Quotes About Compassion

Life is about love. It's about whom you love and whom you hurt. Life's about how you love yourself and how you hurt yourself. Life's about how you love and hurt the people close to you. Life is about how you love and hurt the people who just cross your path for a moment. Life is about love.

You hope friends and family will be sensitive or clairvoyant enough to know what you want. "If you loved me, you'd know what's wrong" is a common assumption.

A friend's loyalty lasts longer than their memory. Over the course of a long friendship, you might fight with your friend, even get angry with them. But a true friend will forget that anger after a while, because their loyalty to their friend outweighs the memory of the disagreement.

You don't like people?" Raf asked. "I don't like what people do to each other.

lives when we may begin to see even the commonest animals on their own terms, fellow creatures with their own needs to meet and hardships to bear, joined with us in the mystery of life and death—and frankly, for all of our more exalted endowments, not all that much less enlightened than the sagest of naked apes about the meaning of it all.

Factory farming isn't just killing: It is a negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature ... It confronts us with the animal equivalent of Abraham Lincoln's condemnation of human slavery: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

Now what is it that moves our very hearts and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? … They have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which make their sufferings so especially touching. Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God…. There is something so very dreadful, so Satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.21

Go into the largest livestock operation, search out the darkest and tiniest stall or pen, single out the filthiest, most forlorn little lamb or pig or calf, and that is one of God's creatures you're looking at, morally indistinguishable from your beloved Fluffy or Frisky.

A helpless elephant hunted by sharpshooters waiting by the water hall, a deer fleeing the hunter or dying on a highway, a pig or lamb or calf trapped amid the bedlam, - they cannot draw a meaning from their hardship, or find refuge in God, or pray for deliverance. That still leaves the enduring of it, the deprivation and fear and panic and loneliness. We know those feelings too.

There is something so very dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power. -Cardinal John Henry Newman

The fact that creatures cannot act morally toward us in no way diminishes our ability to act morally toward them.

Everyone who derives pleasure from tormenting animals, or watching the torment, insists they do so for only the loftiest motives.

There is something so very dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.' -Cardinal John Henry Newman

Much as I admire anyone who bothers to take the matter seriously, some theorists, at least in their more abstract arguments, miss a crucial point by assuming that to be cared for, a creature must somehow be made our equal, which isn't even true in our human affairs, where often those we love most are the weak and vulnerable.

When standard agricultural practice treats billions of animals as unfeeling flesh, at the very moment when humankind has established beyond reasonable doubt their conscious mental and emotional lives, it is no good to go on as if nothing had changed.

Gratuitous cruelty cannot take cover behind the fact of inevitable suffering.

If this animal is to be protected, why not that identical one, too? If it is cruelty to confine or mistreat a dog, a cat, or even a pet lamb or pig, why is it not cruelty to confine and mistreat millions of equally sensitive animals at Smithfield, IBP, ConAngra, and other such places? When we speak of the unavoidable severity of livestock production or laboratory experiments or trapping, and so on, just how rigorously are we defining unavoidable?

Go into the largest livestock operation, search out the darkest and tiniest stall or pen, single out the filthiest, most forlorn little lamb or pig or calf, and that is one of God's creatures you're looking at.

That is the whole idea of mercy, after all, that it is entirely discretionary, entirely undeserved.... There is no such thing as a right to mercy, not for the animals and not even for us.

When we condemn cruelty to animals, we don't call it un-American, or un-European, or un-Japanese. We call it inhumane.

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even where animals are concerned.

When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs just too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that here what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

For me it was a simple moral step of extending that vision out into the world, for what are dogs but affable emissaries from the animal kingdom?

We can challenge farming practices today without passing judgement on the whole of human experience.