Quotes About Compassion

When we call something a necessary evil, something requiring the suffering or death of a fellow creature, the evil is real and it had better be necessary.

It would be enough if more of us would simply compare our own principles, our own vision of life and nature, whether secular or religious or somewhere in between, wit the reality of how animals are actually treated, often in our name. If such things cannot be justified, if the great majority of us find them reprehensible and wrong and unworthy of humanity, then why on earth are they all permitted? Why do we tolerate them, in our lives and in our laws?

Compassion for animals doesn't drain away some finite reserve of moral energy and idealism, to the detriment of human welfare, but surely adds to the supply.

Why just say grace when you can show it?

Mr Wallace is sitting beside a dying elk. If elk could scream, he reflects, the woods would have fewer hunters.

In the same way, one might well ask what good it does to keep the elephants alive at all if their sole value on earth is a hunter's fee. Why even bother if we think so little of these creatures, after all that they have endured at the hands of man, that we are now willing to let them be farmed and administered in this nice, systematic way by the very people who have already done them so much evil?

The more we understand about life, in general, the more we value the lives of all creatures. -Paul Johnson, British historian

All predators are limited in the kind and duration of suffering they can inflict and in the level of moral degradation of which they are capable. We are not.

Since when does love ever diminish as we spread it around? Among humans it usually works the other way. So too in our dealings with the animals we know best.

My brand of conservatism also brings with it a basic realism, accepting that there is a certain amount of suffering in the world beyond our power to avoid or spare, especially in the case of animals.

The more we understand about life, in general, the more we value the lives of all creatures. -Paul Johnson, British historian

It is a terrible thing that religious people today can be so indifferent to the cruelty of the farms, shrugging it off as so much secular, animal rights foolishness. They above all should hear the call to mercy. They above all should have some kindness to spare.

It would be enough if more of us would simply compare our own principles, our own vision of life and nature, whether secular or religious or somewhere in between, with the reality of how animals are actually treated, often in our name. If such things cannot be justified, if the great majority of us find them reprehensible and wrong and unworthy of humanity, then why on earth are they all permitted? Why do we tolerate them, in our lives and in our laws?

That is the whole idea o 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.

Nature has its own hardships, but its own kindnesses, too, like straw and room to sleep and the are of a mother for her young.

Those who dismiss love for our fellow creatures as mere sentimentality overlook a good and important part of our humanity.

For all we know it, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate, blunt, arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an animal shelter or a slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal suffering might not at times be all the more terrifying and all-encompassing without benefit of the words and concepts that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but consolation. Whatever is going on inside their heads, it doesn't seem mere to them.

The very industries clinging to such theories employ cats and dogs and chimps and so many other animals in laboratory test of analgesics and surgeries, a useless exercise unless they experience physical pain comparable to ours.

Few of us would regret the years it takes to complete an education or master a crucial skill. So why complain about the perseverance needed to become a well-balanaced and truly compassionate human being?

As long as a sense of self-importance rules your being, you will never know lasting peace.

Being altruistic not only helps us to benefit others, but it is also the most satisfying way to live.

Tibetan poet Shabkar said: "One with compassion is kind even when angry; one without compassion will kill even as he smiles.

He understands that all beings have the power to free themselves from ignorance and unhappiness, but that they don't know it. How

The ultimate reason for meditating is to transform ourselves in order to be better able to transform the world.