Quotes

Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child, as it is to the caterpillar

Bradley Miller

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

Albert Einstein

Such a situation, is dreadful. Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity - that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures - and by violating his own feelings, becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life. But by the assertion that God ordained the slaughter of animals, and above all as a result of habit, people entirely lose their natural feeling.

Leo Tolstoy

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

Henry David Thoreau

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most [All?] of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit; The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread; But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought.. Let us work that this time may come.

Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics (Nobel 1952)

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