Animal Rights Activists

"As time passes and society assumes more and move the care of the young, it is probable that the love of parents for their own children will grow weaker. Parents will develop a feeling of regard for children as a whole, and will not have that feeling of partiality which they today have so much, for their own children. Society is in many ways better fitted to look after its young than are individual parents. Society today carries on the education of the child, providing school houses, teachers, and in some cases even books and meals. All of these things were formerly done by parents themselves, that is, in a "private" rather than in a "public" way. And future times will no doubt see still further advances along these same lines."

"Man is but a single sector in the great circle of sentient life. The human species is one among a million or two of species inhabiting the earth. The beings below and around us have had the same origin as we have. They have the same general architecture of both body and mind, and are footballed by the same antithetical impulses of pleasure and pain. Whatever the beings of this world have been in the past, they can never again be anything but a family. Universal ethics is a corollary of universal kinship. Moral obligation is as boundless as feeling."

"Oh, universe! Pitiful spectacle! Aggregation of tragedy, somnambulism, inhumanity, terrorism, and death! It makes one long to seal up his sensibilities and leap out into the gulfs and be swallowed up. The handiwork of an all-wise biophilist? Rhapsody of an idiot! Gods? No! The monstrous kindergarten of an idle-pated knave! A Satanic prank! The surreptitious handiwork of an ass! A universe is, indeed, to be pitied whose dominating inhabitants are so unconscious and so ethically embryonic that they make life a commodity, mercy a disease, and systematic massacre a pastime and a profession."

"[T]here is a Future. And the creeds and ideals, men bow down to to-day will in time to come pass away, and new creeds and ideals will claim their allegiance. Shrines change as the generations come and go, and out of the decomposition of the old comes the new. The time will come when the sentiments of these pages will not be hailed by two or three, and ridiculed or ignored by the rest; they will represent Public Opinion and Law."

"These wider relations and obligations implied by evolution should be included in every program designed for the amelioration of the world. To ignore them is to classify ourselves as incompetents. No one but an inferior can any longer maintain that kindness, justice, sympathy, love, honesty, humanity, and charity are not as good for dogs, horses, and fishes as they are for men; or that cruelty, hatred, and inhumanity are not he same damning things wherever they fall on living souls."

"For it must be remembered that there was a time when no set of beings tyrannized and terrorized the planet as do the reigning cutthroats to-day. Estimate finally, if you can, and history will help you, the amount of bloodshed and war and woe necessary to develop those unfinished Troglodytes into beings clever enough to write history and invent gin and originate the hope of heaven. Compute these totalities, and you will know what it has cost to teach you and me and the rest to talk politics and wax sarcastic with our fore limbs in the air. Question: If it has required two or three millions of species struggling for life twenty millions of years to produce a being barely above derision, how long will it take and how many millions of species to evolve a being as nearly divine as the average man thinks he is?"

"Women are everywhere systematically deprived of privileges which men have fought and bled and died to obtain for themselves. In many lands a woman legally ceases to exist the day she is wed—if she ever existed before. Man has always been, and is to-day, the race, and woman his shadow."

"I have a theory that we judge best of the reality of friendships in absence; and if this be true, I cannot have been mistaken as to the warmth of my feelings for Howard Moore, for I never saw him in person, though we corresponded regularly for years, and I have still a big packet of his letters which show him to have been no less lovable as a man than he was brilliant as a writer."

"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."

"The inhabitants of the earth are all alike in one particular—they are all striving to experience pleasure and to avoid pain. Early in the evolution of living beings, these two opposite forms of experience were hit upon as the determinants of conduct; and the plan worked so well that it has been continued ever since. It is an excellent scheme in a world where simple survival is the main thing. It promotes earnestness. But it is inconvenient, to say the least. And it ought to be changed if there could ever be found a way to do it."

"Imitation will not always be stronger than reason, but it is today."

"Progress is not natural. We are geared to go round and round. The reformer should not expect too much. We are only as far along as we are. It is the nature of granite to be hard. And it is the nature of man to be mechanical."

"The stars of heaven never looked down on a more pitiful sight than that of a horse, after having drudged faithfully all his days in the service of his lord, cast out in his helpless old age to wander and perish."

"The dread of death, an instinct so unfailing in all animals, exists, not because existence is intrinsically so sweet, nor because annihilation is so distressing, but because this bugaboo has been an indispensable safeguard against the suicide of the life process. The expectation of post-mortem consciousness, so prevalent and so insistent among human beings, is a hope arising from the concussion of a desire and a fancy—the desire to persist just referred to, and the fancy or hallucination of a double which originated among savages from shadows, images, dreams, and the like."

