Moral Animal Quotes

#1. Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#2. Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal
not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held.

Matthew Scully

#3. Especially when it comes to animals used for food, humanity's reasoning power and concern about fairness plummets.

Karen Davis

#4. I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animal, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important ... It is the most noble of all the attributes of man.

Charles Darwin

#5. Pretty, pink Barbie fucks hard and raw like an animal. Her head is thrown back, spine arched, she's oblivious to rules, to moral order, to all but inner imperatives. And I wonder: could she live like she fucks?

Karen Marie Moning

#6. At the bitter end of an era of liberation - women's lib, kids' lib, animal lib, and everything-but-ethics lib - America has apparently been liberated from its moral foundations. But for too many, the good life has become a living hell.

Billy Graham

#7. The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#8. People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices

Gary L. Francione

#9. We still have a long way to go. But we are moving in the right direction. If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution - and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity.

Jane Goodall

#10. It's not a requirement to eat animals, we just choose to do it, so it becomes a moral choice and one that is having a huge impact on the planet, using up resources and destroying the biosphere.

James Cameron

#11. If intelligence and capability are not criteria for the possession of rights, why would animals -who have the capacity to feel fear and pain- be excluded from our moral consideration?

Jack Norris

#12. Humans are unique in having the astonishing capacity to extend our sympathies far beyond the here and now. through time and space, to anywhere and anything we choose. It is our culture that decides how large and inclusive our moral circle is, but it is each of us who makes up our culture. (p.250)

Andrew Westoll

#13. Being vegan is not just a matter of being 'kind' to animals. First and foremost, it is a matter of being just and observing our moral obligation to not treat other sentient beings as things.

Gary L. Francione

#14. Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.

Edward Abbey

#15. There is too much animal courage in society and not sufficient moral courage.

Mary Baker Eddy

#16. The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it.

John Ruskin

#17. Veganism is the application of the principle of abolition in your own life; it represents your recognition that animals are not things. Veganism is the recognition of the moral personhood of nonhuman animals.

Gary L. Francione

#18. The distinction between meat and other animal products is total nonsense. Vegetarianism is a morally incoherent position. If you regard animals as members of the moral community, you really don't have a choice but to go vegan.

Gary L. Francione

#19. The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?

Jeremy Bentham

#20. Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.

Wendell Phillips

#21. The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.

Steven Pinker

#22. The matter of the abuse and cruelty we inflict on other animals has to fight for our attention in what sometimes seems an already overfull moral agenda. It is vital, however, that these instances of injustice not be overlooked.

Desmond Tutu

#23. Socialist is not a human but animal - because human differs from animal in this that he has moral rules, and reds, as their program states they disobey them.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke

#24. The travesty of slavery wasn't physical abuse. It was the moral abuse of looking at a human being as if they are an animal.

Alan Keyes

#25. The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion.

Bill Nye

#26. I am a political animal, because for God's sakes I think "We The People" is a job. I think experienced self government demands on all levels - intellectual, moral, historical, and spiritual level. We are supposed to be engaged and give directions to our elected employees.

Ted Nugent

#27. The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.

Roald Dahl

#28. Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?

Joy Williams

#29. It's the false moral component behind blind animal love that so frosts me. The faulty logic that believes that the capacity to adore a nonhuman creature is somehow a purer form of love.

David Rakoff

#30. Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#31. None of that is necessary. It's not as if we're in a situation where it is us or them.There's something peculiar about talking about the moral status of animals, when we are killing and eating them for no reason whatsoever.

Gary L. Francione

#32. Veganism is an act of nonviolent defiance. It is our statement that we reject the notion that animals are things and that we regard sentient nonhumans as moral persons with the fundamental moral right not to be treated as the property or resources of humans.

Gary L. Francione

#33. Even if animal experiments did result in a cure for AIDS, of which there is no chance, I'd be against it on moral grounds.

Ingrid Newkirk

#34. If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because ... its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling - killing.

Leo Tolstoy

#35. True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

Milan Kundera

#36. Eating animals involves an intentional decision to participate in the suffering and death of nonhumans where there is no plausible moral justification.

Gary L. Francione

#37. I believe that justice is instinct and innate, that the moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing; as a wise Creator must have seen to be necessary in an animal destined to live in society.

Thomas Jefferson

#38. One can measure the greatness and the moral progress of a nation by looking at how it treats its animals.

Mahatma Gandhi

#39. The fidelity of a dog is a precious gift demanding no less binding moral responsibilities than the friendship of a human being.

Konrad Lorenz

#40. Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals.

Milan Kundera

#41. Tom Regan's now classic Case for Animal Rights blends careful argument with intense moral concern. For two decades, where Regan has been taken seriously, animals have been better off and people have become better persons. This new edition is a welcome sign of this influence continuing.

Holmes Rolston III

#42. I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.

Daniel Dennett