Carl Sagan Quotes

The difference between humans and wild animals is that humans pray before they commit murder.

No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.

It really is a strange time we're living in, when saying 'Don't kill people' is considered a radical point of view.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of.

It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.

In movies, it's so easy to have this 'boom,' to kill, and I think that's inhumane.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.

No kids should see that kind of violence where Batman is killing as many people as the bad guys.

A human being has been given an intellect to make choices, and we know there are other food sources that do not require the killing of a creature that would protest being killed.

Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil - of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them and tape-record them. But I didn't think of myself as evil - just realistic.

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.

Courage without compassion can wreak havoc on our civilization.

When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.

They charge me with fanaticism. If to be feelingly alive to the suffering of my fellow creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.

In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.

Some might argue humans are hard-wired to fight. I don't agree: we are conscious beings who have the capacity to make decisions.

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?

It is not right to glory in the slain

When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice.