Inspirational Quotations

Humane farming is cultivating a plant-based diet. Inhumane farming is breeding any sentient being for production and consumption.” Cheri Ezell

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Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity - George Bernard Shaw

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[A] relationship exists between deception and suffering. Let's face it--most of us will respond emotionally to a description of another's suffering. Language that describes suffering shouldn't be avoided simply because of that. But most people don't want to respond emotionally. Dealing with our feelings can be difficult, especially when we ourselves directly or indirectly participate in harm to others. Deceptive language helps us deny both the suffering and the cause. Once those who suffer and those who cause the suffering are rendered absent, there is no act of violence, just business as usual. --Carol J. Adams

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Veganism is about ethics NOT diet or health. If you doubt this just pause for a moment and consider and examine the incessant hostile reactions to vegans and veganism

If it were just about diet or health, why would it raise so much cognitive dissonance? -- Gary V C Gibbon

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Speciesism is like racism/sexism/homophobia:

it involves using a morally irrelevant criterion

to block membership in the moral community. -- Gary L. Francione

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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 Shelly

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If one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people. —Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines 

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Animal abusers aren't just the dog fighters, puppy mill operators and backyard breeders of the world. When you consume animal products you are an animal abuser. When you pay the hitman you are the murderer. -- Marlaina Mortati

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 The past two centuries of scientific progress have made it difficult to sustain a belief in human exceptionalism. -  (world renowned Caltech neurobiologist Christof Koch in Scientific American Mind)

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I No Longer Steal From Nature

You are diseased in understanding and religion.

Come to me, that you may hear something of sound truth.

Do not unjustly eat fish the water has given up,

And do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals,

Or the white milk of mothers who intended its pure draught

for their young, not noble ladies.

And do not grieve the unsuspecting birds by taking eggs;

for injustice is the worst of crimes.

And spare the honey which the bees get industriously

from the flowers of fragrant plants;

For they did not store it that it might belong to others,

Nor did they gather it for bounty and gifts.

I washed my hands of all this; and wish that I

Perceived my way before my hair went gray!

~ Al-Ma’arri (973-1057), Baghdad (modern Iraq)

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[T]he idea that animal defense requires controlling individual behavior, as if animal exploitation arises from an innate willingness to take advantage of other species, ignores the taming of compassion and outrage that proceeds every day as an integral part of the business of exploiting animals. In this society people are domesticated, trained through external rewards and punishments, through myths and lies, through instilled fear and ignorance, to disconnect from animals, especially those animals designated as "game," "livestock," or "guinea pigs." So animal liberation is not so much a taming of ourselves as it is a refusal to be tamed in support of anthropocentrism.                                                              -- Brian Luke 

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Humans are not the measure of things; we are only one measure among many. -- Gary L. Francione

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 A lifestyle choice is whether to have carpeting or hardwood floors in your house. What--no, WHO, you eat is a moral choice, involving another living creature who wants to be free of suffering, and who wants to live, just as much as you do. -- Sandra Bauer

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We do not exploit animals because we are superior to them, we claim superiority in order to excuse the exploitation. --Brian Luke

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Who would not want to detach herself (himself) from a culture that rests upon violence toward all those beings designated as "other". -- Marian Scholtmeijer

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The animals you unnecessarily ate today - ate the grain that could have fed me. Don't speak of human suffering, and how you pray for peace, calling yourself an environmentalist, a humanitarian, an animal lover if you are not vegan - If you can't control your appetite for dead flesh- If you can't see the true destruction that the exploitation of animals is doing to our planet, and all life upon it. -- A Peaceful Planet

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Megaphone, please.

"I am battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron, and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless alive.

My mind is alert and my body is sensitive and I should have been richly feathered. In nature or even a farmyard I would have had sociable, cleansing dust baths with my flock mates, a need so strong that I perform 'vacuum' dust bathing on the wire floor of my cage. Free, I would have ranged my ancestral jungles and fields with my mates, devouring plants, earthworms, and insects from sunrise to dusk. I would have exercised my body and expressed my nature, and I would have given, and received, pleasure as a whole being. I am only a year old, but I am already a 'spent hen.'

Humans, I wish I were dead, and soon I will be dead. Look for pieces of my wounded flesh wherever chicken pies and soups are sold." - Karen Davis, PhD , United Poultry Concerns

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A holy man once gave two men a chicken and told them to go and kill the chicken where no one could see. The first man went behind the fence and killed the chicken. The second man walked around for two days and came back carrying the live chicken. When the holy man asked what happened he said "Every where I go the chicken sees - Ram Dass

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Murdering animals (yes, murdering them:  I am tired of using euphemisms) is not humane.  Period, full-stop.  There is no “more humane” way of cutting throats, gassing hundreds of avians in CO2 tanks.  There are only relatively “less brutal” ways.  Techniques of extermination can be made more or less aesthetic, more or less horrifying.  But changing such techniques, swapping out the mechanisms of doom, does nothing to make the violence any less extreme or unconscionable.  You can murder me less brutally, but you cannot murder me “more humanely. - John Sanbonmatsu, associate professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute 

