetations, enslave its atmospheres, torture its soils, and perform upon it any other surgery or enormity that will help us in the satisfaction of these driving desires of ours. The inanimate is. if reason is not treason, the gigantic accessory of the consciousnesses that infest it. The animate environment, on the contrary, is related to each living being, not as means, but as end."

"The universe of things in the midst of which we discover ourselves, is to be managed and placated, in so far as it is to be managed and placated at all, by the observation and classification of its phenomena, by the ascertainment of its habits, and by ingenious and business-like manipulations of its tendencies, and in no other way."

"If the rest of cosmos were a conspiracy intriguing for the maintenance and entertainment of the sentient creatures it has brought into existence, it would seem to be an arrangement more creditable and more worthy of an all-wise and amicably disposed inventor. But it is not."

"It has been called a problem of adaptation. There is a subjective and there is an objective, a self and a not-self. And between this self and the not-self there is incessant irrelation. That which is not-self is a process, always changing. It never tires of adopting new attitudes toward the self. The self also is a process, and hence is continually losing joint, or is in continual danger of losing joint, with its environment. Life, therefore, at best, since in the nature of things it is a struggle and a search, is an enterprise with exasperating lack of sunshine."

"There is nothing more frightful to the philosopher than the unconscious tragedies of human reason. Men are somnambulists. Stupefied by the long night of instinct out of which it arose, the human mind is only half awake to the world of reality and duty. George Washington was the father of his country, and a great and good man, but he held human beings as slaves, and paid his hired help in Virginia whisky. It took Americans one hundred years to find out that "all men" includes Ethiopians; yet men who risked their lives in order to achieve personal and political liberty for black men, deliberately doom white women to a similar servitude. A rich man will give millions of dollars to a museum or a university, when he would know, if he had the talent to stop and think, that the thousands who make his wealth work like slaves from morning till night, and feed on garbage and suffocate in garrets, in order that he may be munificent."

"We preach the Golden Rule with an enthusiasm that is well-nigh vehement, and then freckle the globe with huge murder-houses for the expeditious destruction of those who have as good a right to live as we have."

"It is simply monstrous, this horrible savagery and somnambulism in which we grope. It is the climax of mundane infamy—the "paragon of the universe" dozing on the pedestal of his imagination and contemplating himself as an interstellar pet and all other beings as commodities. Let us startle ourselves, those of us who can, to a realization of the holocaust we are perpetrating on our feathered and fur-covered friends. For remember the same sentiment of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man's manacles and is to-day melting the white woman's chains will to-morrow emancipate the sorrel horse and the heifer; and as the ages bloom and the great wheels of the centuries grind on, all the races of the earth shall become kind, and this age of ours, so bigoted and raw, shall be remembered in history as an age of insanity, somnambulism, and blood."

"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."

"I have just finished your little book on 'The Logic of Vegetarianism.' It is the best thing on this subject in existence – bold, brilliant, unanswerable. I am glad you are on earth. If it were not for a very few souls like you, this world would seem to me an intellectual solitude."

"Writing is so unnatural & hard for me that I have a good deal of difficulty in getting myself to undergo the hardship. It's a good deal like "sweating blood" for me. And unless I am driven by terrible feelings or convictions, I am inclined to go on & do nothing. I hate writing. It is the greatest hardship of my life. It seems to me I might be reasonably happy if I weren't everlastingly nagged by the obligation to perpetuate literary things on people."

"Poor Thomson! How melancholy & helpless. I believe in the perfect parallelism & correlation of the physical & psychical. The anomalous mentality, like that of James Thomson, is caused by some hidden defect in his physical machinery. And I believe that it is to be one of the triumphs of future surgery to rectify many of these soul malformations, such as poor helpless Thomson had to carry thru life."

"It is a fact of our world, tho, that Death is as inevitable as Birth. The coffin is as natural as the cradle."

"I cannot express myself when I get to thinking about these things—these terrible crimes that man is inflicting year after year on millions of his poor, helpless brothers. I become indignant and desperate. I am ashamed of the race of beings to which I belong. It is so cruel and bigoted, so hypocritical, so soul-less and insane. I'd rather be an insect—a bee or a butterfly—and float in dim dreams among the wild flowers of summer than be a man and feel the wrongs and sufferings of this wretched world."

"Is murder stripped of its blackness by become a fine art? All assassination is practically instantaneous and painless, the assassination of men as as well as that of birds and quadrupeds. What would the author of such nonsense think if the assassination of his brother or mother blandly attempted to relieve himself of all guilt by means of the assurance that his victim had experienced no suffering? The crime of extermination does not consist in the creation of pain, but in the destruction of that precious and mysterious essence called life."

