Animal Liberation Quotes - Page 2

• With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.

  Peter Singer

  Religious, Acceptance, Animal

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• We ought to consider the interests of animals because they have interests and it is unjustifiable to exclude them from the sphere of moral concern; to make this consideration depend on beneficial consequences for human beings is to accept the implication that the interests of animals do not warrant consideration for their own sakes.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Sake, Spheres

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• No consideration at all is given to the interests of the "pests" - the very word "pest" seems to exclude any concern for the animals themselves. But the classification "pest" is our own, and a rabbit that is a pest is as capable of suffering, and as deserving of consideration, as a white rabbit who is a beloved companion animal.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, White, Suffering

  Peter Singer (2015). “Animal Liberation”, p.212, Random House

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• Whatever the reason, for most of the present century, the literature and publicity of the old established [animal welfare] groups made a significant contribution to the prevailing attitude that dogs and cats and wild animals need protection, but other animals do not. Thus people came to think of "animal welfare" as something for kindly ladies who are dotty about cats, and not as a cause founded on basic principles of justice and morality.

  Peter Singer

  Dog, Attitude, Cat

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• Even people who are aware that the traditional family farm has been taken over by big business interests, and that some questionable experiments go on in laboratories, cling to a vague belief that conditions cannot be too bad, or else the government or the animal welfare societies would have done something about it.

  Peter Singer

  Taken, Animal, Government

  Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

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• ...the proposed air force and army experiments were designed so that many animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering and death would save a single human life or benefit humans in any way at all; but the same can be said of millions of their experiments performed each year in the United States alone.

  Peter Singer

  Army, Animal, Years

  Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

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• If that means going onto their farms, releasing their animals and burning the place to the ground, that's morally justifiable, in our opinion...There were always innocent people who got hurt somewhere along the way but it was important that those who oppressed one group of people be stopped, and we don't see the animal liberation struggle being substantially different from these other struggles.... A sustained campaign against a particular industry or a particular organization has the potential to be quite effective.

  Jerry Vlasak

  Hurt, Struggle, Mean

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• Christian theology provides some of the best arguments for respecting animal life and for taking seriously animals as partners with us within God's creation. It may be ironical that this tradition, once thought of as the bastion of human moral exclusivity, should now be seen as the seed-bed for a creative understanding of animal liberation.

  Andrew Linzey

  Christian, Animal, Creative

  Andrew Linzey (2016). “Christianity and the Rights of Animals”, p.5, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• Perhaps one of the most important things you can do for human beings is wean them off an animal-based diet. It hardens the arteries and runs up our health-care costs. The last thing a poor person can afford is a heart attack or cancer or a stroke. And that's all linked to a meat-based diet. I think animal liberation is human liberation.

  Ingrid Newkirk

  Running, Cancer, Heart

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• Typically, defenders of experiments on animals do not deny that animals suffer. They cannot deny the animals' suffering, because they need to stress the similarities between humans and other animals in order to claim that their experiments may have some relevance for human purposes. The experimenter who forces rats to choose between starvation and electric shock to see if they develop ulcers (which they do) does so because the rat has a nervous system very similar to a human being's, and presumably feels an electric shock in a similar way.

  Peter Singer

  Stress, Animal, Order

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• 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

  Baby, Zoos, Animal

  Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

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• ...chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are thinking, self-aware beings, capable of planning ahead, who form lasting social bonds with others and have a rich social and emotional life. The great apes are therefore an ideal case for showing the arbitrariness of the species boundary. If we think that all human beings, irrespective of age or mental capacity, have some basic rights, how can we deny that the great apes, who surpass some humans in their capacities, also have these rights?

  Peter Singer

  Emotional, Thinking, Animal

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• I am personally not advocating violence. I am simply saying that it is a morally acceptable tactic and it may be useful in the struggle for animal liberation. I don't know.

  Jerry Vlasak

  Struggle, Animal, Tactics

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• Some of us seem to be born with a drive to try to make the world kinder. In my twenties, living in New York City, I worked in a soup kitchen every Sunday for many years, just trying to do my part. Then I read Animal Liberation and learned about factory farming and the killing of animals for oven cleaner and realized nobody needed my help as badly as the animals did.

  Karen Dawn

  New York, Sunday, Animal

  "Animal Advocate and Author Karen Dawn: The Welfare of Animals and the Earth". Interview with Barbi Twins, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. January 27, 2015.

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• Once we ask why it should be that all human beings - including infants, the intellectually disabled, criminal psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest - have some kind of dignity or worth that no elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that justifies the inequality of humans and other animals.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Pigs, Elephants

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• Sometimes animals may suffer more because of their more limited understanding. If, for instance, we are taking prisoners in wartime we can explain to them that although they must submit to capture, search, and confinement, they will not otherwise be harmed and will be set free at the conclusion of hostilities. If we capture wild animals, however, we cannot explain that we are not threatening their lives. A wild animal cannot distinguish an attempt to overpower and confine from an attempt to kill; the one causes as much terror as the other.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Understanding, Suffering

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• So far as this argument is concerned nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhuman animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis can we do it, other than a bare-faced - and morally indefensible - preference for members of our own species?

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Adults, Use

  Peter Singer (1975). “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals”

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• Pain and suffering are in themselves bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the being that suffers. How bad a pain is depends on how intense it is and how long it lasts, but pain of the same intensity and duration are equally bad, whether felt by humans or animals.

  Peter Singer

  Sex, Pain, Animal

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• It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road...A stone has no interests because it cannot suffer. The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is, however, not only necessary, but also sufficient for us to say that a being has interests - at an absolute minimum, an interest in not suffering. A mouse, for example, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road because it will suffer if it is.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Suffering, Stones

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• Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

  Peter Singer

  Philosophy, Believe, Thinking

  Peter Singer (1986). “Applied Ethics”, p.225, Oxford University Press, USA

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• 

  One of the most important things you can accomplish is just being yourself.

  Dwayne Johnson

  Motivational, Being Yourself, Inspire

  Twitter post from Apr 3, 2013

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• The most callous, stupid things were done just because regulations required them...It was not until 1983, for example, that U.S. federal agencies stated that substances known to be caustic irritants such as lye, ammonia, and oven cleaners, did not need to be tested on the eyes of conscious rabbits.

  Peter Singer

  Stupid, Eye, Animal

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• The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Should, Treats

  Peter Singer (1986). “Applied Ethics”, p.220, Oxford University Press, USA

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• I would not question the sincerity of vegetarians who take little interest in Animal Liberation because they give priority to other causes; but when nonvegetarians say that "human problems come first" I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.

  Peter Singer

  Animal, Giving, Support

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• Lastly, anyone who believes in the possibility of total animal liberation while billions of humans continue to inhabit and decimate the planet is delusional. Only when most humans have died off will there be a chance to returning to a society that values all beings for who they are.

  Jerry Vlasak

  Believe, Animal, Chance

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