On Activism for Animals & Others

Mary Oliver, 1935-
Tell me what it is that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? A ship is safe in port, but that is not what ships are for.

John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873
Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. [TOP]

John Galsworthy, 1867-1933
Much Cry, Little Wool
You are not living in a private world all your own. Everything you say and do and think has its effect on everything around you. How do you imagine it ever came about that bulls and bears and badgers are no longer baited, cockerels no longer openly encouraged to tear each other to pieces, donkeys no longer beaten to a pulp? Only because people went about shouting that these things made them uncomfortable. So when a thing exists which you really abhor, I wish you would remember a little whether in letting it strictly alone, you are minding your own business on principle, or simply because it is comfortable to do so. [TOP]

Ian Redmond
When an animal is shot and has its face sawn off with a chainsaw, you cannot just sit back and accept it. [TOP]

Jonathan Schell
The Fate of the Earth
Extinction is not something to contemplate; it is something to rebel against. [TOP]

Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968
Letter from Birmingham Jail
I know that justice is indivisible: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Cowardice asks the question, Is it safe? Expediency asks the question, Is it politic? Vanity asks the question, Is it popular? But conscience asks the question, Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him that it is right. [TOP]

Carly Simon
Let the river run. Let all the dreamers wake the nation. [TOP]

Anna Sewell, 1820-1878
Black Beauty
My doctrine is this: that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt. [TOP]

Frederick Douglass, 1817?-1895
The North Star
Those who profess to love freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be physical, but it must be a struggle. ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did. And it never will. [TOP]

Shelley Heistand
Notes of an Activist
by candlelight, in front of a slaughterhouse, in the rain
[W]e cry
for the murdered. [TOP]

Ralph Chaplin, 1887-1961
Mourn not the dead, that in the cool earth lie;
but rather mourn the apathetic throng, the cowed and the meek
who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong and dare not speak. [TOP]

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894
You cannot run away from awareness; you must some time fight it out or perish. And if you be so, why not now and where you stand? [TOP]

Frank Kovac
I think, therefore, I am anti-vivisection. [TOP]

President John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. [TOP]

Vernon Bartlett
Once, in a moment of great generosity
God has shown to me
a leopard running free.
How then, could he expect of me—
born without his tolerance—calmly to see
those women, those bloody awful women,
dressed up in leopard skins
sitting down to tea? [TOP]

Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811-1896
The Minister’s Wooing
It’s a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done. [TOP]

George T. Angell, 1823-1909
from a lecture
I am sometimes asked, “Why do you spend so much of your time and money talking about kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to men?” I answer: “I am working at the roots.” [TOP]

William Faulkner, 1897-1962
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world ... would do this, it would change the earth. [TOP]

Agatha Christie, 1891-1976
We were not put on this earth to turn aside when a fellow creature is in danger. [TOP]

Jean Calore
When one considers that a man can go through a theological seminary and emerge without that heart education which would cause him to speak out against all forms of cruelty and injustice, regardless of the cost to himself, then we need wonder no more why there is strife and cruelty in our world. [TOP]

Paul Harvey, 1918-
from his newspaper column
Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animal suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don’t vote. [TOP]

Lord Douglas Houghton of Sowerby, 1898-
House of Commons Debate, 5/11/73
Those who refuse to help erect the milestones are not on the march. [TOP]

George Orwell, 1903-1950
Animal Farm
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. [TOP]

Ruth Casey
It takes only one person to change your life: you.

Margaret Mead, 1901-
Never doubt that a small committed group of people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. [TOP]

Edmund Burke, 1729-1797
attributed
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. [TOP]

Normal Cousins, 1915-
Human Options
Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life. [TOP]

Joan Ward-Harris
All progressive legislation has always had its genesis in the mind of one person. In the long run, it is the cumulative effect that matters. One can do much. And one and one and one can move mountains. [TOP]

Mark Twain, 1835-1910
Notebook
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. [TOP]

President Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865
attributed
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. [TOP]

George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950
Annajanska
All great truths begin as blasphemies. [TOP]

Socrates, 469-399 b.c.
quoted in Plato’s Apology
My plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth? [TOP]

Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862
Walden
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. [TOP]

Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802
The Botanic Garden
He who allows oppression shares the crime. [TOP]

Albert Einstein, 1879-1955
Youth
Only a life lived for others is a life worth while. [TOP]

Henri Frederic Amiel, 1821-1881
Amiel’s Journal
Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be outraged by silence. [TOP]

Saint Augustine, 354-430
Confessions, Book X
Why does truth call forth hatred? [TOP]

Robert Browning, 1812-1889
Andrea del Sarto
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? [TOP]

The Holy Bible
Proverbs 31:8
Open thy mouth for the dumb, in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. [TOP]

Porphyry, 233-304
On Abstinence from Animal Food
And is it not absurd, since we see that many of our own species live from sense alone, but do not possess intellect and reason; and since we also see that many of them surpass the most terrible of wild beasts in cruelty, anger, and rapine, being murderous of their children and their parents, and also being tyrants and the tools of kings [it is not, I say, absurd] to fancy that we ought to act justly toward these, but that no justice is due from us to the ox who ploughs, the dog who is fed with us, and the animals who nourish us with their milk and adorn our bodies with their wool? Is not such an opinion most irrational and absurd? [TOP]

Peter Singer, 1946-
Animal Liberation
It is easy to take a stand about a remote issue, but the speciesist, like the racist, reveals his true nature when the issue comes nearer home. To protest bullfighting in Spain or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat chickens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks. [TOP]

Ibid.
Animal liberation will require greater altruism on the part of human beings than any other liberation movement. The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that we really are the selfish tyrants that the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said we are? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible? The way in which we answer this question depends on the way in which each one of us, individually, answers it. [TOP]

Richard D. Ryder, 1940-
To be true to the logic of animal liberation entails considerable alteration to the structure of human society. Not only should we stop eating animals and experimenting upon them, cease shutting them in zoos or hunting and trapping them in the wild, we should also, perhaps, put them on an equal footing with children and the mentally handicapped in the eyes of the law. [TOP]

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, 1875-1965
Responsibility is a great thing. To shoulder responsibility, not to shirk it. If we learned early in life not to avoid responsibility, the world would be brighter.

The Philosophy of Civilization
The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil. [TOP]

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1850-1919
Kinship
I am the voice of the voiceless
Through me the dumb shall speak
Till the deaf world’s ear be made to hear
The wrongs of the wordless weak.
And I am my brother’s keeper,
And I will fight his fight
And speak the word for beast and bird
Till the world shall sets things right. [TOP]

The Worlds and I
Many times I am asked why the suffering of animals should call forth more sympathy from me than the suffering of human beings; why I work in this direction of charitable work more than toward any other. My answer is that because I believe that this work includes all the education and lines of reform which are needed to make a perfect circle of peace and good will about the earth. [TOP]

Saint Francis of Assisi, 1181-1226
quoted in Life by St. Bonaventura
Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission to be of service to them wherever they require it. [TOP]

Henry S. Salt, 1851-1939
The Story of My Cousins
What appeal can be made to people whose first instinct, on seeing a beautiful animal, full of joyousness and vitality, is to hunt or eat it? [TOP]

Lloyd Biggle, Jr., 1923-
The Light That Never Was
Life is life’s greatest gift. Guard the life of another creature as you would your own because it is your own. On life’s scale of values, the smallest is no less precious to the creature who owns it than the largest... [TOP]

Tom Regan, 1938-
In Defense of Animals
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. The fate of animals is in our hands. God grant we are equal to the task. [TOP]

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