Animal Rights Quotes

1. "I'm a vegetarian and very much active in regards to how I feel about animal rights and protecting animals and giving animals a voice. But at the same time, I appreciate and respect other people's decisions to eat meat. The only thing that I hope is that people are educated, that they're aware, that they're living a conscious lifestyle."
Author: Abbie Cornish

2. "New Rule: Let the Pope be Pope. An animal-rights group in Italy has asked Pope Benedict to give up his fur-trimmed cape and hat. To which the Pope replied, "Don't be hatin' on my cape, bitch." Sorry, but Popes are the original divas, they invented bling, they've been wearing outlandish outfits for a thousand years--almost as long as Elton John. The clothes, the jewels, the fancy palace...Those aren't just symbols of the Papacy, they are the Papacy. The day the Pope shows up on the balcony in a pair of jeans and polo shirt is the day a billion Catholics go, "What the hell were we thinking?"
Author: Bill Maher

3. "In my movies, there has been little to do in the way of animal rights. I have never worked in a movie with animals. No horse-riding, no trained dogs, lions, bears. A few actors, but what could I do? We had to have them."
Author: Casey Affleck

4. "If we understand "rights" to be legal protection against harm, then many animals already do have rights, and the idea of animal rights is not terribly controversial."
Author: Cass R. Sunstein

5. "Those who emphasize animal rights have a more complicated task. They tend to urge that animals should be given rights to the extent that their capacities are akin to those of human beings. The usual emphasis here is on cognitive capacities. The line would be drawn between animals with advanced capacities, such as chimpanzees and dolphins, and those that lack such capacities. Undoubtedly a great deal of work needs to be done on this topic. But at least an emphasis on the capacity to think, and to form plans, seems to provide a foundation for appropriate line drawing by those who believe in animal rights in a strong sense."
Author: Cass R. Sunstein

6. "Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept us safe among them... The animals had rights - the right of man's protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man's indebtedness. This concept of life and its relations filled us with the joy and mystery of living; it gave us reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all."
Author: Chief Luther Standing Bear

7. "He, Jeff, and Troy Lee carried Super Soakers loaded with Grandma Lee's Vampire Cat Remedy, other Animals had garden sprayers slung on their backs, except for Gustavo, who thought that making him carry a garden sprayer was racial stereotyping. Gustavo had a flame thrower. He wouldn't say where he got it."Second Amendment, cabrones." (The guy who sold Gustavo his green card had included two amendments from the Bill of Rights and Gustavo had chosen Two and Four, the right to bear arms and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. [His sister Estrella had had seizures as a child. No bueno.] For five bucks extra he threw in the Third Amendment, which Gustavo bought because he was already sharing a three-bedroom house in Richmond with nineteen cousins and they didn't have any room to quarter soldiers.)"
Author: Christopher Moore

8. "I'd say that animal rights and environmental issues have always been at the forefront of my mind."
Author: Corey Feldman

9. "Being a humanitarian, supporting animal rights activists, human rights activists, it's all the same."
Author: Daryl Hannah

10. "In Germany, Dodd had noticed, no one ever abused a dog, and as a consequence dogs were never fearful around men and were always plump and obviously well tended. "Only horses seem to be equally happy, never children or the youth," he wrote. ... He called it "horse happiness" and had noticed the same phenomenon in Nuremburg and Dresden. In part, he knew this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison. "At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting." He added, "One might easily wish he were a horse!"
Author: Erik Larson

11. "Veganism is about nonviolence. It is about not engaging in harm to other sentient beings; to oneself; and to the environment upon which all beings depend for life. In my view, the animal rights movement is, at its core, a movement about ending violence to all sentient beings. It is a movement that seeks fundamental justice for all. It is an emerging peace movement that does not stop at the arbitrary line that separates humans from nonhumans."
Author: Gary L. Francione

12. "The rights paradigm, which, as I interpret it, morally requires the abolition of animal exploitation and requires veganism as a matter of fundamental justice, is radically different from the welfarist paradigm, which, in theory focuses on reducing suffering, and, in reality, focuses on tidying up animal exploitation at its economically inefficient edges. In science, those who subscribe to one paradigm are often unable to understand and engage those who subscribe to another paradigm precisely because the theoretical language that they use is not compatible.I think that the situation is similar in the context of the debate between animal rights and animal welfare. And that is why welfarists simply cannot understand or accept the slavery analogy."
Author: Gary L. Francione

13. "One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict "unnecessary" suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our "moral schizophrenia" when it comes to nonhumans.A follow-up question that I often get is: "What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?"Vivisection, Part One: The "Necessity" of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach http://bit.ly/ol179F"
Author: Gary L. Francione

14. "Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awareness, animals are the untouchable caste, those whom human others would rather not acknowledge, let alone render assistance."
Author: Gary Steiner

15. "If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth -- beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals -- would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?"
Author: George Bernard Shaw

