Here's something for ecofems which could be useful in the ongoing effort
to bring meat/poultry eaters to their senses. There's some neat stuff in
here ...
THE ARRS MEGA-LIST OF QUOTATIONS
Version 2 -- updated 19th November 1994
This is a collection of quotations which may be of general interest
to vegetarians and vegans. It does not seek to "prove" anything and is
provided for interest and as a resource which may be freely used elsewhere.
Subjects:
Cruelty/Compassion
Environment/Nature
Equality
Experimentation
Farming
Food Choices
Freedom
Good/Evil
Health
Hunting
Law/Morality
Originality/Progress
Other Philosophical Stuff
The collection is compiled by:
John Davis on: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with contributions by:
Donald Graft -- from the AR/veggies quotes by celebrities
coming soon: poems and quotations from "The Extended Circle
-- a dictionary of humane thought"
by Jon Wynne-Tyson (with author's permission)
If you find any other quotes which you wish to share, please send them
to me and they will be included in they next update. Contributor names
will be included above unless you ask me not to. -- thanks in advance, John.
__________________________________________________________________________
CRUELTY/COMPASSION
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be
indifferent to them, that's the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
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.
Ali McGraw (actress)
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by
the way its animals are treated.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)
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.
Thomas Edison (inventor)
A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
William Blake (1757-1828)
Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
Albert Einstein (physicist, Nobel 1921)
There can be no justification for causing suffering to animals simply to
serve man's pleasure or simply to enhance man's lifestyle.
The Dean of York
When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble.
Buddha (563? - 483? B.C.)
It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man.
Albert Schweitzer (statesman, Nobel 1952)
Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things, man will
not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer (statesman, Nobel 1952)
For there are deeds which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.
Shelley (1792-1822)
Behind each beautiful wild fur there is an ugly story. It is a brutal,
bloody and barbaric story. The animal is not killed - it is tortured.
I don't think a fur coat is worth it.
Mary Tyler Moore
Cruelty is one fashion statement we can all do without.
Rue McClanahan (actress)
What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is
not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
Jeremy Bentham (philosopher)
Animal life, somber mystery. All nature protests against the
barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures
his inferior brethren.
Jules Michelet (historian)
For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he
who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
Pythagoras (mathematician)
You Shall Love Each Other. Thou shalt not kill.
God (supreme being)
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.
Romain Rolland (author, Nobel 1915)
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.
Leonardo Da Vinci (artist and scientist)
My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have
the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in
the guilt.
Anna Sewell (author)
All cruelty springs from weakness.
Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
The infliction of cruelty with a clear conscience is a delight to moralists.
That is why they invented hell.
Bertand Russell
It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed,
than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (poet)
Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.
Do not trouble their joy, don't harrass them, don't deprive them of their
happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on
superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness,
defile the earth by your apppearance on it, and leave the traces of your
foulness after you--alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (author)
Cruelty is fed, not weakened by tears.
Publilius Syrus (fl. B.C. 42)
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
Richard Steele (1672-1729)
ENVIRONMENT/NATURE
Spring -- An experience in immortality.
Thoreau (1817-1862)
If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth
with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and
expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change!
Longfellow (1819-1892)
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless;
peacocks and lilies, for instance.
John Ruskin (1819-1900)
We cannot think too highly of our nature, nor too humbly of ourselves.
Colton (1780-1832)
Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Thanks to the miles of superhighways under construction, America will soon
be a wonderful place to drive - if you don't want to stop.
Fletcher Knebel
Weed - a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emmerson (1803-1882)
My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while trying
to see things from the plant's point of view.
H.Fred Ale
Pigs and cows and chickens and people are all competing for grain.
Margaret Mead, anthropologist.
Government cannot close its eyes to the pollution of waters, to the erosion
of soil, to the slashing of forests any more than it can close its eyes to
the need for slum clearance and schools.
Franklin D.Rooselvelt
Man is a complex being, he makes desserts bloom and lakes die.
Gil Stern
Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of
rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.
Aldous Huxley
The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man.
Carl Jung
Nature understands her business better than we do.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
Francis Bacon
Nature uses as little as possible of anything.
