Quotes About Nonhuman

#1. 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

#2. We might think then of rhetorical production as an extended intentional state in which rhetoric emerges from the dynamic, ongoing intra-actions of human and nonhuman entities all projecting toward each other.

Anonymous

#3. 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

#4. We are mortals all, human and nonhuman, bound in one fellowship of love and travail. No one escapes the fate of death. But we can, with caring, make our good-byes less tormented. If we broaden the circle of our compassion, life can be less cruel.

Gary Kowalski

#5. 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

#6. All right. I do not think she will attack, though. She is a nice inhuman." "You mean nonhuman. Inhuman is an adjective," I said, as I rose from the lawn and padded softly around the left side of the house to the backyard. "Hey, I'm not a native speaker. Give me a break.

Kevin Hearne

#7. What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have.

Peter Singer

#8. 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

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

Peter Singer

#10. One of the first steps toward an integral postmodernity is the development and establishment of a genuine environmental ethics, or a moral and ethical stance to nonhuman holons.

Ken Wilber

#11. The Buddha's teaching leads us to the realization that we must always strive to harm no sentient being, human or nonhuman, whether or not it is in our selfish interest to do so.

Norm Phelps

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

Marc Bekoff

#13. So,uh, where am I, exactly ? And what do you plan on doing with me ?"
"You're at Underworld General Hospital. As you can probably guess, we specialize in nonhuman medical care. Our location is secret, so don't ask."
"UGH ? Your hospital is called 'ugh' ? Oh, that's precious.

Larissa Ione

#14. The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

Archibald MacLeish

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. You mean nonhuman. Inhuman is an adjective, I said, as I rose from the lawn and padded softly around the left side of the house to the backyard.

Kevin Hearne

#18. No Keynesian has ever proposed a measure designed to make the individual more productive; for that would require institutional means for enabling him to acquire ownership of the nonhuman factor of production: capital.

Louis O. Kelso

#19. 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

#20. Something nonhuman doesn't become human by getting older and bigger; whatever is human is human from the beginning.

Randy Alcorn

#21. The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?

Barbara Ehrenreich

#22. In all cultures, human beings - in order to be human - must understand the nonhuman.

Margaret Mead

#23. Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.

Richard Rorty

#24. I bought a brown-skinned glove puppet. He came with a little black briefcase and his hair was parted exactly down the middle. The precision of his parting made me uneasy; somehow it was too human at the exact same time as exposing his status as a nonhuman.

Helen Oyeyemi

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. Speciesism: A failure, in attitude or practice, to accord any nonhuman being equal consideration and respect

Joan Dunayer

#28. There is no doubt that there is a huge difference between human and nonhuman animals. But what we are overlooking is the fact that nonhuman animals are conscious beings, that they can suffer.

Peter Singer

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.

Antonio Damasio

#32. Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes.

Gilles Deleuze

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. [Bruno] Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antimony between nonhuman nature and human culture.

-- Randall Styers, Making Magic, p. 17

Randall Styers

#36. 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

#37. I'm curious about other universes, and nonhuman elementals. For me it's still a very lively ethos. It's a kind of practice. It's an ethos that is very sustaining.

Anne Waldman

#38. The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.

J.M. Coetzee

#39. Buddhism cannot be true to itself until Buddhists resolve their ambivalence toward nonhuman animals and extend the full protection of their compassion to the most harmless and helpless of those who live at our mercy in the visible realms.

Norm Phelps

#40. Citizenship is a way of being in the world rooted in the knowledge that I am a member of a vast community of human and nonhuman beings that I depend on for essentials I could never provide for myself.

Parker J. Palmer

#41. 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

#42. Nonhuman animals instinctively know that stopping is the best way to get healed.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#43. Nonhumanity is a dangerous label. If someone is nonhuman, they have no rights, Andrea. No protection.

Ilona Andrews

#44. Of course, the plea for respect for nonhuman life goes far beyond the scientific delight of familiarity with our planet mates. The nonhuman forms of life with which we 6,000 million talking, upright apes share this finite planet are directly or indirectly connected to our well-being.

Lynn Margulis

#45. I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#46. Philosophy, for me, is a way of relearning to look at the world, a world that is familiar to us, that we know, that is shared by all human beings and also by nonhuman beings.

Simon Critchley

#47. We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman, happens to the human. What happens to the outer world, happens to the inner world.

Thomas Berry

#48. Technology plows through history at an accelerating rate, shifting the burden of production off labor into the nonhuman factor because man uses his highest ingenuity to avoid servile labor.

Louis O. Kelso

#49. The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

Derrick Jensen

#50. 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