Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Instiinct' blijft ook daarna de gebruikelijke verklaring wanneer het gedrag van dieren te veel op intelligentie lijkt te wijzen.

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be a family.

Thinking about her is the next best thing!

We celebrate together, and that makes sense. And we don't just gather, we eat. This wasn't always so. The federal government first thought to promote Thanksgiving as a day of fasting, since that was how it had been frequently observed for decades.

Intr-o zi, tu ai sa faci pentru mine lucruri care nu-ti plac. Asta inseamna familie.

Producing and eating our own food is, historically, much of what made us Americans and not subjects of European powers. While other colonies required massive imports to survive, early American immigrants, thanks to help from Native Americans, were almost entirely self-sustaining.

The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away (from the animal, our plate, our concern, ourselves) or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

Cutting down that tree was my last war! I asked him who won, which I thought was a nice question, because it would let him say that he won, and feel proud. He said, The ax won! It's always that way!

Food is not so much a symbol of freedom as the first requirement of freedom. We eat foods that are native to America on Thanksgiving to acknowledge that fact. In many ways, Thanksgiving initiates a distinctly American ideal of ethical consumerism. The Thanksgiving meal is America's founding act of conscientious consumption.

Rationally, factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all of my reading and conversations, I've yet to find a credible defense of it. But food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.

Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

We have waged war, or rather let a war be waged, against all of the animals we eat. This war is new and has a name: factory farming.

Wszyscy przeczuwamy niebezpiecze?stwo. Nasze jedzenie powstaje kosztem ogromnego cierpienia.Gdy kto? proponuje nam obejrzenie filmu o produkcji mi?sa, spodziewamy si? horroru. Mo?liwe, ?e wiemy wi?cej, ni? nam si? wydaje. Wolimy jednak odsuwa? od siebie t? ?wiadomo??. Jedz?c mi?so, spo?ywamy udr?czone zwierz?. Z bia?ka pochodz?cego od torturowanych stworze? powstaj? nasze mi??nie.

Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless —it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.

Those who defend pig factory farms argue that the farrowing crate is necessary because sows can sometimes accidentally crush their piglets. In the same way that the risk of a forest fire can be reduced by preemptively clearing the forest of all its trees, there is a cockeyed logic to this claim. The farrowing crate, like the gestation crate, confines the mother in a space so small she cannot turn around. Sometimes she will also be strapped to the floor.

Nie mo?emy wystÄ™powa? w obronie obojÄ™tnoÅ›ci i ignorancji. Kolejne pokolenia coraz wiÄ™cej wiedzÄ… o tym, jak wyglÄ…da dziaÅ'alno?? przemysÅ'u. Å»yjemy w czasach, w których krytyczne podejÅ›cie do chowu przemysÅ'owego staÅ'o siÄ™ cz??ciÄ… zbiorowej Å›wiadomoÅ›ci. To nas bÄ™dÄ… pyta?: jak zareagowaÅ'eÅ›, gdy dowiedziaÅ'eÅ› siÄ™ prawdy o zjadaniu zwierzÄ…t.

Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln, that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, "I could not have slept to-night if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.

Întru boal? È™i întru boal?", a continuat el s? citeasc?. "Asta îÈ›i doresc. S? nu cauÈ›i È™i s? nu aÈ™tepÈ›i miracole. Nu exist? miracole. Nu mai exist?. Iar pentru durerea care doare cel mai tare nu exist? vindecare. Exist? doar medicina, aceea de a-i crede suferinÈ›a celuilalt È™i de a fi acolo pentru el." (p. 317)

Shame is the work of memory against forgetting. Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely — yet not entirely — forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification.

To accept the factory farm —to feed the food it produces to my family, to support it with my money —would make me less myself

All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that's at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy: the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlicks, backpacks, shoes, jackets, goodbye.

Not in all ways (of course), but the animals you know have power: they have abilities humans lack, could be dangerous, could bring life, mean things that mean things.

My dad once told me that before I was born, when the only proof of my life was sonograms, he had to believe in me. In other words, being born allows your parents to stop believing in you.

Our methodologies . . . have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining. . . . This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations. . . . Most people . . . have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food.