This Quotations Page contains quotations from famous and some not so famous people who have expressed a sense of love, compassion, and respect for all of God's creation: for people, for animals, and for the environment. They speak of our teaching methods and philosophy. They speak of a lifestyle of non-violence. They seek to eliminate cruelty and suffering. They seek to wake us up. They seek to give us hope.
Table
of Contents
Black Elk
Charles Darwin
Thomas A. Edison
Albert Einstein
St. Francis of Assisi
Mohandas Gandhi
Hippocrates
Abraham Lincoln
James Marcus
Plutarch
Pythagoras
Albert Schweitzer
Chief Seattle
Leo Tolstoy
Mark Twain
Theodore H. White
"We should understand well that all things are the work of the Great Spirit. We should know the Great Spirit is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and the four-legged and winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that the Great Spirit is also above all these things and peoples. When we do understand all this deeply in our hearts, then we will fear, and love, and know the Great Spirit, and then we will be and act and live as the Spirit intends."Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
"There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties ... The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes a well-developed condition, in the lower animals."Thomas A. Edison
"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."Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life."St. Francis of Assisi"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men."Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."Hippocrates (?460 BC - ?377 BC)
"The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different."Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."James Marcus"I care not much for a mans religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it."
"I could not have slept to-night if I had left that helpless little creature to perish on the ground." (reply to friends who chided him for delaying them by stopping to return a fledgling to its nest.)
"Some say vegetarianism is an alternative diet, but it is the original diet, the plan designed by God."Plutarch (46-120 ?)
"...To the Dolphin alone, beyond all other, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage"Pythagoras (580 BC ?)"But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy."
"Though the boys throw stones at the frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest."
"For as long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
"The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the reverence for life that he gives his own.Chief Seattle (c.1786-1866)"Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy."
"The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil."
"Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come wherein humanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come. The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil. Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace. It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man."
"Affimation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to raise it to its true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will to live. At the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give to every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own. He accepts as being good: to preserve life, to promote life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of thought". - From: Out of My Life and Thought
"It is not always granted to the sower to live to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in ---FAITH."
"...the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony and man--all belong to the same family... The White Man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers."Leo Tolstoy
"A human can be healthy without killing animals for food. Therefore if he eats meat he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite."Mark Twain"Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life. "
"It is just like mans vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. 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 that cannot."Theodore H. White, American political writer (1915-1986)
"To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can have." - Theodore H. White, American political writer (1915-1986)