Vegan Quotes - Best Animal Rights Quotations
Vegan quotes by animal rights activists and other notable people who made their voices heard against the atrocities committed by humanity against non-human animals.
“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
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.”
“I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures.
I refuse to do so, because I suffered so painfully myself that I can feel the pains of others by recalling my own sufferings.”
“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”
“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.”
"As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
"I ask this court: If it is NOT a crime to torture, enslave and murder animals, then how can it be a crime to free tortured, enslaved and soon-to-be-murdered animals?"
“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.”
"If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights."
"Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. "
"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."
"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."
"There are times, and these not infrequent, when tears come to my eyes when I see, or read, or hear of the wretched plight of animals in the hands of humans.
Their pain, their suffering, their loneliness, their innocence, their death. Anger. Rage. Pity. Sorrow. Disgust. The whole creation groans under the weight of the evil we humans visit upon these mute, powerless creatures.
It is our hearts, not just our heads, that call for an end to it all, that demand of us that we overcome, for them, the habits and forces behind their systematic oppression."
"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."
"‘Never again’ is not about what others shouldn’t do to us. It’s about what we shouldn’t do to others.
‘Never again’ means that we must never again perpetrate mass atrocities against other living beings.
That we must never again raise animals for food or any other form of exploitation."
"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis.
The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right."
"Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal."
"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."
"It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions."
"Every morsel of meat we eat, is slapping the tear-stained face of a hungry child."
"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."
"Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by what is above him when he shows no mercy to those under his power?"
"In fact, 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."
"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?" (Eating Animals)
"Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace."
"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That’s the essence of inhumanity."
"Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore."
"God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages."
"Holocaust victims WERE treated like animals, and so logically we can conclude that animals are treated like Holocaust victims."
"When I see cages crammed with chickens from battery farms thrown on trucks like bundles of trash, I see, with the eyes of my soul, the Umschlagplatz (where Jews were forced onto trains leaving for the death camps).
When I go to a restaurant and see people devouring meat, I feel sick. I see a holocaust on their plates."
"Animals run no risk of going to hell. They are there already."
"All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life.
See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?"
"If you don’t like seeing pictures of violence towards animals being posted, you need to help stop the violence, not the pictures."
"You either approve of violence or you don't, and nothing on earth is more violent or extreme than the meat industry."
"Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain.
A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret.
It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer.
The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us."
"Some folks insist that believing in animal rights is like a religion.
But religion asks followers to believe in things nobody can see, while animal rights advocates ask followers to see things nobody can believe."
"Meat farms destroy the soul long before slaughterhouses kill the body."
"Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought."