Quotes About The Rights Of Animals

#1. Americans care more about the rights of animals than about what happens to us!

Joe Sacco

#2. A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

Michael Pollan

#3. Rights give rise to legal claims. Ultimately, the more rights animals are granted, the greater the legal lien exercised on their behalf against the liberty and property of people.

Ilana Mercer

#4. If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.
Can we tell a new story?

Jonathan Safran Foer

#5. If we understand "rights" to be legal protection against harm, then many animals already do have rights, and the idea of animal rights is not terribly controversial.

Cass R. Sunstein

#6. Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people.

Cesar Chavez

#7. Being kind to animals is not enough. Avoiding cruelty is not enough. Housing animals in more comfortable, larger cages is not enough. Whether we exploit animals to eat, to wear, to entertain us, or to learn, the truth of animal rights requires empty cages, not larger cages.

Tom Regan

#8. I've broken an arm before, but no one wanted to shoot me!' Suzie says. 'I mean, when you go to the emergency room I hope to God the doctors don't decide it might cost too much to care for.' -Suzie Schwab co-owner of East Maui Animal Refuge

Toni Polancy

#9. At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting.

Erik Larson

#10. As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#11. The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.

J.M. Coetzee

#12. 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

#13. Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.

Milan Kundera

#14. The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our dominant position

Christine Stevens

#15. Gays have rights, lesbians have rights, men have rights, women have rights, even animals have rights. How many of us have to die before the community recognizes that we are not expendable?

Octavia St. Laurent

#16. Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws.

Marc Bekoff

#17. 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

#18. The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.

Yann Martel

#19. Animal-rights advocates remind us of this admonition: The ways in which people treat animals will be reflected in how people relate to one another.

William Greider

#20. We middles see the world in shades of grey rather than in the clear blacks and whites of committed animal activists and their equally vociferous opponents

Hal Herzog

#21. We cannot talk simultaneously about animal rights and the 'humane' slaughter of animals.

Gary L. Francione

#22. Who knows what the long-term effects of saving rescue dogs are and the healing lessons and love they bring to Earth? Each one of us has the capacity to influence hundreds - even thousands of people or animals through the way we live our lives.

Jadi Kindred

#23. Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it.

Dick Gregory

#24. I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we do. I feel very deeply about vegetarianism and the animal kingdom. It was my dog Boycott who led me to question the right of humans to eat other sentient beings.

Cesar Chavez

#25. One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#26. To attribute rights to animals is to ignore the purpose and justification of rights - to protect the interests of man.

Alex Epstein

#27. If modern civilised man had to keep the animals he eats, the number of vegetarians would rise astronomically.

Christian Morgenstern

#28. We feel that animals have the same rights as retarded human nchild because they are equal mentally in terms of dependence on others.

Alex Pacheco

#29. As a so-called "civilized" people, and as members of a society in search of lasting peace in the world, we cannot remain callous to our responsibility toward nature and insensitive to the inherent rights of the animals.

Nathaniel Altman

#30. What strikes me most of all in Christian culture, which is supposed to be concerned with the rights of the weakest, is the lack of regard toward animals. Maybe because they're thought to be soulless.

Dacia Maraini

#31. 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

#32. We know we cannot be kind to animals until we stop exploiting them
exploiting animals in the name of science, exploiting animals in the name of sport, exploiting animals in the name of fashion, and yes, exploiting animals in the name of food.

Cesar Chavez

#33. The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.

Ashley Montagu

#34. Sam was helping animals long before he was Sam Simon. He lived what he believed; his thing was making the world better and having rights for animals, and every area of his life reflected that.

Justin Baldoni

#35. Farmers today keep themselves in ignorance of the needs and true nature of pigs precisely because to know would put their conscience in a terrible bind. Wilful ignorance of this kind is no better than complicity.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

#36. Beyond the economics of production efficiency, animal welfare laws that require "humane" treatment are really not about animals; they're about humans and making humans feel better about using animals. We can comfort ourselves with the idea that we are acting in a "humane" way.

Gary L. Francione

#37. Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil.

Colin McGinn

#38. Thus godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were only made for man, to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered or enslaved.

John Muir

#39. He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

Immanuel Kant

#40. Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied - they don't after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else.

Morrissey

#41. The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

#42. The case for exploiting animals for food, clothing and entertainment often relies on our superior intelligence, language and self-awareness: the rights of the superior being trump those of the inferior.

Michael Shermer

#43. If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth - beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals - would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?

George Bernard Shaw

#44. I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#45. To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today ... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#46. In my movies, there has been little to do in the way of animal rights. I have never worked in a movie with animals. No horse-riding, no trained dogs, lions, bears. A few actors, but what could I do? We had to have them.

Casey Affleck