Steven Patrick Morrissey Quotes

Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.

As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis.

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.

Anyone who says that life matters less to an animal than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being animals to have an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh...I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.

I was always empathetic with animals. It's a terrible and self-involved point of view that we do something because someone else is exploitable.

One of the things that I always think about is the emotional sophistication of animals and how much we're learning about the emotional sophistication of animals. If you're eating a pig, you're essentially eating the equivalent of a four-year-old human being.

I have always felt that the way we treat animals is a pretty good indicator of the compassion we are capable of for the human race.

I respect animals. I have more sympathy for an injured or dead animal than I do for an injured or dead human being, because human beings participate and cooperate in their own undoing. Animals are completely innocent. There are no innocent human beings.

I believe that animals are on the planet so that we can know love and compassion.

These birds and animals and fish cannot speak, but they can suffer, and our God who created them, knows their sufferings, and will hold him who causes them to suffer unnecessarily to answer for it. It is a sin against their Creator.

The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals.

I always befriended animals and have said many a good word for them. Even to the least-loved mosquitoes I gave many a meal, and told them to go in peace.

Without the perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use.

You really, really have to care about animals to want to kill one. You have to learn all this stuff about them and start thinking like them.

We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other.

If the creatures with fur/feathers/fins are our brothers in a lower stage of development then their very weakness and inability to protest, demands that man should refrain from torturing them for the mere possibility of obtaining some knowledge which he believes may be to his own interest.

There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship, and nail him down to a table, and dissect him alive to show you the mezaraic veins... Answer me, Machinist, has Nature really arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering?

In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

We are all God's creatures-that we pray to God for mercy and justice while we continue to eat the flesh of animals that are slaughtered on our account is not consistent.

Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way." ... "Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when godlike human beings will become truly humane, and learn to put their animal fellow mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners.

An appreciation of animals is good for a human, it can lead to a better understanding and respect for all living things.

Having respect for animals makes us better humans.

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain.

Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don't trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent.