Smart People on Dumb Animals

I've already told you what I think about how we treat our mute cousins.

Here is what some really great minds had to say:

Abraham Lincoln:

I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.

Thomas Edison:

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

Mohandas Gandhi:

To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy:

A human can be healthy without killing animals for food.  Therefore if he eats meat he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.

Albert Schweitzer:

There slowly grew up in me an unshakable conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature, unless there is some unavoidable necessity for it.

Leonardo da Vinci:

The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.

Henry David Thoreau:

I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with each other.

Albert Einstein:

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Plutarch:

But for the sake of some little mouthful of meat, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.

Plato:

The gods created certain kinds of beings to replenish our bodies they are the trees and the plants and the seeds.

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple:

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than blacks were made for whites, or women for men.

Cardinal John Henry Newman:

Cruelty to animals is as if humans did not love God.

Sir Paul McCartney:

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.

Sir Ian McKellen:

Although he's a vegetarian, I couldn't find any quotes by him on the subject. This one will have to do instead: "I'm Gandalf and Magneto - get over it!"

Franz Kafka:

Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore.

George Bernard Shaw:

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.

Fred Rogers:

I don't want to eat anything that has a mother.

And on the subject of kindness to animals, let's not forget to be kind to the often mistreated animal wearing our clothes!