Famous quotes on animal-related issues

Welp, here you are. Let's see what the best, the brightest, and the ... say about animal issues. See, you're in good company!

Famous quotes - http://www.geari.org/famquotes.html

To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana.
--Buddha

One is dearest to God who has no enemies among the living beings, who is nonviolent to all creatures.
--Bhagavad Gita

He that slayeth an ox is as he that killeth a human.
--Isaiah

We should remember in our dealings with animals that they are a sacred trust to us from our heavenly Father. They are dumb and cannot speak for themselves.
--Harriet Beecher Stowe

"I'm stopped. I'll never eat another burger".
--Oprah Winfrey

One day the world will look upon research upon animals as it now looks upon research on human beings.
--Leonardo Da Vinci

Humans are the only hunters who kill when not hungry.
--Steven Spielberg

Once I was fishing and caught the hook in the fish's eye. That was the last time I ate a killed creature .
--Janet Barkas, editor of Grove Press

Oprah has power because Oprah is believable. People do not believe the beef industry. Shouldn't we be more concerned about the first amendment rather than protecting powerful agribusiness?
--Morton Downey

The world's environment can no longer handle beef.
--Jeremy Rifkin of Beyond Beef

Many things made me become a vegetarian, among them. the higher food yield as a solution to world hunger.
-- John Denver

Hunters are to the arms industry what smokers are to the tobacco industry. Smokers get a nicotine rush. Hunters get an adrenalin rush from killing a living being.
--Jim R

Cruelty to animals can become violence to humans.
--Ali MacGraw

40 years ago on the set of Gunsmoke I read the book The Holy Science. Since then I have not eaten meat.
--Dennis Weaver

Being around all the animals in the film Dr. .Doolittle made me one too.
--Semantha Eggar

Check out my web site, wtp.org, to see what fast food did to 2 people in England.
--Governor Jerry Brown of California

Those who are used to a cage will weep for a cage.
--Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian Poet

So you are the people tearing down the Brazilian rainforest and breeding cattle.
--Prince Philip to McDonald's of Canada

The awful cruelty and terror to which tens of thousands of animals killed for human food are subjected in traveling long distances by ship and rail and road to the slaughterhouses of the world. God disapproves of all cruelty.. whether to man or beast. The occupation of slaughtering animals is brutalising to those who are required to do the work.... I believe this matter is well worthy of the serious consideration of Christian leaders.
--Mrs. Booth and General Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army

All creation has the same right to life.
--Sun Bear and Jaya Bear

Charlie didn't want to give up meat and smoking. Now he's gone.
--Lesley Stahl of CBS

I would not want to get to know a pig very well if I intended to eat him.
--Pat Leigh

Why not just put sterilization hormones in the deer food rather than killing them?
--Dan Ryan, Youngstown talk show host

A human can be healthy without killing animals for food. Therefore if he eats meat he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.
--Leo Tolstoy

The USDA recommendation of 2 servings of meat per day seems like too much.
--Diane Rehm, First Lady of Broadcasting

He is a heavy eater of beef. Me thinks it doth harm to his wit.
--Shakespeare in "Twelfth Night"

Whenever we cause suffering or death to any other being, we cause suffering to the Great Life Force.
--Shik Po Chih

In all the round world there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses.
--H.G. Wells (from Utopia)

I decline to go fox hunting (nor did she want her sons William and Harry to be involved in hunting).
--Diana, Princess of Wales

Martin Luther King taught us all nonviolence. I was told to extend nonviolence to the mother and her calf.
--Dick Gregory

I went snorkeling and noticed how gently the fish welcomed us into their world.. as compared to the violence with which we welcomed them into ours. I became a vegetarian.
--Syndee Brinkman

GE is the biggest polluter of the Hudson.. years ago they killed all the fish dumping millions of lbs. of pcb's into our waterways. Now let's make them pay for the cleanup.
--Robert F. Kennedy Jr

Items containing raw or uncooked egg should be avoided so as not to contact a certain strain of salmonella (It used to be thought that only broken eggs could transmit salmonella ... now it is known that the mother passes salmonella through the egg.) (There is more incidence of food poisoning from eggs than from meat, fish, or milk.)
--Jane Snow, food editor of the Beacon Journal

When I was poor living in a garage in Kansas I began to draw the mice who scampered over my desk. That is how Mickey and Minnie were born. (Walt would not like animals advertised on his network as hamburgers)
-- Walt Disney

Mary Lu Henner, herself a vegetarian because of Danny DeVito's example, star of Taxi, asked by Larry King.. "Is that true... that Danny DeVito won't harm cockroaches on the set of Taxi?" replied "No Larry and he doesn't eat them either".
-- Mary Lu Henner

May all that have life be delivered from suffering.
-- Buddha

Please put the ladybug outside without harming her. (to his butler)
--Winston Churchill

I have no intention of eating a fish from the East River. They're not safe to eat.
--Mayor White of Cleveland

May those who oppose capital punishment for humans extend that protection to animals as well . May those who oppose germ and other biological warfare work to end the unconscious biological warfare unwittingly waged on those who eat animal products. Those who are prolife would logically become vegetarian. Those who are prochoice would not want to impose their wills upon the body of a cow, sheep or pig.
--Unknown

Arson and cruelty to animals are 2 of 3 childhood warning signs regarding the potential to be a serial killer. (To no longer objectify living beings by ceasing hunting and fishing takes one l step further away from the murder of humans.)
--John Douglas, profiler of serial killers for the FBI, upon whom Silence Of The Lambs FBI character was based:

Since visiting the abatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat.
--Vincent Van Gogh

Thousands of animals (now billions) are butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. It cries vengeance upon all the human race.
--Romain Rolland

More and more we realize that vegetarian diet is a good idea
--Dr. Edward Martin, head of Dept. of Defense Health

It is a surprisingly close progression from hunting animals to hunting and torturing people.. catching and lynching blacks or smoking out Jews during the Holocaust.
--Aviva Cantor writing in MS Magazine

I do not believe that any of the suffering I have caused to laboratory animals has helped humanity in the slightest.
--Richard Ryder

We should live in harmony with Earth not conquer it.. or the animals. The other members of the National Football League say I'm in the minority.. but they are. A majority of the world is vegetarian.
--Former Pittsburgh Steeler and NY Giant football Player Glenn Scolnick

Some people are still going to want to eat meat.. we do agree though that vegetarianism is a healthier diet.
--David Stroud of the American Meat Institute

For many years the media have been afraid of the Goliath power of the meat industry. (But David is coming!)
--Pegeen Fitzgerald of WOR TV and Radio in NY

I spoke often in Congress against the war in Vietnam. and commented on congresspersons hiding from the reality of war by saying 'many eat the meat but few go to the slaughterhouse'. I said it so often I became a vegetarian.
Rep. Andrew Jacobs.. formerly of Indianapolis

In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be, But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And it is impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig.I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.
-- H G Wells (A Modern Utopia)

Of what use are all your sacrifices to Me? I have had enough of the roasted carcasses of rams and of the fat of fattened beasts. I take no pleasure in the blood of calves, lambs and goats . When you spread out your hands, I close My eyes to you; despite however much you pray, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood! Wash yourselves clean! Put away your misdeeds from before My eyes and stop doing evil.
--Isaiah 1:11, 1:15-16

A righteous man takes care of his beast, but the heart of the wicked is merciless.
--Proverbs 12:10

Whatever you do unto the least of my brothers, you do it unto me.
--Matthew 25:40

Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? … It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless,tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beautyand grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being…
--Plutarch

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

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

The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of ‘real food for real people,’ you'd better live real close to a real good hospital.
--Neal D. Barnard, M.D., President Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

I abhor vivisection. It should at least be curbed. Better, it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery, that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil.
--Charles Mayo (founder of the Mayo Clinic)

