Nonhuman Animal Quotes

#1. What is there about the notion of a person, at law, that makes every living member of the species Homo sapiens a person, irrespective of their mental capacities, but excludes every nonhuman animal - again, irrespective of their mental capacities?

Peter Singer

#2. When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis.

David Quammen

#3. I don't have a hands-on fondness for animals. I did not grow up bonded to any particular nonhuman animal. I like them and I pet them and I'm kind to them, but there's no special bond between me and other animals

Wayne Pacelle

#4. They are nonhuman persons. They are not food. If animals matter morally at all, there is one and only one rational response: go vegan. Everything else is just participation in animal exploitation.

Gary L. Francione

#5. All us Youngs could throw. I used to kill squirrels with a stone when I was a kid, and my granddad once killed a turkey buzzard on the fly with a rock.

Cy Young

#6. 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

#7. For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them ... The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment.

Peter Singer

#8. Does the human intellect, or "reason," really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms? Or on the contrary, is the human intellect rooted in, and secretly borne by, our forgotten contact with the multiple nonhuman shapes that surround us on every hand?

David Abram

#9. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly "inert" letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless - as mysterious as a talking stone.

David Abram

#10. It's bad biology to rob nonhuman animals of their emotional lives.

Marc Bekoff

#11. Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans.

Peter Singer

#12. Time brings an end to everything. We should not mistake for a tragedy what is no more than the passage of time.

Robert Breault

#13. Human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember.

Alice Walker

#14. We cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman as our property, as a resource, as a thing that we an use and kill for our purposes.

Gary L. Francione

#15. I've had a nontabloid life because I had a really good family.

Peter Billingsley

#16. Humans treat animals as things that exist as means to human ends. That's morally wrong. Sexism promotes the idea that women are things that exist as means to the ends of men. That's morally wrong. We need to stop treating all persons - whether human or nonhuman - as things.

Gary L. Francione

#17. In a war the last thing the English know is how to practice fair play.

Adolf Hitler

#18. The newspapers do little better. Their coverage of nonhuman animals is dominated by "human interest" events like the birth of a baby gorilla at the zoo, or by threats to endangered species; but developments in farming techniques that deprive millions of animals of freedom of movement go unreported.

Peter Singer

#19. See it's easy as cake, simple as whistling Dixie
While I'm waving the pistol at sixty Christians against me
Go to war with the Mormons, take a bath with the Catholics
In holy water, no wonder they tried to hold me under longer.

Eminem

#20. Our knowledge and understanding of nonhuman animals is polluted far more than we acknowledge by our belief in our own superiority, our unrecognized cultural programming, and our separation from nature.

Will Tuttle

#21. In addition to Ameslan, chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are being taught a variety of other gestural languages. And it is just this transition from tongue to hand that has permitted humans to regain the ability-lost, according to Josephus, since Eden-to communicate with the animals.

Carl Sagan

#22. 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

#23. Veganism must be the baseline if we are to have any hope of shifting the paradigm away from animals as things and toward animals as nonhuman persons.

Gary L. Francione