"The ability to weigh the stars is all right, but it is not more important than the disposition to be just."

"We should be a little more disposed to move along. We live in a world that is neither petrified or perfect. The universe is a liquid. It is flowing. Humanitarianism is in the air."

"Human nature is defective. It is selfish. It is cruel and revengeful. It is a product of militancy and hate. It is much better adapted to a fighting life, in which it was generated, than it is in cooperation and peace."

"Every being is incomparably precious to himself. This is the most mournful feature in human psychology. We did not invent it. It was handed to us along with our fingers and our fondness fo eating. It is the psychic calamity of the animal kingdom."

"It is a crime to start a child learning to read and write as soon as it is out of the cradle. We should get ideas before starting on the business of representing them."

"Much of the vagueness of the human mind is due to the fact that the mind is largely composed of material derived second-hand from books. The ideas are not read."

"I came to the conclusion out there on the Kansas prairies that the animals were not treated right by human beings. I thought we had not even a right to kill them for food and came to the University of Chicago to study the matter. At that time I had never heard of vegetarianism."

"I sit here tonight in this great city and think back along the years. Life is so full and so different now – full of teaching, writing and problem solving. But, oh, those precious memories away back there in the morning! The prairies are gone, where we used to gather wild strawberries and tiger lilies, but the old school house still stands, I am told, where the High Bank lifts its formidableness above the singing stream."

"Religion is a strictly human infirmity. No other animal has it. It originated far back in the past, when the human world was young and the mind just beginning to open. It is an anachronism today, with our science and understanding. It survives solely by the force of tradition."

"Religion is essentially pre-scientific. It will pass away. It represents a certain stage of mental development. It has been tinkered with and tinkered with until it is about ready for the scrap heap. The more men know of chemistry and physics and evolution and natural law, the less use they have for supernaturalism. No true scientist can pray. Prayer is unscientific. No evolutionist can believe in the divine origin of anything."

"Religion has had a natural origin, like coal, and rock salt, and mountains, and river valleys, and everything else. It has been made in the laboratory of human feeling and imagination. The gods did not make men; men made the gods."

"The long struggle is ended. I must pass away. Good-by. Oh, men are so cold and hard and half conscious toward their suffering fellows. Nobody understands. Oh my mother! and Oh my little girl! What will become of you? And the poor four-footed! May the long years be merciful! Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever."

"This is a gray world. There is enough sorrow in it, even though we cease to scourge each other—the sorrow of floods, famines, fires, earthquakes, storms, diseases, and death. We should trust each other, and love each other, and sympathize with and help each other, and be patient and forgiving."

"The human race is like a snake—it sheds. Ever and anon, as the ages bloom, old forms of thought are superseded by intellectual bran-news. Shrines at which one generation adores become to the succeeding desolate and despised."

"[This work] would be inexcusable to suppose it to be exhaustive. It is not even defensive. It is a projectile, and projectiles do not apologize. It intends to be followed."

"I became a vegetarian by my own reflection. I did not know at the time of the vegetarian movement, and hence, supposed myself among republics of carnivora. It did not seem to me graceful or ideal that I, an ethical being should maintain my existence at the incessant expense of misery and death to others."

"I am a vegetarian because I believe that present-day ethics is founded on that puerile, pre-Darwinian delusion that all other kinds of creatures and all worlds were created explicitly for the hominine species. Vegetarianism is the ethical corollary of evolution. It is simply the expansion of ethics to suit the biological revelations of Charles Darwin. Evolution has taught us the kinship of all creatures."

"I am a vegetarian, therefore, because cannibalism is unnecessary. I can live just as well and be just as happy without drinking the blood of my fellows, and why should I slay them? Why should I not live and let live—especially when I can do it just as well as not? It is not necessary that ten thousand creatures should give up their lives in order that I may keep mine, and if I make any pretensions to morality why should I require them to do it? If you say such a thing is necessary in your case, I say to you it is not—and further, that if it were, it would be your duty as an ethical being to call on your undertaker. There is no sense in carnivora talking about ethics and justice and mercy, for their very existence is a travesty on such things. It makes me indignant and sad when I hear men deplore sin and prate about justice and love and mercy, when the very energy they expend in preaching justice and mercy is obtained from the skeletons and sensibilities of their fellows. It is a spectacle that ought to make the imps of netherdom tremble for their laurels—man, the remorseless glutton, going about with a tongue and a knife, with his tongue preaching peace, mercy, and love, and with his knife making the very earth sodden with blood."