"An ox is of a very different nature from a fox, and men (some of them) are very unlike serpents, because the classes of impulses in the consciousnesses of these animals are for the most part very different in one animal from another. Serpents, oxen, foxes, and men, however, are all similar in their eagerness to reproduce themselves, and in their emphatic reluctance to die."

"Our competitive system of industry is a vestigial institution. It is a survival from the militant ages of the past. It is a form of warfare. It is unsuited to a world of co-operation and division of labor. Higher men are beings of sympathy. They have the natures to put themselves in the places of others. Their ideal is the Golden Rule. But our system of industry compels us to fight each other. It is a heart-hardener. It is a system of cannibalism. Instead of instilling the feeling of brotherhood, it compels us to eat each other. It will pass away. It is already far advanced in its transition to a system based on sympathy and systematic co-operation."

"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.""

"The inextricable way pleasure and pain are mixed up with each other in this world is a mournful fact to beings who are all the time striving for pleasure alone. In the ideal world there is no pain, no misery. There is nothing but happiness. But in our world pain seems to have been the original feeling, the first one to appear in the evolution of sentiency. Pleasure is a sort of after-thought, a secondary attribute of consciousness which developed later as an aid to pain in keeping living beings straight. Pain is a whip, a penalty. Pleasure is a reward or bribe. Pain is a curse. We are all the time trying to minimize and escape it. In an ideal world the inhabitants never have any impulses that drive them to improper acts. All their impulses are good. Every act is proper and right. Ideal beings need only to live and act in order to be happy. We are not ideal beings. Our world happens to be one affording almost unlimited opportunities for improvement."

"It ought to be perfectly clear by this time that the popularity and unpopularity of propositions in no way coincide with their truth and falsity. It makes no difference how true a proposition may be or how unreservedly it may finally be accepted by mankind, there is always a period in its early life when it is stoned and misunderstood. It has been so throughout the ages of the past; it is true to-day; and it will continue to be true as long as disparities in heroism and originality exist among men."

"Socialism is inevitable. It is right. It is in the line of least resistance. It is on the way to the highlands—on the way to Real Civilisation, not the starched, hypocritical, supposititious, so-called kind palmed off by pietists and pickpockets, such as we are called upon to contemplate and endure around us to-day, but a civilisation based on the shining and imperishable foundations of Brotherhood and Mutual Love."

"There are not ten men on the continent of America at this moment who will not, two hundred years from now, be considered as 'back numbers.'"

"In the ideal universe the life and happiness of no being are contingent on the suffering and death of any other, and the fact that in this world of ours life and happiness have been and are to-day so commonly maintained by the infliction of misery and death by some beings on others is the most painful fact that ever entered an enlightened mind."

"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."

"Of all the silly notions foisted upon us by a know-nothing past, the notion that Nature is immaculate and ideal, perfect and all-wise, certainly takes the cake for downright absurdity. Men attempt to whitewash every old barbarity almost by appealing to what they call 'Nature,' as if whatever Nature is or does is all right, whether it is or not. Whenever these individuals get into a tight place in a discussion, or feel that they would like to allow their not very athletic reasoning faculties a rest, away they go to Nature (or the Bible); then everything is settled so far as they are concerned. They can always find something in the infinite diversity of Nature to suit every case especially if they have a knack for ignoring: essentials and are handy in the use of allegory."

"[W]e are a part of Nature, we human beings, just as truly a part of the universe of things as the insect or the sea. And are we not as much entitled to be considered in the selection of a model as the part 'red in tooth and claw'? At the feet of the tiger is a good place to study the dentition of the cat family, but it is a poor place to learn ethics."

"The defect in this argument is that it assumes that the basis of ethics is life, whereas ethics is concerned, not with life, but with consciousness. The question ever asked by ethics is not, Does the thing live? but. Does it feel? It is impossible to do right and wrong to that which is incapable of sentient experience. Ethics arises with consciousness and is coextensive with it. We have no ethical relation to the clod, the molecule, or the scale sloughed off from our skin on the back of our hand, because the clod, the molecule, and the scale have no feeling, no soul, no anything rendering them capable of being affected by us. And the same thing is true of the cabbage, and the onion, and of plants generally. The fact that a thing is an organism, that it has organisation, has in itself no more ethical significance than the fact that it has symmetry, or redness, or weight."

