George Carlin Quotes

Speciesism is morally objectionable because, like racism, sexism, and heterosexism, it links personhood with an irrelevant criterion. Those who reject speciesism are committed to rejecting racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination as well.

Everyone loves justice in the affairs of another.

I can't abide people who go soft over animals and then cheat every human they come across!

Whatever the reason, for most of the present century, the literature and publicity of the old established [animal welfare] groups made a significant contribution to the prevailing attitude that dogs and cats and wild animals need protection, but other animals do not. Thus people came to think of "animal welfare" as something for kindly ladies who are dotty about cats, and not as a cause founded on basic principles of justice and morality.

Moralizing and morals are two entirely different things and are always found in entirely different people

How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelette?

What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.

That is the way with people ... If they do you wrong, they invent a bad name for you, a good name for their acts and then destroy you in the name of virtue.

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.

I truly don't judge other people's actions. But I think that factory farming is an abomination.

How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

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 non-humans?

What goes on in the world and who's defining what is right or wrong in anything? Is there a place in any of our existence where we need judgment any longer? But we should have empathy towards each other and break away from those categories that politics and religion keep throwing back at us.

To speak well of a base man is much the same as speaking ill of a good man.

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.

No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE.

How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people.

Legality alone is no guide for a moral people. There are many things in this world that have been, or are, legal but clearly immoral. Slavery was legal. Did that make it moral? South Africa’s apartheid, Nazi persecution of Jews, and Stalinist and Maoist purges were all legal, but did that make them moral?

Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error.

What they need is a little immorality in their lives. Then they wouldn't be so busy looking for it in other people's.

Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency of sin.

But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of GOODNESS, so why of the other shop?

To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals.

A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.

If 6,000,000 cattle had been slaughtered, there would have been more interest. A way would have been found.