When he bethought him of the first beginning of all things, he was filled with a yet more overflowing charity, and would call the dumb animals, howsoever small, by the names of brother and sister, forasmuch as he recognized in them the same origin as in himself.
Saint Bonaventure (theologian)

[George Bernard] Shaw is an acute thinker. He refuses to be deceived into the belief of the greatness of man. He says that man must rise higher.
Sri Aurobindo (poet and philosopher)

I just couldn't stand the idea of eating meat--and I really do think it has made me calmer...People's general awareness is getting much better, even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the calves are actually killed so that the milk doesn't go to them but to us can't really be right, and if you've seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because she can't understand why her calf isn't by her, it can make you think a lot.
Kate Bush (singer and songwriter)

Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscious to life.
Norman Cousins (author)

Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is--whether its victim is human or animal--we cannot expect things to be much better in this world...We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity.
Rachel Carson (marine biologist)

You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.
Harvey Diamond (author)

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature, and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (novelist)

We and others indeed believe that along with the preeminence that Homosapiens has achieved goes a very great moral responsibility--a stewardship if you will--upon which we must not turn our backs. Perhaps especially because we have the power to destroy them we must respect the rights of our co-habitants of earth.
Paul Ehrlich (bacteriologist, Nobel 1908)

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
Albert Einstein (physicist, Nobel 1921)

Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
Albert Einstein (physicist, Nobel 1921)

It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.
Albert Einstein (physicist, Nobel 1921)

One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
Loren Eiseley (anthropologist)

Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission--to be of service to them whenever they require it... If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
Saint Francis of Assisi (mystic and preacher)

I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl upon earth.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)

It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion torwards our fellow creatures.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)

I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard.
William Lloyd Garrison (author)

As custodians of the planet it is our responsibility to deal with all species with kindness, love, and compassion. That these animals suffer through human cruelty is beyond understanding. Please help to stop this madness.
Richard Gere (actor)

...what has been called the "Golden Rule" [should be enlarged] from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom.
Thomas Hardy (novelist)

Every year tens of thousands of animals suffer and die in laboratory tests of cosmetics and household products...despite the fact that the test results do not help prevent or treat accidental or purposeful misue of the products. Please join me in using your voice for those whose cries are forever sealed behind the laboratory doors.
Woody Harrelson (actor)

How good it is to be well-fed, healthy, and kind all at the same time.
Henry Heimlich (physician)

The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.
Hippocrates (philosopher)

First it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to nature and the animals.
Victor Hugo (poet, novelist, and playwright)

Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave torward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
Aldous H. Huxley (biologist)

We are indeed told...that the belief in the unity of origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and degradation of the former. But is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute, by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would force this conclusion upon us?
Thomas H. Huxley (biologist)

Sit down before fact like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
Thomas H. Huxley (biologist)

One person can make all the difference in the world...For the first time in recorded human history, we have the fate of the whole planet in our hands.
Chrissie Hynde (musician)

When I was 12, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird. He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature [who] was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning.
Marv Levy (football head coach)

I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the commmunity over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.
Martin Luther King Jr. (civil rights leader)

The recklessness with which we sacrifice our sense of decency to maximize profit in the factory farming process sets a pattern for cruelty to our own kind.
Jonathan Kozal (author)

And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.
Joseph Wood Krutch (naturalist and essayist)

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 lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude torwards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
Milan Kundera (author and playwright)

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalist for the same reasons.
C. S. Lewis (novelist and essayist)

It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of man. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of anything else.
Maimonides (physician and philosopher)

If mankind and the world as a whole are to have a future, it will be necessary that we reduce the selfish tendencies in our ethics in favor of a higher regard for the community and for the whole of Creation.
Ernst Mayr (biologist)

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we're not contributing to their pain.
Paul and Linda McCartney (musicians)

Compassion is the foundation of everything positive, everything good. If you carry the power of compassion to the marketplace and the dinner table, you can make your life really count.
Rue McClanahan (actress)

I have always felt that the way we treat animals is a pretty good indicator of the compassion we are capable of for the human race.
Ali McGraw (actress)

Animals form an inalienable fragment of nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we diminish our world and our place in it.
James Michener (novelist, Pulitzer 1947)

Behind every beautiful fur, there is a story. It is a bloody, barbaric story.
Mary Tyler Moore (actress)

They were shooting pigeons...How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change as innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain. At one moment--graceful, mysterious, desirable and free--and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.
Iris Murdoch (author)

Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is for that reason, to be of no account?
Jean Paul Richter (satirist)

I will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and guard and pertect all natural beauty upon the earth.
John Ruskin (author and critic)

Remember those macaques who would rather go hungry than profit from harming their fellows; might we have a more optimistic view of the human future if we were sure our ethics were up to their standards?
Carl Sagan (astronomer and biologist)

It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truely a man.
Albert Schweitzer (missionary and statsman, Nobel 1952)

...the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony and man--all belong to the same family...The White Man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.
Chief Seattle (Indian chief)

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.
Anna Sewell (author)

It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (poet)

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.
Robert Louis Stevenson (novelist and poet)

Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight. And after I'm finished "shooting", my unharmed victims are still around for others to enjoy. I have developed a deep respect for animals. I consider them fellow living creatures with certain rights that should not be violated any more than those of humans.
Jimmy Stewart (actor)

Man is connected by his nature...with the whole tribe of animals, and so closely with some of them, that the distance between his intellectual faculties and theirs...appears, in many instances, small, and would probably appear still less, if we had the means of knowing their motives, as we have of observing their actions.
Henry St. John (statsman)

All good things are wild, and free.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)

What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit for their cruelty.
Leo Tolstoy (author)

I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity torward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.
Mark Twain

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.
Romain Rolland (author, Nobel 1915)

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead (anthropologist)