On Human Nature

Ernest Crosby, 1856-1907
The Soul of the World
A strange lot this, to be dropped down in a world of barbarians—men who see clearly the barbarity of all ages except their own. [TOP]

Thomas A. Edison, 1847-1931
Harper’s Magazine, 1890
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. [TOP]

George S. Arundale, 1878-1945
Peace and War
The world as a whole is at war with the animal kingdom. The aftermath of inter-kingdom war is inter-human war; and let us clearly realize that war never ends war, that no League of Nations can ever end war, no treaties, no pacts, no agreements of any kind. The only way to end war is to determine that there shall be no war anywhere, for war anywhere means, sooner or later, war everywhere. [TOP]

Russian Proverb
Men show their superiority outside, animals inside. [TOP]

C.W. Leadbeater, 1847-1934
Vegetarianism and Occultism
      I read how one boy, for whom a minister had secured a place in the slaughterhouse, returned home day after day pale and sick and unable to eat or sleep, and finally came to that minister of the gospel of the compassionate Christ and told him that he was willing to starve if necessary, but that he could not wade in blood another day.
      ...The horrors of the slaughter had so affected him that he could no longer sleep yet this is what many a boy is doing and seeing from day to day until he becomes hardened to the taking of life; and then some day, instead of cutting the throat of a lamb or a pig, he kills a man, and straightaway we turn our lust for slaughter upon him in turn, and think that we have done justice. [TOP]

Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936
The Jungle Book
We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle; we all say so and so it must be true. [TOP]

Sir Victor Gollancz, 1893-1967
The Unlived Life
I think the rapidly growing tendency to regard animals as born for nothing except slavery to so-called humanity is absolutely disgusting. [TOP]

John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873
It often happens that the universal belief of one age, a belief from which no one was free or could be free without an extraordinary effort of genius or courage, becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity that the only difficulty is to imagine how such an idea could ever have appeared credible. [TOP]

Henry S. Salt, 1851-1939
Seventy Years Among Savages
It is not this bloodshed or that bloodshed that must cease, but all bloodshed—all wanton infliction of pain or death. [TOP]

The Sending of the Animals
The animals, you say, were “sent”
For man’s free use and nutriment.
Pray, then, inform me and be candid
Why came they eons before man did?
To spend long centuries on earth
Awaiting their
Devourer’s birth?
Those ill-timed chattels, sent from Heaven
Were, sure, the maddest gift e’er given—
“Sent” for man’s use (can man believe it?)
When there was no man to receive it! [TOP]

Leonardo Da Vinci, 1452-1519
Notes
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. [TOP]

Charles B. Edelman
It is just as wrong to kill an animal as it is to kill a human being, and only human chauvinism, speciesism and the inordinately high opinion the human race has of itself prevents it from accepting this simple fact. [TOP]

Axel Munthe, 1857-1949
The cruel wild beast is not behind the bars of the cage. He stands in front of it. [TOP]

Mary Midgley, 1919-
Beast and Man
We cannot dismiss our emotions and the rest of our nonintellectual nature, along with the body and the earth it is fitted for, as alien, contingent stuff. Our dignity arises within nature, not against it. [TOP]

Professor J. Howard Moore, 1862-1916
Better World Philosophy
A universe is, indeed, to be pitied whose dominating inhabitants are so unconscious and so ethically embryonic that they make life a commodity, mercy a disease and systematic massacre a pastime and a profession. [TOP]

The Universal Kinship
Man is not the pedestalled individual pictured by his imagination—a being glittering with prerogatives, and towering apart from and above all other beings. He is a pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organism, differing in particulars, but not in kind, from the pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organisms below and around him. [TOP]

Milan Kundera
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 toward those who are at its mercy: the animals. [TOP]

Emile Zola, 1840-1902
Correspondence
The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men. [TOP]

Ambrose Bierce, 1842-?1914
The Devil’s Dictionary
Edible, good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a pig to a man, a man to a worm. [TOP]

General Omar Nelson Bradley, 1893-1981
We know more about killing than we know about living. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. [TOP]

Henry Ward Beecher, 1813-1887
in The Clergy Speak for Animals
For fidelity, devotion, love, many a two-legged animal is below the dog and the horse. Happy would it be for thousands of people if they could stand at last before the Judgment Seat and say “I have loved as truly and I have lived as decently as my dog.” And yet we call them only “brutes.” [TOP]

Kavi Yogi Maharshi Shuddhananda Bharat
Animals have five senses and man six. The intelligent mental man must treat plants and animals with tender love and compassion. Man as the most evolved soul, as the paragon of living beings, is obliged to practice non-violence in thought, word and deed ... The man who kills screaming life for food is dead to mercy and compassion ... Nature gives man clean sweet vegetables; but refined man cuts the throats of crying animals and gluts his stomach. His heart becomes hard and the hand that cuts animals cuts tomorrow the throats of brother men in the battlefield. If war must stop in the world, blood-soaked food must stop and men must become vegetarians. [TOP]

