On Human Nature

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Charles Darwin, 1809-1882
The Descent of Man
The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man. [TOP]

Madame de Stael, 1766-1817
Memoirs
The more I see of men, the more I like dogs. [TOP]

Loren Eiseley, 1907-
The Unexpected Universe
One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human. [TOP]

The Star Thrower
Man has the capacity to love, not just his own species, but life in all its shapes and forms. This empathy with all the interknit web of life is the highest spiritual expression I know. [TOP]

All the Strange Hours
Let men beat men, if they will, but why do they have to beat and starve small things? Why? Why? I will never forget that dog’s eyes, nor the eyes of every starved mongrel I have fed from Curacao to Cuernavaca. Nor the drowning one I once fished out of an irrigation ditch in California, only to see him limp away with his ribs showing ... This is why I am a wanderer forever in the streets of men, a wanderer in mind, and, in these matters, a creature of desperate impulse. [TOP]

Dian Fossey, 1940-
St. Louis Post Dispatch, 1980
I feel more comfortable with gorillas than people. I can anticipate what a gorilla’s going to do, and they’re purely motivated. [TOP]

Michael Fox, D.V.M., 1937-
One Earth, One Mind
The missing link between animals and a truly humane mankind is man himself, who does not yet see himself as a part of the world, claiming it instead for himself. [TOP]

Returning to Eden
Human liberation will begin when we understand that our evolution and fulfillment are contingent on the recognition of animal rights and on a compassionate and responsible stewardship of nature. [TOP]

Edward Augustus Freeman, 1823-1892
History of Europe
The awful wrongs and sufferings forced upon the innocent, helpless, faithful animal race, form the [most evil] chapter in the whole world’s history. [TOP]

Roy Fuller, 1912-
The Holy State
It is man who has fallen, not the beasts: that is the message even for the irreligious, and to some extent salvation can be measured by his very treatment of them. [TOP]

Ellen Glasgow, 1874-1945
The Woman Within
The things I feared were not in the sky, but in the nature and in the touch of humanity. The cruelty of children ... the blindness of the unpitiful—these were my terrors. But not the crash of thunder overhead, not the bolts of fire from the clouds. [TOP]

Sir Wilfred Grenfell, 1865-1940
The Adventure of Life
Kindness to all God’s creatures is an absolute rock-bottom necessity if peace and righteousness are to prevail. [TOP]

Ruth Harrison, 1920-
Animals, Men and Morals
It is a sobering thought that animals could do without man, yet man would find it almost impossible to do without animals. [TOP]

Elspeth Huxley, 1907-
letter in The Times, 12/14/84
Could we have a moratorium on the use of the phrase “they behaved like animals” to describe any especially nasty form of human brutality? Carnivores certainly kill when they need their dinners, but do so as quickly as they can. Herbivores just eat vegetation and do not interfere with others. Do we hear of dolphins torturing other dolphins, gorillas cutting or biting bits off other gorillas, elephants inflicting prolonged periods of terror on other elephants, or indeed on any other animal? Rather should dolphins left to die in nets, gorillas killed in order that their dried heads should be sold to tourists, elephants dying in agony from poisons for the sake of their tusks, exclaim, in condemnation of acts of savagery (should these ever occur) committed by members of their own species: “They behaved like humans.” [TOP]

Jerome K. Jerome, 1859-1927
The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
...men are the greatest, noblest and wisest and best beings in the whole, vast, eternal universe! Any man will tell you that. [TOP]

C.S. Lewis, 1898-1963
Vivisection
[On a Darwinian view] we sacrifice other species to our own not because our own has any objective metaphysical privilege over others, but simply because it is ours. It may be very natural to have this loyalty to our own species, but let us hear no more from the naturalists about the “sentimentality” of anti-vivisectionists. If loyalty to our own species—preference for man simply because we are men—is not sentiment, then what is? [TOP]

Rev. Andrew Linzey, 1952-
Animal Rights
It is an unfortunate fact that those people who are most eloquent in their demand for the conservation of animals are often those most eager to violate animal life at the first opportunity. [TOP]

Jayne Meadows, 1926-
quoted in an animal protection advertisement
I feel very sad for women who continue to purchase real fur coats. They are lacking in a woman’s most important requisites: heart and sensitivity. [TOP]

Professor J. Howard Moore, 1862-1916
The New Ethics
I am ashamed of the race of beings to which I belong. It is so cruel and bigoted, so hypocritical, so soulless and insane. I would rather be an insect ... a bee or a butterfly ... and float in dim dreams among the wild flowers of summer than be a man and feel the horrible and ghastly wrongs and sufferings of this wretched world. [TOP]

Ashley Montagu, 1905-
Of Man, Animals and Morals
...our relation to our fellow human beings, to other creatures, to the inanimate as well as to the animate world will undergo fundamental change in the direction of love and cooperation only when we have learned to live as if to live and love were one. I really don’t think we are going to solve many of the basic problems that confront humanity today until we have made that principle a way of life, a personal lifestyle. The world stands greatly in need of men and women who are both compassionate and intelligent. [TOP]