Johannes Keppler (1571-1630)
Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up
every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever
abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
Thomas H. Huxley (biologist)
EQUALITY
I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as to a human being.
Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)
Respect your fellow earthlings.
Berke Breathed ("Bloom County" cartoonist)
Life is life--whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference
there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human
conception for man's own advantage...
Sri Aurobindo (poet and philosopher)
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.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)
I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings
called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with
such things as crawl upon earth.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)
I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the
way of a whole human being.
Abraham Lincoln (16th U.S. President)
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those
rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand
of tyranny.
Jeremy Bentham (philosopher)
Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to
recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and
shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see
the sun!
Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopher)
Even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other;
yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence
above a beast.
Ecclesiastes 3:19
When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel
pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.
Ingrid Newkirk (activist)
...the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our
brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat
of the pony and man--all belong to the same family... The White Man
must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.
Chief Seattle (Indian chief)
The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of
each is different.
Hippocrates (philosopher)
[The day should come when] all of the forms of life...will stand before the
court--the pileated woodpecker as well as the coyote and bear, the lemmings
as well as the trout in the streams.
William O. Douglas (late U.S. Supreme Court
Justice)
Late upon the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset... there flashed
upon my mind, unforseen and unsought, the phrase 'Reverence for Life'.
Albert Sweitzer
A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants
and animals as well as that of his fellowman, and when he devotes himself
helpfully to all life that is in need of help.
Albert Sweitzer
The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every
will-to-live the reverence for life that he gives his own.
Albert Sweitzer
That's my private ant. You're liable to break its legs.
Albert Sweitzer to a ten year old boy.
The realisation that our small planet is only one of many worlds gives
mankind the perspective it needs to realise sooner that our own world
belongs to all its creatures.
Arthur C. Clark
The quizzical expression of the monkey at the zoo comes from wondering
whether he is his brother's keeper or his keeper's brother.
Evan Esar
As long as human beings go on shedding the blood of animals, there
will never be any peace.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)
EXPERIMENTATION
Most animal experimentation is useless.
Henry Heimlich (physician)
The Queen has done all she could on the dreadful subject of vivisection,
and hopes that Mr. Gladstone will speak strongly against such a
practice which is a disgrace to humanity...
Queen Victoria
Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories
and are called medical research.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)
Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge,
it does so at the expense of human character.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)
I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that
are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts
upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and
it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking
further.
Mark Twain (author)
Vivisection is the blackest of all the black crimes that a man is
at present committing against God and his fair creation.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)
Mutilating animals and calling it "science" condemns the human species
to moral and intellectual hell...this hideous Dark Age of the mindless
torture of animals must be overcome.
Grace Slick (musician)
What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they
have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the
benefit of many, there will be no limit for their cruelty.
Leo Tolstoy (author)
After a great deal of research, we discovered that we
could develop new, innovative, and safe products
without testing them on animals.
Kenneth Landis (President, Benettons)
FARMING
I am in this business for what I can make out of it. If it pays me
to do this or that, I do it and as far as I am concerned that is all
there is to say about it.
anonymous (poultry farmer)
The recklessness with which we sacrifice our sense of decency to
maximize profit in the factory farming process sets a pattern for cruelty
to our own kind.
Jonathan Kozol (author)
FOOD CHOICES
Kill neither men, nor beasts, nor yet the food which goes into your mouth.
For if you eat living food, the same will quicken you, but if you kill your
food, the dead will kill you also. For life comes only from life, and from
death always comes death. And our bodies become what your foods are, even
as your spirits, likewise, become what your thoughts are. Eat nothing,
therefore, which a stronger fire than the fire of life has killed.
Wherefore, prepare and eat all fruits of trees, and all grasses of the
fields, and all milk of beasts good for eating. For all these are fed and
ripened by the fire of life; all are the gift of the angels of our Earthly
Mother. But eat nothing to which only the fire of death gives savour, for
such is of satan.
Jesus (BC 6?- 30 AD?)
(from an unknown source, not in the Bible, does anyone recognise it?)
Opus told me that his six-year pickled-herring habit ended after reading the
Compassionate Cook. He discovered the rutabaga frappe recipe and has been
practicing it ever since.
