The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
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.
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.
I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.
Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit.
To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being.
A good deed done to an animal is as meritorious as a good deed done to a human being, while an act of cruelty to an animal is a bad as an act of cruelty to a human being.
Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.
When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble.
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards 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.
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. I hold that the more helpless a creature the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of humankind.
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