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Henry Stephens Salt Quotes

1851–1939 England

Henry Stephens Salt (20 September 1851 – 19 April 1939) was an influential English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions and the treatment of animals.

England
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Also known as: Henry S. Salt

Random Henry Stephens Salt quote

10 quotes

Have the lower animals "rights?" Undoubtedly—if men have.

The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice will bring with it in due course the emancipation of animals also. The two reforms are inseparably connected, and neither can be fully realized alone.

If "rights" exist at all—and both feeling and usage indubitably prove that they do exist—they cannot be consistently awarded to men and denied to animals, since the same sense of justice and compassion apply in both cases.

If "rights" exist at all … they cannot be consistently awarded to men and denied to animals, since the same sense of justice and compassion apply in both cases.

The ignorance, carelessness, and brutality are not only in the rough-handed slaughtermen, but in the polite ladies and gentlemen whose dietetic habits render the slaughtermen necessary.

I shall die ... as I have lived, rationalist, socialist, pacifist, and humanitarian.

Humanitarian Reformer and Man of Letters, George Hendrick, Illinois (1977)

Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless "beasts", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.

Seventy Years Among Savages (1921)

We have to decide, not whether the practice of fox-hunting, for example, is more, or less, cruel than vivisection, but whether all practices which inflict unnecessary pain on sentient beings are not incompatible with the higher instincts of humanity.

Oppression and cruelty are invariably founded on a lack of imaginative sympathy; the tyrant or tormentor can have no true sense of kinship with the victim of his injustice. When once the sense of affinity is awakened, the knell of tyranny is sounded, and the ultimate concession of "rights" is simply a matter of time.

As man is truly “humanised”, not by schools of cookery but by schools of thought, he will abandon the barbarous habit of his flesh-eating ancestors, and will make gradual progress towards a purer, simpler, more humane, and therefore more civilised diet-system.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Henry Stephens Salt (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.