A Univ. of NC study linked hot dogs to childhood leukemia.
--Fox News Jan 15th Kathy Wolff

"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 Singer

He who harms animals has not understood or renounced deeds of sin ... Those whose minds are at peace and who are free from passions do not desire to live at the expense of others.
--Acharanga Sutra

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
--Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)

If [man] is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for 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 (1724-1804)

This is the sum of duty: do naught to others which if done to thee, would cause thee pain.
--Mahabharata

Cruelty to dumb animals is one of the distinguishing vices of low and base minds. Wherever it is found, it is a certain mark of ignorance and meanness; a mark which all the external advantages of wealth, splendour, and nobility, cannot obliterate. It is consistent neither with learning nor true civility.
--William Jones (1726-1800)

What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
--Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

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 toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.
--Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.
--George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

If any kid ever realized what was involved in factory farming they would never touch meat again.I was so moved by the intelligence,sense of fun and personalities of the animals I worked with on Babe that by the end of the film I was a vegetarian.
--James Cromwell

I have reached zero tolerance for the cruelty against our animal brothers. If we are to nuture our culture, let’s begin with the animals who have been nothing but our beasts of burden for so long.
--Riki Rockett

If animal experimentation, animal dissection and any kind of animal exploitation all ended tomorrow, I don’t make a f-----’ dime!” I am for the animals, I couldn’t care less about your need to eat animals, wear them, shoot them or exploit them. Too bad if you consider it suffering to let all that self-centered and traditional bullshit stop you from having the will to help the animals..
--Riki Rockett

The medical argument for animal testing doesn’t stand up. Even if it did, I don’t think we should kill other species. We think we’re so much better; I’m not sure we are. I tell people, “We’ve beaten into submission every animal on the face of the Earth, so we are the clear winners of whatever battle is going on between the species. Couldn’t we be generous? I really do think it’s time to get nice. No need to keep beating up on them. I think we’ve got to show that we’re kind.
--Paul McCartney

There were no Slaughterhouses in the Garden of Eden.
--Unknown

You're thinking I'm one of those wise-ass California vegetarians who is going to tell you that eating a few strips of bacon is bad for your health. I'm not. I say its a free country and you should be able to kill yourself at any rate you choose, as long as your cold dead body is not blocking my driveway.
--Scott Adams(writter of Dilbert)

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

I grew up in cattle country-that's why I became a vegetarian. Meat stinks, for the animals, the environment, and your health.
--K.D. Lang

If you could see or feel the suffering you wouldn't think twice. Give back life. Don't eat meat.
--Kim Basinger

I haven't bought any leather articles for a very long time. My ideal is to be able to avoid all animal products, in food as well as clothing.
--Martina Navratilova

My respect and empathy towards animals includes sea dwellers too--from dolphins to fish to lobsters. So, of course, I wouldn't dream of eating them.
--Alexandra Paul

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

Animals are my friends-and I don't eat my friends.
--George Bernard Shaw

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

We stopped eating meat many years ago. During the course of a Sunday lunch we happened to look out of the kitchen window at our young lambs playing happily in the fields. Glancing down at our plates, we suddenly realised we were eating the leg of an animal who had until recently been playing in a field herself. We looked at each other and said: "Wait a minute, we love these sheep-they're such gentle creatures. So why are we eating them?" It was the last time we ever did.
--Paul and Linda McCartney

How can you eat anything with eyes!
--Will Kellogg

"Prince Charming is very nice and very honest and very confident in who he is and funny and knows how to have a kick-ass fun time. Is willing to melt away so that nothing else exists in the world except himself and his princess and loves food and cats and every life form except human beings which is not necessary."
--Alicia Silverstone

"Animals are God's creatures, not human property, nor utilities, nor resources, nor commodities, but precious beings in God's sight. ...Christians whose eyes are fixed on the awfulness of crucifixion are in a special position to understand the awfulness of innocent suffering. The Cross of Christ is God's absolute identification with the weak, the powerless, and the vulnerable, but most of all with unprotected, undefended, innocent suffering."
--Rev. Andrew Linzey