Berke Breathed ("Bloom County" cartoonist)
How good it is to be well-fed, healthy, and kind all at the same time.
Henry Heimlich (physician)
The butcher relenteth not at the bleating of the lamb; neither is the heart
of the cruel moved with ditress. But the tears of the compassionate are
sweeter than dew-drops, falling from roses on the bosom of spring.
Akhenaton? (c.BC 1375)
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel
better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we're not
contributing to their pain.
Paul and Linda McCartney (musicians)
We stopped eating meat many years ago. During the course of a Sunday lunch
we happened to look out of the kitchen window at our young lambs playing
happily in the fields. Glancing down at our plates, we suddenly realized
that we were eating the leg of an animal who had until recently been playing
in a field herself. We looked at each other and said, "Wait a minute, we
love these sheep--they're such gentle creatures. So why are we eating them?"
It was the last time we ever did.
Linda and Paul McCartney (musicians)
And God said, behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is
upon the face of the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of
a tree yeilding seed, to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of
the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth
upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for
meat: and it was so.
Genesis 1, 29 & 30.
Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how
can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)
If civilised man had to kill the animals he eats, the number of vegetarians
would rise astronomically.
Christian Morgensen
Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of
life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
Albert Einstein (physicist, Nobel 1921)
It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely
physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially
influence the lot of mankind.
Albert Einstein (physicist, Nobel 1921)
If you could see or feel the suffering you wouldn't think twice. Give
back life. Don't eat meat.
Kim Basinger (actress)
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race,
in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)
Compassion is the foundation of everything positive,
everything good. If you carry the power of compassion
to the marketplace and the dinner table, you can make
your life really count.
Rue McClanahan (actress)
If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing
from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because
...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act
which is contrary to the moral feeling--killing.
Leo Tolstoy (author)
Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh?
For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of
soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought
his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of
dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts
that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How
could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides
flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench?
How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made
contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from
mortal wounds?
Plutarch (essayist and biographer)
But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh 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.
Plutarch (essayist and biographer)
You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the
rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.
Harvey Diamond (author)
People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a
justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic,
we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people,
since this has also been done since the earliest of times.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is
concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (author)
I grew up in cattle country--that's why I became a vegetarian.
Meat stinks, for the animals, the environment, and your health.
k.d. lang (musician)
It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary
preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or
digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror
does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (poet)
We manage to swallow flesh, only because we do not think of the cruel and
sinful thing we do. There are many crimes which are the creation of man
himself, the wrongfullness of which is put down to their divergence from
habit, custom, or tradition. But cruelty is not of these. It is a fundamental
sin, and admits of no arguments or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow
our heart to grow callous, it protests against cruelty, is always clearly
heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of
us--in fact, any one who does not join in is dubbed a crank.
Rabindranath Tagore (poet, Nobel 1913)
I just couldn't stand the idea of eating meat--and I really do think that
it has made me calmer...People's general awareness is getting much better,
even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the calves are actually
killed so that the milk doesn't go to them but to us can't really be right,
and if you've seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because it can't
understand why its calf isn't by it, it can make you think a lot.
Kate Bush (singer and songwriter)
How can you eat anything with eyes?
Will Kellogg (creator "Kellogg's Corn Flakes")
What with our hooks, snares, nets, and dogs, we are at war with all living
creatures, and nothing comes amiss but that which is either too cheap or too
common; and all this is to gratify a fantastical palate.
Seneca (Roman Stoic philosopher)
Vegetarianism is not a fad. It is a great and essential part of the
religion of humanity. It is a step into a higher, because a less selfish
way of life. It makes progress possible, and both the individual and social
development is at present seriously blocked by the meat habit and all that
it implies and involves. As long as we treat other living, sensitive
creatures with like feelings as ours as carcasses for the market, and meat
to be consumed, we must shut our eyes to the real kinship of all living
things and thus lose an essential factor in learning to understand, even
in some degree, this mysterious world in which we find ourselves. Social
progress is blocked no less than individual development. In a dozen ways
this barbarous habit, inherited from savage ancestors, stands in the way
of practical reforms which are much needed.
