3. A special kind of an animal, undoubtedly, but from the very
fact, that we are all members of one great family, we have
major dues to our little brethren. Including fundamental one
– respect.
4. We should care about their goodness and respect their
lives in every manifestation as long as it doesn’t threaten
our own existence.
5. Unfortunately, it’s quite different in most situations.
Our compassion and sympathy are usually narrowed to this
one household member, cat or dog,
but do not include other living beings.
6. We are usually indifferent to the suffering of other
animals and this we prove countless number of
times, especially with our eating habits.
7. That’s why widering the circle of compassion is so important.
Now! At once! Because every successive day brings torment
and death to no less than one hundred million [100.000.000!!!]
of sensitive, conscious and innocent beings. Every single day…
8. And if we want to reduce and
stop
this gigantic stream of blood
someday,
we have to start
transformation
from ourselves.
From our consciousness and
our actions.
9. I strongly believe, and in this agree with Socrates,
that evil is a result of ignorance.
10. Therefore I created this presentation,
brutal and bloody maybe [but reality
isn’t different],
yet I hope wise and illuminating one
also.
11. Through words of those,
who made a choice
to stand on the side of
aggrieved ones.
Through pictures of those,
who didn’t have a chance
of being saved.
12. May there come consciousness of evil,
that is a result of treating animals like things, rather
than treating them like persons.
May there come consciousness of good seeds,
that we can sow with every individual, non-egoistic
deed guided by an empathy.
13. Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of
character and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to
animals cannot be a good man.
Artur Schopenhauer
[German philosopher]
14. We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant
cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to
formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
William Ralph Inge
[English writer, Anglican prelate, professor of divinity at Cambridge University]
15. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is
concealed
in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
Ralph Waldo Emmerson
[American poet and philosopher]
16. The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the
way its animals are treated.
Mohandas Gandhi
[spiritual and political leader of India, father of modern non-violence
movement]
17. Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all
evolution. Until we stop harming all living beings, we are all savages.
Thomas Alva Edison
[American inventor]
18. These birds and animals and fish
cannot speak,
but they can suffer, and our God
who created them, knows their
sufferings,
and will hold him who causes them
to suffer unnecessarily to answer
for it.
It is a sin against their Creator.
George Cannon
[member of the Quorum of the
Twelve Apostles
of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints]
19. All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard
fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.
Peter Singer
[Australian philosopher and humanist]
20. Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a
slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
Theodor Adorno [German sociologist, philosopher, pianist,
musicologist, and composer]
21. When it comes to having a
central nervous system, and
the ability to feel pain, hunger,
and thirst,
a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.
Ingrid Newkirk
[president of PETA – People
for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals ]
22. God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and
invented cages.
Jacques Deval
[French dramatist]
23. The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule:
we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other
species in our dominant position.
Christine Stevens
[internationally acclaimed speaker, author, and music therapist]
24. If you declare that you are naturally
designed
for such a diet, then first kill for
yourself
what you want to eat.
Do it, however, only through your
own resources, unaided by cleaver
or cudgel or any kind of ax.
Plutarch
[ancient Greek historian,
biographer and essayist]
25. The time will come when men such as I will look upon the
murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.
Leonardo da Vinci
[scientist, painter, sculptor, inventor, engineer, architect,
mathematician, writer]
26. Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy
untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harass them, don't deprive them
of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride
yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your
greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it,
and leave the traces of your foulness after you – alas, it is true of almost
every one of us!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[Russian novelist]
27. 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
[Nobel Prize-winning writer]
28. 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
[Nobel Prize-winning physicist]
29. Until he extends the circle of his
compassion
to all living things, man will not
himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer
[theologian, musician, philosopher,
and physician]
30. 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 and the terror of the abattoirs.
Jane Goodall
[English primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist]
31. One is dearest to God who has no enemies among the
living beings, who is nonviolent to all creatures.
„Bhagavad Gita”
32. As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
Leo Tolstoy
[Russian writer, thinker and social activist]
33. 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.
Charles R. Magel
[writer]
34. As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living
beings he will never know health or peace.
For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other.
Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and
love.
Pythagoras
[Greek philosopher and mathematician]
35. The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they
suffer?
Jeremy Bentham
[English philosopher and social reformer]
36. Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not
give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he
cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the
animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare
minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for
himself.
George Orwell
[English writer and essayist]
37. If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth –
beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel
yourself to be to other animals –would you concede them the rights
over you that you assume over other animals?
George Bernard Shaw
[Irish writer and dramatist, Nobel Prize-winner]
38. Our grandchildren will ask us one
day: Where were you during the
Holocaust of the animals? What did
you do against these horrifying
crimes? We won't be able to offer the
same excuse for the second time,
that we didn't know.
Helmut F. Kaplan
[Austrian writer and philosopher]
39. 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.
Reverend Andrew Linzey
[Anglican priest, theologian, writer ]
43. There are many reasons to become a vegatarian.
Among them: philosophical, ethical, ecological and health reasons.
We can talk about unnecessary suffering, which is bad itself.
We can talk about wasting limited resources of our planet, which are lost in factory farming.
We can point out, undoubtedly positive, influence of vegetarian diet on our health.
And, at last, we can quote a few verses by Henry Beston, in which we can find something,
that goes way beyond words:
44. We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical
concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by
complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature
through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather
magnified and the whole image in distortion.
We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate
of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err,
and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.
In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished
and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost
or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other
nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow
prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
„The Outermost House”