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592
The Essays
The most calamitous and fragile of all creatures is man, and yet the most arrogant. It is through the vanity of this same imagination that he equals himself to a god, that he attributes to himself divine conditions, that he picks himself out and separates himself from the crowd of other creatures, curtails the just shares of other animals his brethren and companions, and assigns to them only such portions of faculties and forces as seems to him good. How does he know, by the effort of his intelligence, the interior and secret movements and impulses of other animals? by what comparison between them and us does he infer the stupidity which he attributes to them? [TOP]

E.E. Cummings, 1894-1962
Pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: a world of made is not a world of born—pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence... [TOP]

Iris Murdoch, 1919-
A Fairly Honorable Defeat
...half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you’re lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there’s anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter. [TOP]

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, 1875-1965
Memoirs of Childhood and Youth
As long as I can remember, I have suffered because of the great misery I saw in the world. I never really knew the artless, youthful joy of living, and I believe that many children feel this way, even when outwardly they seem to be wholly happy and without a single care. I used to suffer particularly because the poor animals must endure so much pain and want. [TOP]

Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1904-
Enemies, a Love Story
As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward 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. [TOP]

Vegetarianism, a Way of Life
...as long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin ... all such deeds are done in the name of “social justice.” There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is. [TOP]

Gladys Taber, 1899-
Conversations with Amber
My own species, unfortunately, is the greatest predator on the planet. We have the distinction of killing our own kind as well as other living creatures. But mankind is relatively new and may develop beyond this in time. [TOP]

Mark Twain, 1835-1910
The problem with the American people ain’t ignorance. It’s just that they know too much that ain’t so. [TOP]

Following the Equator
In studying the traits and dispositions of the so-called lower animals, and contrasting them with man’s, I find the result humiliating to me. Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to. [TOP]

The Damned Human Race
The higher animals engage in individual fights, but never in organized masses. Man is the only animal that deals in the atrocities of atrocities, war.

from an unpublished notebook
There being 22 million microbes in each man, and feeding upon him, we now perceive who the whole outfit was made for. [TOP]

The Mysterious Stranger
The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don’t dare to assert themselves ... Someday, a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise ... perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and determined front will do it ... and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end. [TOP]

What is Man?
It is just like a man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. [TOP]

Autobiography
Of all the creatures ever made he (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one ... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature who cannot. [TOP]

Desmond Morris, 1928-
Animal Contract
Environmentalists are increasingly preoccupied with the way in which we’re polluting the waters, laying waste the land, and corrupting the atmosphere, and these are all important issues. But there’s another crime that humanity is committing, and that’s breaking the animal contract, the contract that exists between ourselves and other animals, the contract that makes us partners in the sharing of the earth’s surface. [TOP]

Jessamyn West, 1907-1984
Why do men who eat cows condemn cats who eat birds? [TOP]

Lois Flynne
Gitel and Berne
For much of my life I continued to not “see” cattle trucks and to eat flesh and to wear fur and leather and ivory and drive cars with pigskin seats, and to kill pests like mice and rats with poisons and traps and to look to medical research and animal studies to save me from the consequences of my booze and nicotine habits. I did not notice the living animals involved. I was a good human, and if hauled before some animal Nuremberg in the sky would have been hard pressed to understand, “Why me?” [TOP]

Henry S. Salt, 1851-1939
in a letter to Gandhi, 1932
I cannot see how there can be any real and full recognition of kinship as long as men continue either to cheat or to eat their fellow beings. [TOP]

Dr. Gordon Latto, 1911-
The Vegetarian Way
In a lunch session in a slaughterhouse, a lamb jumped out of its pen and came unnoticed up to some slaughtermen who were sitting in a circle eating their sandwiches; the lamb approached and nibbled a small piece of lettuce that a man was holding in his hand. The men gave the lamb some more lettuce and when the lunch period was over they were so affected by the action of the lamb that not one of them was prepared to kill this creature, and it had to be sent away elsewhere—showing that within each human soul there is an element of pity, compassion and love in varying degrees. It is our duty to encourage the higher qualities in each individual to bloom and blossom wherever possible. [TOP]

Charles Chaplin, 1889-?
Autobiography
Man is only a half-tame animal who has for centuries governed others by deceit, cruelty and violence. [TOP]

Loren Eiseley, 1907-1977
The Star Thrower
Man has the capacity to love, not just his own species, but life in all its shapes and forms. This empathy with all the interknit web of life is the highest spiritual expression I know. [TOP]

Porphyry, 233-304
On Abstinence of Animal Food
He who abstains from anything animate ... will be much more careful not to injure those of his own species. For he who loves the genus will not hate any species of animals. [TOP]

Victor Hugo, 1802-1885
Alpes et Pyrénées
It was first was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to nature and the animals. [TOP]

Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826
I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could possibly bring happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others. [TOP]

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