C. Richard Calore
We have a moral responsibility. How well this responsibility is met could very well determine the outcome of our civilization. So long as there is violence and cruelty to animals, so long will we be steeped in violence and cruelty to mankind. The manner in which we treat animals is a good indication of the moral character of our society. [TOP]

Will Cuppy, 1884-1949
National Enquirer, 1/27/81
If an animal does something we call it instinct; if we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence. [TOP]

Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, 1882-1970
House of Lords, 7/18/57
Failure to recognize our responsibilities to the animal kingdom is the cause of many of the calamities which now beset the nations of the world. We shall never attain to true peace until we recognize the place of animals in the scheme of things and treat them accordingly. [TOP]

Elizabeth Goudge, 1900-1984
The Joy of the Snow
Civilization is another word for respect for life. [TOP]

Gustav Mahler, 1860-1911
The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism
How can one be happy while a single living being on earth still suffers? [TOP]

John Cowper Powys, 1872-1963
The Enjoyment of Literature
The greatest miracle of evolution is man’s moral sense, his pity, his justice, his gentleness... [TOP]

Barry Lopez
Of Wolves and Men
There has never been a killing like it. We’ve killed hundreds of thousands of wolves, sometimes with cause, sometimes with none. In the end, I think we are going to have to go back and look at the stories we made up when we had no reason to kill, and find some way to look the animal in the face again. [TOP]

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-
Childhood’s End
The picadors had taken up their places and the bull had come snorting out into the arena. The skinny horses, nostrils wide with terror, had wheeled in the sunlight as their riders forced them to meet their enemy. The first lance flashed—made contact—and at that moment came a sound that had never been heard on earth before. It was the sound of 10,000 people screaming with the pain of the same wound—ten thousand people who, when they had recovered from the shock, found themselves completely unharmed. But that was the end of that bullfight, and indeed of all bullfighting. [TOP]

Ernest Bell, 1851-1933
Summer School Papers
The man who is described as behaving “like a beast” would often in his behavior be a disgrace to any known animal. [TOP]

Svetlana Alliluyeva, 1926-
One Year Later
Violence over men, over animals, over life under all forms, cannot be justified or accepted. [TOP]

Count Leo Tolstoy, 1828-1910
The First Step
This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life! But by the assertion that God ordained the slaughter of animals, and above all as a result of habit, people entirely lose their natural feeling. [TOP]

Ralph Waldo Trine, 1866-1958
Every Living Creature
Let them (children) be taught to have pity for the animals who are at our mercy, who cannot protect themselves, who cannot explain their weakness, their pain or their suffering. Soon this will bring to their attention that higher law, the moral obligation of man as a superior being to protect and care for the weak and the defenseless. Nor will it stop there, for this in turn will lead them to that highest law: man’s duty to man. [TOP]

Dr. Fredric Werthman, 1895-
A Sign for Cain
Children have an inborn capacity for sympathy. But that sympathy has to be cultivated ... And it is this point that the mass media trample on. Even before the natural feelings of compassion have a chance to develop, the fascination of overpowering and hurting others is displayed in endless profusion. Before the soil is prepared for sympathy, the seeds of sadism are planted. [TOP]

Henry Bergh, 1811-1888
from a lecture
While reading these frightful atrocities, perpetrated on innocent, unoffending animals, the inquiry springs to the lips: can the perpetrators of them be human beings? Can the brain that conceives them, the heart that tolerates them, and the hand that executes them belong to the being who, it is said, was made in God’s own image? [TOP]

Brigid Brophy, 1929-
Hackenfeller’s Ape
Possibly man rose by exploiting the weak. That’s how he came up. But now, now he is up. The very thing that marks his progress is that he knows better. [TOP]

Rachel Carson, 1907-1964
Silent Spring
We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature. [TOP]

Lord Kenneth Clark, 1903-1983
Animals and Men
We love animals, we watch them with delight, we study their habits with ever-increasing curiosity, and we destroy them. [TOP]

Ibid.
What is needed is ... a total change in our attitude of mind. We must recognize that the faculty of speech, which has given us power over those fellow creatures whom we once recognized as brothers, must carry with it a proper measure of responsibility. We can never recapture the Golden Age; but we can regain that feeling of kinship which will help us establish a feeling of the unity of creation. It is a faith we all may share. [TOP]

Civilization: a Personal View
I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole, I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology ... I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters. [TOP]

continued on next page

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