Quotes About Sentience

Die Tiere empfinden wie der Mensch Freude und Schmerz, Glück und Unglück.

What happens to them matters to them.

No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness that we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?

Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

It's okay to eat fish because they don't have any feelings.

It's okay to eat fish because they don't have any feelings.

He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.

He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back.

you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don't have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behavior of a sentient race.

One of the many quotes on love..."Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language--and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance.

I don't know why you would even bring up the internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour's exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn't draw attention to it, if I were you.

Though any species on any dumb gobworld may develop sentience (the poor bastards), no government ever does'?

you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don't have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behavior of a sentient race. It is the behavior of wild animals.

Kick-starting the gas-guzzling subcompact go-cart of organic sentience is as easy as shoving it down a hill and watching the whole thing spontaneously explode.

The Rare Earth Hypothesis means well, but it's colossally, spectacularly, gloriously wrong. Life isn't difficult, it isn't picky, it isn't unique, and fate doesn't enter into the thing. Kick-starting the gas-guzzling subcompact go-cart of organic sentience is as easy as shoving it down a hill and watching the whole thing spontaneously explode. Life wants to happen.

For who has not wondered whether everything in this world might be alive? Though it be made of stone or wood or metal, there might be life in it, or opinion or, worst of all, resentment. The hewn boards of any boardwalk, did they recall the bite of the saw? Does memory linger in them? Perhaps the forge's fire still dreams in each nail. A building might be made entirely of injured and brooding things.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties... The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

The evolution of sentience reflects the constant movement between those two poles. Evil—the dark side—won't be eradicated until it has been discarded as an option for acquiring power, subjugating would-be opponents, or offsetting feelings of anger, envy, or exclusion. Where victims of injustice exist, the dark side finds initiates.

Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron fillings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality

Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality

animals have minds capable of solving problems, as well as emotions and very definite personalities

It's okay to eat fish because they don't have any feelings.

Some things don't react. But everything's alive.