"Ethical culture should do for human character what physical culture should do for the body. It should produce a race of kind, honest, courageous, public-spirited, and justice-loving men and women. It is all so perfectly plain. Men are moral invalids. They come into the world bearing the curse of their animal origin. They are unfit for a life of love and co-operation. The defects of human character are as well known and as well understood as the defects of the human body. They are the cause of more unhappiness to mankind than any other one thing. They can be corrected by the application of the same remedies that have proved so efficacious in the case of mental and physical defects. The school should be the mental, physical, and moral infirmary of society."

"The world we inhabit is not an ideal world, except to the ninny. It is not such a world as we would pick out if we were choosing, unless the assortment from which we were to make the selection were a pretty hard batch. It is so full of inconveniences in the first place—so much so that it seems sometimes that it must have been whittled out in some idle hour, without any idea that it would ever be used for anything, and then, when organic beings came into existence, it was given to them as a place to grow up and fight it out in, because there wasn't any other place for them to go. Then, again, it is inhabited by a lot of species that have acquired their natures through an apprenticeship of crime and militancy extending bade millions of years into the past."

"Those things, thoughts, beings, acts, and instincts which help us to the pleasurable experiences of life we call good, and those which deprive us of pleasure or which bring upon us painful experiences we call bad. This is the supreme standard—Utility. Is the thing, thought, being, act, or impulse useful? Does it lead directly or indirectly to happiness and well-being? If it does, it is right, proper, and good. If it does not, it is wrong, improper, and bad."

"The sad and unmistakable thing one observes in looking out over the universe of conscious existence is the preponderance of egoism, the intense and almost maniacal regard with which beings, as a rule, act in behalf of themselves, and the lukewarm consideration, on the whole, allowed to others."

"It seems sometimes that I can almost see the shining spires of that Celestial Civilisation that man is to build in the ages to come on this earth—that Civilisation that will jewel the land masses of this planet in that sublime time when Science has wrought the miracles of a million years, and Man, no longer the savage he now is, breathes and to every being that feels."

"The question is not. Shall man be master of the earth? but. What sort of a master shall he be? Shall he be cruel and selfish, bigoted and imperialistic, thinking only of himself and sacrificing the interests of others to his own heartless purposes? or shall he be the responsible administrator of the universe, presiding over the affairs of the earth honourably and equitably, with a mind single to the good of all? Shall he be a savage despot or a schoolmaster? a feared and hated monster, or a wise, patient, and affectionate father? Since he has become the manager of the planet, shall he manage it as he would wish it to be managed if he were a subordinate and some other race had succeeded to the superintendency, or shall he cut loose from all moral obligations, ignore the promptings of his better self, and run things absolutely in the interest of himself? Which shall it be—the great law of love or the savage law of might?"

"Many races, owing to the manner in which life has been evolved, are by nature criminal, just like a lot of individual men and women. Their existence is a continual menace to the peace and well-being of the world. The fullness of their lives is dependent upon the emptiness and destruction of others. The mosquito and the tiger, the rattle-snake and the 'sportsman,' are criminals of this kind. The same thing is true of predatory animals generally."

"It is impossible for me to express my loathing and horror of the practice men have of killing things for pastime so-called 'hunting,' or 'sport. No one but a barbarian can engage in such pursuits, or can look upon them or know of them without pain and indignation. It makes me want to fight and cry whenever I think of them. And when I see men engaged in such execrable activities (the crippling, killing, and terrifying of whole communities of innocent and happy beings, shooting them down in cold blood, and with hellish enthusiasm), my feeling is that I must stop them at all hazards. And there have been times, when I have come upon men engaged in these fiendish doings, when I would have shot them down if I had been armed, the enormity of their crimes has come over me with such vividness and power."

"The function of punishment is to do good, to improve the universe, to add to the sum total of happiness. And punishment which does not do this is not justified. It is a crime in itself. The penal acts of society should be judged just as other acts of conduct are judged—by their utilities."

"Vacation days may be much more beautifully spent communing with the transcendent spirit of Nature than in the butchery and terrorisation of her simple-hearted children."

"Nature is the universe, including ourselves. And are we not all the time tinkering at the universe, especially the garden patch that is next to us—the earth? Every time we dig a ditch or plant a field, dam a river or build a town, form a government or gut a mountain, slay a forest or form a new resolution, or do anything else almost, do we not change and reform Nature, make it over again and make it more acceptable than it was before? Have we not been working hard for thousands of years, and do our poor hearts not almost faint sometimes when we think how far, far away the millennium still is after all our efforts, and how long our little graves will have been forgotten when that blessed time gets here?"

