"Animal Liberation" Quotes

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens 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.

If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans?

The time has come for a change of consciousness. It is time to recognize that all the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals.

We are familiar with the idea of the sanctity of human life, but if we want to give it a solid ethical basis, we first need to defend the idea of the sanctity of life in general.

If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.

The fact that humans have greater mental or physical capacities than animals does not mean that they have greater intrinsic value than animals.

To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.

A prejudice is a pre-judgment, the decision to act on the basis of something before, or without, examining all of the relevant facts.

We can no longer plead ignorance, or hide behind the old-fashioned, specious arguments about the need for 'scientific research'.