Ernest Bell (1851-1933)
FREEDOM
Liberty is given by nature even to mute animals.
Tacitus (55-117 A.D.)
Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature,
and is determined in its actions by itself alone.
Spinoza (1632-1677)
What is so beneficial to the people as liberty, which we see not only to be
greedily sought after by men, but also by beasts, and to be preferred to all
things.
Cicero (B.C. 106-43)
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is
responsible for everything he does.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
GOOD/EVIL
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to
do nothing.
Edmund Burke (statesman and orator)
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore
only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its
fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its
attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect
mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all
others stem from it.
Milan Kundera (author and playright)
It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.
Albert Einstein
Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.
Ghandi
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction.
Pacal (1817-1862)
The best known evil is the most tolerable.
Livy (BC 59 -17 AD)
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking
at the root.
Thoreau (1817-1862)
The lives of the best of us are spent in choosing between evils.
Junius (1740-1818)
When our vices leave us, we flatter ourselves that we have left them.
La Rouchefoucauld (1613-1680)
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary, men alone are
quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1934)
Evil is simply misplaced force. It can be misplaced in time, like the
violence that is acceptable in war is unacceptable in peace. It can be
misplaced in space, like a burning coal on the rug rather than the fireplace.
Or it can be misplaced in proportion, like an excess of love can make us
overly sentimental, or a lack of love can make us cruel and destructive. It
is in things such as these that evil lies, not in a personal Devil who acts
as an Adversary.
Kabbalah (B.C. 1200?-700? A.D.)
Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion,
or corruption of that which has substance.
John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
What is evil? - Whatever springs from weakness.
Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.
Socrates (B.C.469-399)
To overcome evil with good is good, to resist evil by evil is evil.
Mohammed (570-632 A.D.)
The greatest evils, are from within us; and from ourselves also we must look
for the greatest good.
Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667)
Preventives of evil are far better than remedies; cheaper and easier of
application, and surer in result.
Tryon Edwards (1809-1894)
He who does evil that good may come, pays a toll to the devil to let him
into heaven.
Hare and Charles (c. 1830)
Evil events from evil causes spring.
Aristophanes (B.C. 448-380)
There are a thousand forms of evil; there will be a thousand remedies.
Ovid (B.C. 43-18 A.D.)
No one ever reached the worst of a vice at one leap.
Juvenal (40-125 A.D.)
No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.
La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
Wickedness may prosper for awhile, but in the long run, he that sets all the
knaves at work will pay them.
L'Estrange (1616-1704)
This is the course of every evil deed, that, propagating still it brings
forth evil.
Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834)
If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call
men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.
Horace Mann (1796-1859)
One may say that evil does not exist for subjective man at all, that there
exist only different conceptions of good. Nobody ever does anything
deliberately in the interests of evil, for the sake of evil. Everybody acts
in the interests of good, as he understands it. But everybody understands
it in a different way. Consequently men drown, slay, and kill one another
in the interests of good.
Gurdjieff (1873-1949)
Sin is hoping for another life and eluding the implacable grandeur of this
life.
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
The sun shines even on the wicked.
Seneca (B.C. 3-65 A.D.)
It is some compensation for great evils that they enforce great lessons.
Bovee (1820-1904)
What has this unfeeling age of ours left untried, what wickedness has it
shunned?
Horace (B.C. 65-8)
It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law.
Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that
human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no
distinction between good and evil.
Anatole France (1844-1924)
Every evil in the bud is easily crushed: as it grows older, it becomes
stronger.
Cicero (B.C. 106-43)
Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.
Romans (c. 56 A.D.)
When better choices are not to be had,
We needs must take the seeming best of bad.
Samuel Daniel (1562?-1619)
Let no man be sorry he has done good, because others have done evil! If a
man has acted right, he has done well, though alone; if wrong, the sanction
of all mankind will not justify him.
Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.
Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834)
Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods, choose both.
Tryon Edwards (1809-1894)
The true rule in determining to embrace or reject anything is not whether
it have any evil in it, but whether it have more of evil than of good.
There are few things wholly evil or wholly good.
Lincoln (1809-1865)
Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers on
their road. - Both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we
find they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.
Colton (1780-1832)
It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that in all things good, gain is
harder and slower than loss; but in all things bad or evil, getting is
quicker and easier than getting rid of them.
Hare & Charles (c. 1830)
The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain
that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of
murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in
ours.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
To talk goodness is not good...Only to do it is.
Chinese Proverb
To be doing good deeds is man's most glorious task.
Sophocles (B.C. 495-406)
A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost;
he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers
love.
Basil (329-379 A.D.)
HEALTH
Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.
Hosea Ballou (1771-1852)
Men worry over the great number of diseases, while doctors worry over the
scarcity of effective remedies.
Pien Ch'iao (fl. B.C. 255)
Some remedies are worse than the disease.
Publilius Syrus (fl. B.C. 42)
By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.
Shakespeare (1564-1616)
He who cures a disease may be the skillfullest, but he that prevents it is
the safest physician.
Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
William Osler (1849-1919)
Before thirty, men seek disease; after thirty, disease seeks men.
Chinese Proverb
Misdirected life force is the activity in disease process. Disease has no
energy save what it borrows from the life of the organism. It is by
adjusting the life force that healing must be brought about, and it is the
sun as transformer and distributor of primal spiritual energy that must be
utilized in this process, for life and the sun are so intimately connected.
Kabbalah (B.C. 1200?-700? A.D.)
Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of
compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life,
which must be understood before they may be guided.
Paracelsus (1493-1541)
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of
medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.
Bacon (1561-1626)
As long as men are liable to die and are desirous to live, a physician will
be made fun of, but he will be well paid.
La Bruyere (1645-1696)
He's the best physician that knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.
Franklin (1706-1790)
It is with disease of the mind, as with those of the body; we are half dead
before we understand our disorder, and half cured when we do.
Colton (1780-1832)
A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may,
after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
Beecher (1813-1878)
Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two
bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under
the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.
William Osler (1849-1919)
The superior doctor prevents sickness;
The mediocre doctor attends to impending sickness;
The inferior doctor treats actual sickness;
Chinese Proverb
Doctors prescribe medicine of which they know little
to cure diseases of which they know less
in human beings of which they know nothing.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly
a thing to be encouraged in others.
Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)
Prevention is better than cure.
Erasmus (1466-1536)
Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight
it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common
death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help
she can muster.
Paracelsus (1493-1541)
Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right
hygiene - nine-tenths of it!
Henry Miller (1891-1980)
I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
But when ill indeed,
Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.
George Colman (1762-1836)
Physician - One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the
disease.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Happiness? That's nothing more than good health and a poor memory.
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
HUNTING
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)
This is the true joy in life; being used for a purpose recognized by
yourself as a mighty one, and being a force of nature instead of a
feverish, selfish little clod.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)
All good things are wild, and free.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)
There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or
with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)
The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job
is to salvage Mother Nature...We are facing a formidable enemy in this
field. It is the hunters...and to convince them to leave their guns on the
wall is going to be very difficult.
Jacques Cousteau (oceanographer)
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture
and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
Froude (1818-1894)
When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport;
When the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity.
The distinction between crime and justice is no greater.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
We have never understood why men mount the heads of animals and hang them
up to look down on their conquerers. Possibly it feels good to these men
to feel superior to animals, but does it not seem that if they were sure
of it they would not have to prove it? Often a man who is afraid must
constantly demonstrate his courage and, in the case of the hunter, must
keep a tangible record of his courage.
from 'The Sea of Cortez' by John Steinbeck
LAW/MORALITY
To see what is right, and not do it, is want of courage, or of principle.
Confucius (B.C. 551-479)
The human race afraid of nothing, rushes on through every crime.
Horace (B.C. 65-8)
Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.
Seneca (B.C. 3-65 A.D.)
I say, break the law.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)
If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behavior.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)
Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous
obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.
Thomas Jefferson (3rd U.S. President)
I tremble for my species when I reflect that God is just.
Thomas Jefferson (3rd U.S. President)
Even the animals have a sense of right or wrong. It is very well shown
in Kipling's Jungle Book.
