Henry Salt
Henry Salt
English writer, social reformer for prisons, schools, economics, animal rights,
author of Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress
(1851-1939)
"It is difficult to maintain perfect love for animals so long as we continue to eat them.”
"To advocate the rights of animals is far more than to plead for
compassion or justice towards the victims of ill-usage ; it is not only, and
not primarily, for the sake of the victims that we plead, but for the sake
of mankind itself. Our true civilization, our race-progress, our humanity
(in the best sense of the term) are concerned in this development ; it is
ourselves, our own vital instincts, that we wrong, when we trample on the
rights of the fellow-beings, human or animal, over whom we chance to hold
jurisdiction."
— Henry Salt, Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress,
1892
Our thanks goes to Deanna Dacus for submitting the next three quotations:
"It is not THIS bloodshed or THAT bloodshed that must cease, but ALL bloodshed - all wonton infliction of pain or death."
"In spite of their boasted progress in sciences and arts, my countrymen are still practically ignorant of the real kinship which exists between mankind and the other races, and of the duties which this kinship implies. They are still the victims of that old anthropocentric superstition which pictures man as the centre of the universe, and separated from the inferior animals - mere playthings made for his august pleasure and amusement - by a deep intervening gulf."
"The cause of each and all of the evils that afflict the world is the same - the general lack of humanity, the lack of the knowledge that all sentient life is akin, and that he who injures a fellow being is in fact doing injury to himself."
