Lori Foster Quotes

Compassion and mercy are important, period. It doesn't matter who's at our receiving end, but we need to be flexing those muscles. It's not mutually exclusive: If you have compassion for children starving in Africa, it doesn't mean you can't have compassion for adults in Africa or animals that are being tortured and abused.

Being a humanitarian, supporting animal rights activists, human rights activists, it's all the same.

My most firmly held value is what Albert Schweitzer termed 'reverence for life.' I take this seriously; many would say that because I extend it to nonhumans, I take it too far.

I'm not an activist; I don't look for controversy. I'm not a political person, but I'm a person with compassion. I care passionately about equal rights. I care about human rights. I care about animal rights.

I think it's very important to support those who can't help themselves - children, animals - and especially to do so in your own neighborhood.

I care a lot about animal welfare and children. Although I don't have children myself.

The ultimate test of any civilization is how we treat the most vulnerable... what we do to our children. Our world has lost its direction.

We cannot close ourselves off to information and ignore the fact that millions of people are out there suffering. I honestly want to help. I don't believe I feel differently from other people. I think we all want justice and equality, a chance for a life with meaning. All of us would like to believe that if we were in a bad situation someone would help us.

So often when you start talking about kindness to animals someone comments that starving and mistreated children should come first. The issue can't be divided like that. It isn't a choice between children and animals. It's our duty to care for both. Kindness is the important thing. Kids and animals are our responsibility.

Alleviation of suffering is my fundamental principle.

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.

If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car, wouldn't you help him?

Animal welfare issues have always been important to me.

Once I showed up at my sister's with a baby rabbit I had bought from some children because its ears were cold. I put the rabbit on a hot water bottle and massaged its ears for quite a while. After all, I knew that all healthy animals had warm ears.

One is guilty of all abjection that one does not help to relieve.

A calling is you feel - you look out and see the need - maybe it's the need for the poor, to help poor people. Maybe it's the need to get involved in the race problem, as Martin Luther King was - felt called.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.

At PETA, we often say that the issue of how animals are treated isn't just about them; it's about us, how we behave.

We don't woo our wives with clubs. We don't leave old folks on ice floes. And maybe the time has come to quit diving into rip tides to save people we don't know. We've outgrown a lot of survival-of-the-fittest strategies, and risking our lives for strangers might be one of them.

The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

Because a human being is endowed with empathy, he violates the natural order if he does not reach out to those who need care. Responding to this empathy, one is in harmony with the order of things, with dharma; otherwise, one is not.

People are nicer than economists give us credit for. The economists cannot understand why people would work long and hard to clean up a community after a hurricane. … Most economists don’t have any interest in or understanding of psychology.

No living being should have to endure conditions that you wouldn't put on your worst enemy.