Sri Aurobindo (poet and philosopher)
The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as
meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.
Albert Einstein
No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human
nature.
A.A.Milne
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin
Every man without passion has within him no principle of action, nor motive
of act.
Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771)
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
When you doubt, abstain.
Zoroaster (B.C. 628?-551?)
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Einstein (1879-1955)
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth
living.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled
with a responsibility.
Gerald W. Johnson (born 1890)
I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice.
And let me remind you also that moderation in pursuit of justice is no
virtue.
Barry Goldwater (born 1909)
We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain
duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can
influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was
before he entered it.
Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)
I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is
unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the
conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the
very highest respect for law.
Martin Luther King Jr. (civil rights leader)
ORIGINALITY/PROGRESS
How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which to-day are
fables to us!
Montaigne (1533-1592)
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with
which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first
appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen.
Aldous Huxley
The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow.
At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of
the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a
number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded
that they should burn none at all.
Maurice Maeterlinck
The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much
easier to give up than bad ones.
Somerset Maugham
That which seems to be the height of absurdity in one generation often
becomes the height of wisdom in another.
Adlai Stevenson.
Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
John Dewey
Crank - a man with a new idea until it succeeds.
Mark Twain
Every new opinion at its starting is precisely a minority of one.
Thomas Carlysle (1795-1881)
The perpetual obstacle to human advancement is custom.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Habit with him was all the test of truth.
"It must be right, I've done it since my youth."
George Crabbe (1754-1832)
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ
from that of their social environment.
Albert Einstein
One person can make all the difference in the world...For the first time in
recorded human history, we have the fate of the whole planet in our hands.
Chrissie Hynde (musician)
Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his
conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life.
Norman Cousins (author)
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to
favour freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain
without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of
its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did
and it never will.
Frederick Douglass (abolitionist)
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal
that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they
might have been.
Hazlitt (1778-1830)
He that knows nothing doubts nothing.
Herbert (1593-1632)
To do nothing is in everyone's power.
Samuel Johnson
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there
abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Emerson (1803-1882)
It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had the individuality
enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions.
Robert G.Ingersoll (1833-1899)
On the whole, it is patience which makes the final difference between those
who succeed or fail in all things. All the greatest people have it in an
infinite degree, and among the less, the patient weak ones always conquer
the impatient strong.
John Ruskin (1819-1900)
OTHER PHILOSOPHICAL STUFF
[George Bernard] Shaw is an acute thinker. He refuses to be deceived
into the belief of the greatness of man. He says that man must rise
higher.
Sri Aurobindo (poet and philosopher)
I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not
retreat a single inch and *I will be heard*.
William Lloyd Garrison (author)
It is a cruel folly to offer up to ostentation so many lives of creatures,
as to make up the state of our treats.
William Penn (Quaker colonizer of America)
Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not also
the only one that deserves to be laughed at?
Greville (1554-1628)
Zoo: an excellent place to study human beings.
Evan Esar
All zoos actually offer the public, in return for the taxes spent upon them,
is a form of idle witless amusment, compared to which a visit to the state
penitentiary, or even a state legislature in session, is informing,
stimulating and enobling.
H.L. Mencken
Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.
Desmond Morris
When I was a kid I said to my father one afternoon, "Daddy, will you take me
to the zoo?" He answered, "If the zoo wants you let them come and get you."
Jerry Lee Lewis
Anyone can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right
person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and
in the right way - that is not easy.
Aristotle (B.C. 384-322)
Anger is a great force. If you control it, it can be transmuted into a
power which can move the whole world.
Sivananda (born 1887)
Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury
that provokes it.
Seneca (B.C. 3-65 A.D.)
The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual
disposition in man...it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door.
Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893)
The sum of the whole is this: walk and be happy; walk and be healthy.
The best way to lengthen out our days is to walk steadily and with a purpose.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.
Buddha (B.C. 568-488)
Fishing is a pleasure of retirement,
yet the angler has the power to let the fish live or die.
Chessplaying is an enjoyable pastime,
yet the players are motivated by the idea of war.
Hung Tzu-ch'eng (1593-1665)
