Quotes

Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether its victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in this world.

~Michigan Bar website

Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote.

~Paul Harvey

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

~Mark Twain, What Is Man, 1906

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

~Alice Walker

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

~Albert Schweitzer

Deliberate cruelty to our defenseless and beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being can be guilty.

~William Ralph Inge

The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever.

~Ashley Montague

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.

~Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization

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 man.

~St. Francis of Assisi

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

~George Eliot

If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of the spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.

~Chief Seattle of the Suwamish Tribe, letter to President Franklin Pierce

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.

~Clarence Darrow

The purity of a person's heart can be quickly measured by how they regard animals.

~Anonymous

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

~Mahatma Gandhi

This (animal cruelty) is not a harmless venting of emotion in a healthy individual; this is a warning sign that this individual...needs some sort of intervention.

~Alan Brantley, FBI Supervisory Agent, in an interview with Randall Lockwood, Ph.D., and Ann Church of the Humane Society of the United States, 1996