"We are striving for the amelioration of this suffering world. Let us be economical."

"No being knows. He thinks he knows. A few grams strategically shifted here and there in his organism, and he knows, or thinks he knows, something altogether otherwise. All is attitude and relativity."

"Man's desires are, indeed, innumerable, often hopeless, and sometimes vile, but they may all be rolled together into two: the desire to avoid pain, and the desire to experience pleasure. Every conscious movement made by living beings, from oyster to philosopher, is directed toward the accomplishment of one or both of these ends."

"The satisfaction of the much stigmatized animal propensities," or carnal desires," whatever they are, may be just as exemplary and noble as the satisfaction of the desire for knowledge or opulence; and they are, in fact, frequently more so. The only rational characterization of a low desire is one incapable of yielding to the universe in its satisfaction large returns of happiness. And a high desire is simply one affording to the universe in its satisfaction wide and profound welfare. The only reason why any desire, so-called "high" or so-called low," should be kept in abeyance is that its satisfaction will not contribute to the utilities. There is no reason why any desire capable of satisfaction possessed by a living being should not be satisfied, except that its satisfaction may interfere with the satisfaction of other more valuable desires possessed by the being himself or by other beings."

"Every pain is to be avoided, except those whose endurance will enable the avoidance of greater pain, and every possible happiness is to be harvested, save those whose foregoing will help the universe to larger happiness. There is no obligation commanding any being to endure misery save to avoid misery, and no consideration demanding any one to neglect happiness save for larger happiness—those ascetics who proclaim the divinity of wretchedness to the contrary notwithstanding."

"Man, in satisfying his desires, in avoiding misery and achieving happiness, strives to do two things with the inanimate universe: to manage it and to foreknow it. The inanimate is not devoted to us. We are not birdlings cuddled in an order of things where we need simply to yawn and be filled. We must bestir ourselves, or be in a position to compel others to bestir themselves for us, or perish. We are waifs, brought into existence by a universe whose solicitude for us ended with the travail that brought us forth. The inanimate universe is our mother, but without the blessed mother-love. The first thing we are conscious of, and about the only thing we ever absolutely know, is that we are whirling around in a very helpless manner on a whirligig of a ball, out of whose substance by the sweat of our brows we must quarry our existence. The universe is practically independent of us. But we, alas, are not independent of it. The food we eat, our raiment, our habitations, our treasures, our implements of knowledge, and our means of amusement are all portions of the inanimate, which we living beings must somehow subtract from the rest. In order to obtain these indispensable portions of the universe about us, we must halter it and control it and compel it to produce to the tune of our desires."

"So the disinherited loan themselves to the possessors of things, the landlords and the capitalists, who allow to them a rental for the use of their bodies. The industrial system which allows the unlimited appropriation of land and inventions furnishes to the more powerful and avaricious classes of communities the means by which they compel the rest to labor for them. And not to call such deprivation slavery is to neglect to use the word with its most essential connotation."

"The human beings who possess the dominion of land and machinery and compel others, in order to obtain the essentials of existence, to serve them, are as truly masters of slaves as they who exact blood from the dorsals of their fellows with literal slave whips."

"All of these victimizations, the enslavement of species by species, of race by race, and of class by class, are aspects of one and the same fundamental fact. They are all exemplifications of the same principle—the principle asserting the right to escape one's part in the hardships of life—the doctrine that the weak are, and of right ought to be, the means, and the strong the ends—the doctrine that might makes it right for some to burglarize the lives of others of all that is precious, and at the same time to add to others' woes by the compulsory imposition of their own."

"Inventions are a blessing. They tame the wild tendencies of the inanimate and train them to do human bidding. They save human bodies hard and laborious exertions by becoming their obsequious aids. But they are not invariable and universal blessings. The sad and peculiar conditions prevailing in human industry cause inventions to be to many human beings a catastrophe and a dread. To those who are able to own them and have lands on which to operate them they are blessings. But to the great disinherited class, who have nothing on earth but their hands, inventions are a disadvantage and an evil."

"[T]he universe, we may rest assured, is all alike, the intricate and the simple. It is all a universe of law, from the daisy to the star and from the diatom to the philosopher, from the flowing rivers and growing fields to the processes of our own brains."

"Caprice is a hallucination. There is no caprice, only ignorance."

"The tradition that the universe was originally constructed and has ever since been, and is to-day, guided by the cerebral processes of an all-wise brain, is responsible for it all. Blinded by this inheritance, human beings condone the most palpable defects in the economies of the universe—limitations which, it is not violent to say, if possessed by a fellow human being, would be characterized as those of an imbecile."