Best Animal Rights Quotes

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.

I am only one but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.

True benevolence or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathizes with the distress of every creature capable of sensation.

We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

I have always felt that the way we treat animals is a pretty good indicator of the compassion we are capable of for the human race.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.

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

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.

Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored

Violence begins with the fork.

If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.

The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of Great Kindness.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.

Once admit that we have the right to inflict unnecessary suffering and you destroy the very basis of human society.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

In all the round world there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses.

It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumes flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle: these are our brothers. All things are connected like the blood which unites one’s family.

We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.

I can’t remember when I wasn’t an animal rights activist.

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

I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.

The human race could go extinct and I for one would not shed any tears.

One can’t imagine a Hollywood film whose entire purpose was to ridicule, say, homosexual activists, feminists, animal rights crusaders, or environmentalists. That would be blasphemy. Hollywood understands that religious people, particularly Christians, are the last group in America besides businessmen who may be defamed with impunity.

If the creatures with fur/feathers/fins are our brothers in a lower stage of development then their very weakness and inability to protest, demands that man should refrain from torturing them for the mere possibility of obtaining some knowledge which he believes may be to his own interest.