Jeremy Bentham Quotes

I have developed a deep respect for animals. I consider them fellow living creatures with certain rights that should not be violated any more than those of humans.

If an animal has any rights at all, it's got the right not to be eaten.

Not only are the philosophies of animal rights and animal welfare separated by irreconcilable differences... the enactment of animal welfare measures actually impedes the achievement of animal rights... Welfare reforms, by their very nature, can only serve to retard the pace at which animal rights goals are achieved.

We do not advocate 'right to life' for animals.

My aim is to advocate that we make this mental switch in respect of our attitudes and practices towards a very large group of beings: members of species other than our own - or, as we popularly though misleadingly call them, animals. In other words, I am urging that we extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species.

I've been an animal rights activist and a vegan for 28 years. The entire time, I've asked myself: How do I best advance an animal rights agenda?

Animal rights is a part of my everyday life. When you live by example, you create a certain level of awareness. Friends of mine - people I have never discussed animal rights or vegetarianism with - are adopting vegetarian habits because they see it.

I believe in the rights of creatures other than man.

My ahimsa is my own. I am not able to accept in its entirety the doctrine of non-killing of animals.

We cannot talk simultaneously about animal rights and the 'humane' slaughter of animals.

PETA doesn't want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle-deep in their own crap, because they don't want any animals to die ever and basically think chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don't want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them probably less delicious.

Would I rather the research lab that tests animals is reduced to a bunch of cinders? Yes.

You don't have to love animals to recognize that it is immoral and unjust to exploit them. But if you do love animals, but you continue to participate in their exploitation, you need to rethink your idea of what love means.

99% of our uses of animals, including our numerically most significant use of them for food, do not involve any sort of necessity or any real conflict between human and nonhuman interests. If animals matter morally at all, then, even without accepting a theory of animal rights, those uses of animals cannot be morally justified.

I maintain that we ought to abolish the institution and stop causing or facilitating the existence of more 'companion' animals.

Animals don't have a voice, so I think it is our job to give them one.

We have to be aggressive when those we stick up for have no voice. I don't consider it radical to say cruelty is wrong and that animals should be respected. I consider it radical to eat corpses, put electrodes in animals' heads, make elephants live in chains in the circus, and poison animals we consider a nuisance.

I don't often agree with the RSPCA as I believe it is an animal's duty to be on my plate at supper time.

Animals... are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

People get offended by animal rights campaigns. It's ludicrous. It's not as bad as mass animal death in a factory.

Oops! I always thought PETA stood for Please Eat This Animal.

Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it.

We aren't consistent in our treatment of animals.

The theory of animal rights simply is not consistent with the theory of animal welfare... Animal rights means dramatic social changes for humans and non-humans alike; if our bourgeois values prevent us from accepting those changes, then we have no right to call ourselves advocates of animal rights.