John Ruskin Quotes

Anytime you work with animals, you begin to see more humanity in them.

We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.

If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

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

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.

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

I saw deep in the eyes of the animals, the human soul look out upon me.

Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'

Animals are thinking, feeling creatures. They're sensitive.

It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.

The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated.

I love animals, and I feel more of a connection to animals than people.

Some people say that their pets will tell them when it's time to go. I don't believe that. No animal of mine has ever told me he was ready to die. I wish it were that simple. Dogs can communicate, but they cannot talk, nor do they think in our language or on our terms.

The belief that 'animals' are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now.

People didn't think animals thought or remembered or had minds! They most certainly do: any pet owner knows more than a lot of scientists about animals.

You can look at your dog and see that it's thinking and has strong feelings. And if it does, so do wolves. And if wolves do, so do elephants. People aren't the only beings that think and feel.

I do not believe you can work with animals - certainly you cannot train them - without deciding that if humans have souls, dogs do, too.

The thing about animals that speaks to me so much is that my passion for the animals and against animal abuse is based on the knowledge that these creatures which think and feel can't speak for themselves. I feel it is my responsibility to speak for those who can't speak for themselves.

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

The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man - whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them.

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.