#cruelty

You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort. I couldn’t go because I started crying the one time I tried. All those eyes and the barks like sobs. ↗

— Francesca Lia Block

#animal-cruelty #animal-kindness #animal-rights #animal-welfare #animals

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#animal-rights #animal-welfare #animals #food #hunting

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#evil #evil

The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion in the only guarantee of morality. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#animals #barbarism #compassion #cruelty #morality

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#humanity #mankind #mercy #mankind

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats. ↗

— J.M. Coetzee

#nature #philosophy #nature

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#animal-rights #animal-welfare #animals #attitude

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#kindness #cruelty

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty. ↗

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

#cruelty #intellectual #kid #kind #perhaps

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over. ↗