"You ask people why they have deer heads on the wall. They always say, ‘Because it’s such a beautiful animal.’ There you go. I think my mother’s attractive, but I have photographs of her."
--Ellen DeGeneres

"Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals’ suffering? Because government is not. why not? Animals don’t vote.
--Paul Harvey

"Human beings are the only animals of which I am throughly and cravenly afraid."
--George Bernard Shaw

"Fur used to turn heads, now it turns stomachs."
--Rue McClanahan

"Killing an animal to make a coat is sin. It wasn't meant to be, and we have no right to do it. A woman gains status when she refuses to see anything killed to be put on her back. Then she's truly beautiful. "
--Doris Day

"Behind every beautiful fur, there is a story. It is a bloody, barbaric story. "
--Mary Tyler Moore

"There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is. "
--Isaac Bashevis Singer

"The person who kills for fun is announcing that, could he get away with it, he'd kill you for fun. Your...life may be of no consequence to anyone else but is invaluable to you because it's the only one you've got. Exactly the same is true of each individual deer, hare, rabbit, fox, fish, pheasant and butterfly. Humans should enjoy their own lives, not taking others'. "
--Brigid Brophy

"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)

"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

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed In the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures."
--Christian Barnard (surgeon)

"I despise and abhor the pleas on behalf of that infamous practice, vivisection... I would rather submit to the worst of deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured to death on the pretense of sparing me a twinge or two. "
--Robert Browning (poet)

"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

"The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature...We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters...and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult. "
-- Jacques Cousteau (oceanographer)

"There can be no justification for causing suffering to animals simply to serve man's pleasure or simply to enhance man's lifestyle."
--The Dean of York

I've always been very bonded to animals -- more so than most people. (laughs) I don't think that they can defend themselves, so we have to help them.
--Jennie Garth

Men hunt I think maybe because they have something wrong with thier own equipment and they need something else to shoot.
--Pamela Lee Anderson

"When I was old enough to realize all meat was killed, I saw it as an irrational way of using our power, to take a weaker thing and mutilate it. It was like the way bullies would take control of younger kids in the schoolyard".
--River Phoenix

"Animals can’t really voice their opinion. We feel as though we can be on of the spokespeople on their behalf."
--River Phoenix

"I've always felt somewhat out of place with other kids my own age", said River. "I was constantly reminded by people's reaction to our names and our diet that we seemed weird to them.
--River Phoenix

"I think there will come a time, and this is down the road a great many years, when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say, 'meat-eaters!' in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism."
--Dennis Weaver

"Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?"
--Peter Cheeke

"Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics."
--Peter Singer

"It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed. It was once considered foolish to suppose that black men were really human beings and ought to be treated as such. What was once foolish has now become a recognized truth. Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life."
--Albert Schweitzer

"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."
--Dean Ornish, MD

"I don't eat chicken anymore. I won't eat it. I won't allow it in my house."
--Rodney Leonard -U.S. Poultry inspection

"Based on my experience in Los Angeles, my advice to the public is not to eat meat."
--Gregorio Natavidad-meat inspector

"The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies."
--Albert Schweitzer

If you don't like my opinions leave.But just remember, the animals can’t leave the cages that hold them. They are captive and suffering. As you cozy into your bed tonight, try to imagine the pain and the suffering that they endure day after day and night after night. Next time you get some soap in your eyes, try to imagine that pain for 3 or 4 days at a time. Next time you have a stomach ache, try to imagine liquid plumber being poured down your throat till you puke so much blood that you bleed to death. Next time you bump your head, try to imagine being a monkey and getting a steel plate smashed into your skull at 50 miles per hour. Then, only then should you feel compelled to tell me that I’m wrong about my opinions. For all these things have happened in the name of science. They continue in abundance till this day.
--Ricki Rockett

HOME - www.geari.org

Questions or concerns: justin@geari.org