#sect

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#back #chaos #collapse #disappear #environment

The hired preachers of all sects, creeds, and religions, never do, and never can, teach any thing but what is in conformity with the opinions of those who pay them. ↗

— Francis Wright

#conformity #creeds #hired #never #opinions

If you go to India the roads are being built almost entirely with private sector money and by the private sector. If you look at many, many countries in Europe that's how they're doing it. ↗

— Fareed Zakaria

#being #built #countries #doing #entirely

One reason I'm such a wayward prognosticator of rightwing trends is that I'm incapable of blacking out enough neural sectors to see the world through reptilian-brained eyes, a prerequisite for any true channeling of the mean resentments and implanted fears that drive hardcore conservatives. ↗

— James Wolcott

#channeling #conservatives #drive #enough #eyes

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor. ↗

— Frank Lloyd Wright

#big #big city #city #cross-section #like

She [my wife] has had a Caesarean, so she can't bend over. It's a good excuse [for not changing nappies], I suppose. ↗

— Kevin Pietersen

#nappies #change

I remember one bobcat they had in here - now bobcats are an endangered species in this neck of the woods - they'd caught it somewhere and they must have put that cat through a dozen rounds of burn experiments before they finally determined that it was utterly useless to them. Like an empty beer can. And then you know what they did to it? Claudius was late for a lunch date so rather thanput the destroyed but still breathing animal to sleep, he picked it up by its hind legs and simply smashed its head against a wall repeatedly until it was dead. How can I forget it: I was the one told to clean up the mess. The head dented in. The eyes slowly closing. The once proud claws hanging down, stunned and lifeless, the utter senselessness of it all, and the hate, a hatred that was consummated in me which is as dangerous a hormone, or chemical, or portion of the brain, as any neutron bomb. Except that I didnt know how to explode. I was like a computer without a keyboard, a bird without wings. Roaring inside. I wanted to kill that man. To do unto others what they had done unto me. I was that bobcat, you better believe it. ↗

— Michael Tobias

#animal-rights #animal-testing #science #vegan #vegetarianism

The private sector is motivated by profit and efficiency and the US government often is not. ↗

— Eric Anderson

#government #motivated #often #private #private sector

We’re organisms; we’re conceived, we’re born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria. ↗

— William M. Bass

#death #insects #life #death

One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhumans. A follow-up question that I often get is: “What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?” Vivisection, Part One: The “Necessity” of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach http://bit.ly/ol179F ↗

— Gary L. Francione

#ethical #health #justification #moral #personhood