16. "?'I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

17. "I'm an animal rights activist because I believe we won't have a planet if we continue to behave toward other species the way we do."
Author: James Cromwell

18. "When I did 'Babe' I wanted to talk about animal rights without going through some convoluted justifications about using animal products."
Author: James Cromwell

19. "Another Thing I'm Sick of Hearing:If I started that gay rights group, I must be gay.So if i start an animal rights group,what does that make me?A giraffe?"
Author: James Howe

20. "The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny."
Author: Jeremy Bentham

21. "I want to know how these very people who are against war because of loss of life can possibly be the same people who are for abortion? They are the same people who are for animal rights, but they are not for the rights of the unborn."
Author: Jim Gibbons

22. "A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights."
Author: Lance Morrow

23. "I'm definitely an animal lover, and I stand up for all animals' rights."
Author: Laura Mennell

24. "I've been active in animal rights and all kinds of environmental stuff and children's charities over the years."
Author: Martina Navratilova

25. "Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations without the modern fire-makers, now armed with perfected, inescapable weapons, traipsing along for more fun and thrills at their expense even as so many of them die away. It is our fellow creatures' lot in the universe, the place assigned them in creation, to be completely at our mercy, the fiercest wolf or tiger defenseless against the most cowardly man. And to me it has always seemed not only ungenerous and shabby but a kind of supreme snobbery to deal cavalierly with them, as if their little share of the earth's happiness and grief were inconsequential, meaningless, beneath a man's attention, trumped by any and all designs he might have on them, however base, irrational, or wicked."
Author: Matthew Scully

26. "Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us."
Author: Matthew Scully

27. "I think I've kind of been mistaken for somebody who's trying to be a spokesperson for animal rights, and the fact is I'm not qualified to be a spokesperson. I am passionate about it, but I'm not trying to make other people do what I do."
Author: Neko Case

28. "Going on stage was like being at a butchers' convention. And, of course, the animal rights people were going nuts. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sent people to ‘monitor' our gigs. The crew would f**k with them all the time. They'd say, ‘Oh, Ozzy's going to throw eighteen puppies into the audience tonight, and he won't sing a note until they've all been slaughtered.'The ASPCA believed every word of it."
Author: Ozzy Osbourne

29. "Some animal rights activists are demanding vegetarianism, even veganism now, or nothing. But since only 4 or 5 percent of Americans claim to be vegetarians, 'nothing' is the far more likely outcome. I ask these activists to weigh the horrors of Bladen County's industrial farms and the Tar Heel slaughterhouse against the consequences of doing nothing to alleviate the hour-to-hour sufferings of its victims. Is not a life lived off the factory farm and a death humanely inflicted superior to the terrible lives we know they lead and the horrible deaths we know they suffer in Bladen County today?"
Author: Steven M. Wise

30. "I'm not concerned with paid assassins ... mindless, soulless animals who excel at nothing else. But you, Erik ... you love all the beauty in this world ... you are a genius in so many different fields. Why do you set yourself beyond the pale of humanity by such a despicable crime?"He took off the mask and turned slowly to let me see. "This face which has denied me all human rights also frees me of all obligation to the human race," he said quietly. "My mother hated me, my village drove me from my home, I was exhibited like an animal in a cage until a knife showed me the only way to be free. The pleasures of love will always be forbidden to me ... but I am young, Nadir. I have all the desires of any normal man."
Author: Susan Kay

31. "All zoos, even the most enlightened, are built upon the idea both beguiling and repellent—the notion that we can seek out the wildness of the world and behold its beauty, but that we must first contain that wildness. Zoos argue that they are fighting for the conservation of the Earth, that they educate the public and provide refuge and support for vanishing species. And they are right. Animal-rights groups argue that zoos traffic in living creatures, exploiting them for financial gain and amusement. And they are right. Caught inside this contradiction are the animals themselves, and the humans charged with their well-being."
Author: Thomas French

32. "To be 'for animals' is not to be 'against humanity.' To require others to treat animals justly, as their rights require, is not to ask for anything more nor less in their case than in the case of any human to whom just treatment is due. The animal rights movement is a part of, not opposed to, the human rights movement. Attempts to dismiss it as anti human are mere rhetoric."
Author: Tom Regan

33. "Animal-rights advocates remind us of this admonition: The ways in which people treat animals will be reflected in how people relate to one another."
Author: William Greider

34. "Zeena Schreck is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, author, musician/composer, tantric teacher, mystic, animal rights activist, and counter-culture icon known by her mononymous artist name, ZEENA. Her work stems from her experience within the esoteric, shamanistic and magical traditions of which she's practiced, taught and been initiated. She is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist yogini, teaches at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft Berlin and is the spiritual leader of the Sethian Liberation Movement (SLM)."
Author: Zeena Schreck

Animal Rights Quotes Pictures