Jonathan Kozol Quotes

I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it's clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.

Factory farming, like comparable evils throughout history, depends for its existence upon concealment. It depends on people either not noticing or willfully averting their gaze.

Fear and pain and suffering is not OK for any being to feel intentionally at the hands of us.

To think that any animal would be trapped makes me so sad. It's like living in your bedroom for your entire life and never being able to go outside.

However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless--it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.

The fact that there are bigger injustices and wrongs doesn't make it right to sacrifice an innocent monkey. It doesn't alter the case at all.

You do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

Vivisection is wrong because it is an abuse of man's power over the helpless, involving pain and suffering. The name for this is cruelty, and cruelty is immoral, no matter what the reason for its introduction.

The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians.

That slow poison [slavery] is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentlemen here is born a petty tyrant, practiced in acts of despotism and cruelty.

It was like the first time I'd ever seen Hollywood just really not do the right thing. We filmed Free Willy in Mexico. I'd come in a really nice car from my hotel, and we'd have to drive around all the crew that was sleeping in the parking lot. People making their breakfast on the ground. It was because there was a whale there that was in a little tank. It just felt gross. It felt really bad. They didn't free that whale for, damn... at least 10 years later. The poor whale had horrible psoriasis all over him, and his fin didn't work.

Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.

I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters.

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

We ought never to sport with pain and distress in any of our amusements, or treat even the meanest insect with wanton cruelty.

Why are vegans made fun of while the inhumane factory farming process regards animals and the natural world merely as commodities to be exploited for profit?

Classism and greed are making insignificant all the other kinds of isms.

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleas'd to the last he crops the flow'ry food, And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.

It's terrible when the weak are also cruel for then we are defenseless against them.

Our ability to factory farm animals is coldly psychopathic.

There is no doubt that we live in an age of unprecedented, and sometimes terrifying, technological advance where the speed of advance so often outstrips the necessary ethical considerations.

Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!

I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures.

The best that can be said about embryonic stem cell research is that it is scientific exploration into the potential benefits of killing human beings.

There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.