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Emotion easily divides from reason when we are divorced from the immediate impact of our moral decisions. A possible step, therefore, in striving to fuse these divisions is to experience directly the full impact of our moral decisions. If we _think_, for example, that there is nothing morally wrong with eating meat, we ought perhaps, to visit a a factory farm or slaughterhouse to see if we still _feel_ the same way. If we ourselves, do not want to witness, let alone participate in, the slaughter of the animals we eat, we ought, perhaps, to question the morality of indirectly paying someone else to do this on our behalf. When we are physically removed from the direct impact of our moral decisions--that is, when we cannot see, smell, or hear the results--we deprive ourselves of important sensory stimuli, which may be important in guiding us in our ethical choices. -- The Liberation of Nature:  A Circular Affair, Marti Kheel, PhD

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Why we should accord "marginal human beings," or even "nonmarginal human beings,"... rights is never established. The limitations of rational argument may, in fact, make it impossible to prove rationally why anyone or anything should have rights. Again, we fall back on the need to recognize and affirm the significance of feeling in our moral choices. - The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair, Marti Kheel, PhD 

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[T]he war on compassion has caused people to believe that they have to help humans first. As long as we treat animals as animals, as long as we accept there is the category "animals," both the treatment and the concept will legitimize the treatment of humans like animals. - Carol J. Adams, The War on Compassion  

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Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are like us.' Ask the experimenters why it is morally OK to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction. - Dr. Charles R. Magel

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But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy. ― Plutarch 

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Thousands of people who say they "love" animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering of the terror of the abattoirs. - Jane Goodall

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I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

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Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. — Albert Einstein

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Dr. Holly Cheever, now with the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association, was a large animal vet for many years. During her practice, she was called out one day to a dairy to try to solve a mystery. A farmer contacted her and said that one of his cows, who had recently given birth to a calf and should be producing milk, was returning to the barn each day with an empty udder. The farmer was stumped as to why she was not giving milk. Upon arriving, the vet inquired about the cow and found out that she had given birth three times before without incident. Dr. Cheever was also puzzled, as there seemed to be no medical reason for the empty udder. She decided to return in the morning and follow the cow out to the field, as this lucky girl had the rare pleasure of daily access to a grassy pasture. Dr. Cheever followed her all the way to the edge of the grazing land where the grass met a tree line of forest, and there, in a thicket of bush and trees, lay a quiet baby calf awaiting her morning milk. The cow had given birth to twins, and in a heart-wrenching “Sophie’s choice,” had returned one to the barn, knowing full well that the calf would be taken from her, and then hidden the other, safely tucked in the trees, where she could come and care for her every day. -- Hope Bohanec

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

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 It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food and shelter if you deny them the most basic right--and condone, or are complicit in their slaughter. -- Hope Bohanec

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

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Caring about animals in a moral way is not a matter of “liking” them or thinking that they are “cute.” It is a matter of moral vision; of seeing animals as beings with moral significance and caring about that insight. -- Gary L. Francione: The Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights

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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
― Theodor W. Adorno

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Being vegan is easy. Are there social pressures that encourage you to continue to eat, wear, and use animal products? Of course there are.

But in a patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and ableist society, there are social pressures to participate and engage in sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism. At some point, you have to decide who you are and what matters morally to you.

And once you decide that you regard victimizing vulnerable nonhumans is not morally acceptable, it is easy to go and stay vegan― Gary L. Francione

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Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. ― Mark Twain

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

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If slaughterhouses had glass walls, surely we would all be vegetarians. But they do not have glass walls. The architecture of slaughter is opaque, designed in the interest of denial; to insure that we will not see, even if we wanted to look. And who wants to look. - Joaquin Pheonix, From his film, Earthlings

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The consumption of non-human animals harms everyone. Being a vegan harms no one. - Laura Kamienski

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The idea that we have the right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the trivial reasons of palate pleasure and fashion is, without doubt, one of the most arrogant and morally repugnant notions in the history of human thought. ~ Gary L. Francione

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I have from an early age abjured the use of meat , and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men. - Leonardo da Vinci

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Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when? ― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

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If we are concerned about puppies, but indifferent to the fate of, say, veal calves, this may well be because we understandably but irrationally, accord the latter, but not the former, some sort of ‘associate membership in the family of men. ― Michael Lockwood 

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Most animals suffer and die without tears; most of us stand by without weeping. Physiology explains the animals’ behavior; ignorance explains ours . The animals need— and deserve— a change in our minds and hearts. Only then will we change our actions. - Mark H. Bernstein

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Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals. ~ Ammon Hennacy  

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Our treatment of animals will someday be considered barbarous. There cannot be perfect civilization until man realizes that the rights of every living creature are as sacred as his own. ~ Dr. David Starr Jordan,  American Biologist and Educator

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It takes 50,000 liters of water to produce one kilo of beef. 1 billion people today are hungry. 20 million people will die from malnutrition. Cutting meat by only 10% will feed 100 million people. Eliminating meat will end starvation forever... Poor countries sell their grain to the West while their own children starve in their arms, and we feed it to livestock so we can eat a steak? Am I the only one who sees this as a crime? Every morsel of meat we eat is slapping the tear-stained face of a starving child. --Philip Wollen

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It is considered cruelty, so extreme that you could acquire a felony charge and jail time, if you kill a dog —but kill hundreds of cows a day, and you get a paycheck. -- Hope Bohanec

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf

It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their slaughter. - See more at: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/the-ultimate-betrayal-is-there-happy-meat-an-excerpt-from-the-book/#sthash.OKZXj5ih.dpuf