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An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
MARTIN BUBER, I and Thou
Animals are such agreeable friends -- they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
GEORGE ELIOT, Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.
MARK TWAIN, Letters from the Earth
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, Oceana
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden
If we're not supposed to eat animals ... how come they're made out of meat?
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained. I stand and look at them long and long.
WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass
The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.
THORNTON WILDER, The Skin of Our Teeth
Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.
CHARLES DARWIN, Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind
If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected.
CHIEF SEATTLE OF THE SUWAMISH TRIBE, letter to President Franklin Pierce
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
MILAN KUNDERA, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.
LEO TOLSTOY, The First Step
For an animal person, an animal-less home is no home at all.
CLEVELAND AMORY, The Cat Who Came for Christmas
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER, Mammals
What do you see when you look at an animal? A kindred spirit, a creature much like you; but possibly, the very next moment, a beast, a stranger, just an animal. Animals are like those pictures that we see as one thing and then another; the duck that suddenly becomes a rabbit; the wine glass that's also an old woman in profile. Now the pig is a fellow creature, like Wilbur in Charlotte's Web. Now he's pork.
All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.
GEORGE ORWELL, Animal Farm
Animals are just pure, uncomplicated entities of creation from God. They live like the Maasai do in Kenya--for each day is forever to them and the "Now" is what they live in. You can get aggravated with your pets and yell at them, but in a matter of minutes they are licking your hand again in love.
SYLVIA BROWNE, All Pets Go to Heaven
The fact that the lower animals are excited by the same emotions as ourselves is so well established, that it will not be necessary to weary the reader by many details. Terror acts in the same manner on them as on us, causing the muscles to tremble, the heart to palpitate, the sphincters to be relaxed, and the hair to stand on end. Suspicion, the offspring of fear, is eminently characteristic of most wild animals. Courage and timidity are extremely variable qualities in the individuals of the same species, as is plainly seen in our dogs. Some dogs and horses are ill-tempered, and easily turn sulky; others are good-tempered; and these qualities are certainly inherited. Everyone knows how liable animals are to furious rage, and how plainly they show it.
CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of the Species
Animals are, like us, endangered species on an endangered planet, and we are the ones who are endangering them, it, and ourselves. They are innocent sufferers in a hell of our making.
JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON & SUSAN MCCARTHY, When Elephants Weep
Now by these ... means one can also know the difference between men and beasts. For it is rather remarkable that there are no men so dull and so stupid (excluding not even the insane), that they are incapable of arranging various words together and of composing from them a discourse by means of which they might make their thoughts understood, and that, on the other hand, there is no other animal at all, however perfect and pedigreed it may be, that does the like. This does not happen because they lack the organs, for one sees that magpies and parrots can utter words just as we can, and yet they cannot speak as we do, that is to say, by testifying to the fact that they are thinking about what they are saying; on the other hand, men born deaf and dumb, who are deprived of the organs that aid others in speaking just as much as, or more than the beasts are wont to invent for themselves various signs by means of which they make themselves understood to those who, being with them on a regular basis, have the time to learn their language. And this attests not merely to the fact that beasts have less reason than men but that they have none at all.
RENE DESCARTES, Discourse on the Method for Conducting One's Reason
Animals are not humans with reduced capacities. They have their own capacities, their own spectrum of aptitudes and behaviors.
Animals are less sensitive than human beings because the, living only in the present, lack the reflection on the past and future that plays so great a role in the subjective lives of people; yet where physical pain is involved, we ought to take the greatest care not to cause needless anguish to animals.
DAVID FRASER, Understanding Animal Welfare
And God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.
Anyone would be hard pressed to put forth that animals are not perfect creations of God; they are just different types of creations. Humankind has always compared other creations with themselves, thinking always that we are the highest of God's creations. For this reason many humans don't think that other living organisms have souls, but how do we supposedly know that? Do we presume to know God so well that we can say that souls don't exist in other living forms? Just because God supposedly gave us dominion over all living things (according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible), does that mean we can kill and mistreat them? Could not the word "dominion" also mean a responsibility to care for and ensure the survival of all living things?
SYLVIA BROWNE, All Pets Go to Heaven
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