Brenda Ueland Quotes

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 proposed air force and army experiments were designed so that many animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering and death would save a single human life or benefit humans in any way at all; but the same can be said of millions of their experiments performed each year in the United States alone.

It is an incontrovertible fact that if we want to make progress in basic areas of medicine and biology, we are going to have to use animals.

It is time my colleagues got real. All British universities doing worthwhile research use animals, and, instead of hiding, they should be boasting of their achievements.

Guinea pigs are practically synonymous with experiments. Lab rats have become the workhorses of modern medicine. Genetics owes a huge debt to the humble fruit fly. There's almost no branch of the life sciences, in fact, that hasn't leaned heavily on one animal or another.

Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.

Those who experiment on animals should never be able to quiet their own conscience by telling themselves that these cruelties have a worthy aim.

Even if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, we'd be against it.

Research performed on animals is, by definition, scientifically unsound.

It made me feel particularly sickened to know that this kind of callous attitude toward animals is repeated again and again in laboratories around this country.

Typically, defenders of experiments on animals do not deny that animals suffer. They cannot deny the animals' suffering, because they need to stress the similarities between humans and other animals in order to claim that their experiments may have some relevance for human purposes. The experimenter who forces rats to choose between starvation and electric shock to see if they develop ulcers (which they do) does so because the rat has a nervous system very similar to a human being's, and presumably feels an electric shock in a similar way.

What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.

I think you know that I classify science as British science, American science, and everybody else.

We think that it is the best scientists working in the frontier fields of science who are best able to judge what is good and what is bad - if any - in the application of their scientific research.

We are a society now that is 100 percent dependent on science.

Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.

It was the late Dr. Mahendra Lal Sircar who, by founding the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, made it possible for the scientific aspirations of my early years to continue burning brightly.

If you look at my track record as government chief scientific advisor, I've always recognized that all of the sciences are important to all of research, and we need a balance.

I work with a lot of scientists, and one of the frustrating things they find is that all this fascinating stuff is being done which doesn't find its way into science fiction. They say look at the science fact pages - they're so much more imaginative than science fiction.

If experiments on animals were abandoned on grounds of compassion, mankind would have made a fundamental advance.

The Queen has done all she could on the dreadful subject of vivisection, and hopes that Mr. Gladstone will speak strongly against such a practice which is a disgrace to humanity.

If you suppress laboratories, physical science will be stricken with barrenness and death.

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

Again there is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress; which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.