"The partially emancipated human being who extends his moral sentiments to all the members of his own species, but denies to all other species the justice and humanity he accords to his own, is making on a larger scale the same ethical mess of it as the savage. The only consistent attitude, since Darwin established the unity of life (and the attitude we shall assume, if we ever become really civilised), is the attitude of universal gentleness and humanity."

"No being will do his most luminous and exalted thinking with his stomach a morgue."

"The great trouble is that individuals and races in their treatment of each other are not guided by the same high standards of impartiality as an individual organism in dealing with his own organs and parts. Life is not one. It lacks unity of feeling and purpose. And as long as it lacks this oneness it will lack justice."

"If man acted unkindly toward non-human beings only when he had to do so in order to avoid harm to himself—if he were as economical in his injuries to others as he would be if he had to endure them himself—the violence which to-day marks his dominion of the planet would be reduced to a mere vestige of what it is."

"Inconsideration by human beings toward the rest of sentients is an aspect of that vast unconsciousness which taught that blacks were made for whites, females for males, and barbarians" for Romans."

"The weak submit because they are helpless and because they are ignorant, because they are incarcerated and disarmed, and because they have been taught and intimidated into believing that the conventional and the legal, whatever they are, have been ordained and established by the immeasurable manufacturer of things."

"A carnivorous animal is not an ideal animal, and never can be. The life of a carnivorous animal is a perpetual onslaught. Every meal is a murder. Eating is not the harmless activity it is to one who sits down to fruit and grains. The carnivore must kill somebody, or have somebody else do it for him, in order to eat. It cannot be otherwise. And an animal whose life is one unbroken succession of such necessities, whose stomach is the grave of hundreds and thousands, and even of tens of thousands, of his fellow-beings, may be meritorious in other respects — may preach the Golden Rule, decry war, give money to the missionary, and rail at the rich — but so long as he continues to fill himself every few hours with the blood and vitals of others, he is not only not an ideal animal, but has in reality no just claims on life. Flesh is a painful form of nutrition for any organism, but it is especially so for man, because it is unnecessary, and because man makes so many pretensions and occupies a position in the world of such exceptional responsibility."

"Flesh foods are coming to be recognised more and more by physicians, teachers, writers, and progressive and scientific people generally, as being not only unnecessary and immoral, but as actually inhibitory of the highest efficiency and well-being in man himself. The meat fetish is nothing but an idol, a delusion pure and simple, which has been foisted upon us, like so many other delusions, by tradition, and the time is not far distant when it will be recognised as such by all who really think."

"Men are not zoophilists (being-lovers). Not many of them are philanthropists (man-lovers). They are barbarians. And the wrongs inflicted by them on non-human beings are for the most part inflicted simply because they feel like it. Human nature is so constructed that men get pleasure out of doing the most monstrous deeds. It is worse than this. Human nature is so constructed that it contains elements which demand exercise, demand motor expression, and in whose expression the most lamentable and appalling effects are produced."

"Take the donkey. The donkey brays. But wouldn't it have been more satisfactory to all those who have ears to hear and sensoriums to look after if the donkey had been provided with a laryngeal apparatus that would enable it to express the overflow of its yearnings in song? Would it have been better or would it have been worse if the liver-fluke had been left out of the world—that parasitic flat-worm residing in the bile-sac of the sheep, and causing sometimes as many as 3,000,000 sheep to perish miserably in a year in Great Britain alone? Couldn't we get along without tapeworms, and rattlesnakes, and fleas, and the appetite for alcohol? How about weeds, and diseases, and slush, and microbes, and famines, and fogs, and floods, and hurricanes, and earthquakes, and mosquitoes, and dust, and fools, and near-fools, and death?"

"We know more about human heredity to-day than we did loo years ago. Human nature is not an unstained page. We come into the world with more than blank minds and helpless bodies. We come bringing with us machines, natures, which must be radically changed if we ever become more than mere fractions of men and women. Nearly all the woes of the world arise either from ignorance of the ways we should go or from hereditary waywardnesses which we bring into the world with us. It is as truly the function of the school to correct these inherent defects in our acting machinery and to put sign-boards in the mind telling which ways to go and which ways to avoid as it is to tutor the understanding or guide the growing body."

"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."

"Health is the universe to one who is without it. It is the foundation of all human values. Yet we grow up in utter ignorance of its laws. How often we hear the lament at forty, "If I had only known at fourteen what I know now, I never would have had to suffer what I am suffering." We toil over the axioms of Euclid, and the idioms of deceased languages, and strain after dates and the names of capitals and the idiocies of orthography, as if our very lives depended upon them. But we give hardly a single serious thought to those conditions of physical well-being on which the whole universe rests."