109 quotes
We are striving for the amelioration of this suffering world. Let us be economical.
Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895)
It is a crime to start a child learning to read and write as soon as it is out of the cradle. We should get ideas before starting on the business of representing them.
This is a wintry world. Low temperatures prevail in the hearts of men. Altruism is scarce. Gaunt but blessed hands stretch up to us everywhere for bread. They are the holy hands of Truth.
Ethics and Education (1912)
No wonder the child loves the camp-fire. The camp-fire was the ancestor of the hearth—the first bright spot in that dark world out of which our forefathers groped their way so long ago.
The Law of Biogenesis (1914)
"Wild animals" merely strangers to us—beings who live apart from and independent of us. They suffer and enjoy the same as we do. They have their own ends and justifications of life.
Ethics and Education (1912)
It is a fact of our world, tho, that Death is as inevitable as Birth. The coffin is as natural as the cradle.
The frail, narrow, fantastic character of human sympathy is the most mournful fact in human nature. 'Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn,' and his inhumanity to not-men makes the planet a ball of pain and terror.
The Universal Kinship (1906)
From the time an individual human comes into the world a sprawling, squalling, unpeepered vagrant, to the hour he goes out in tragedy and pain, life is one continuation of the very conditions which brought him into the world a confirmed egoist.
Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899)
A central truth of the Darwinian philosophy is the unity and consanguinity of all organic life. And during the next century or two the ethical corollary of this truth is going to receive unprecedented recognition in all departments of human thought.
The Universal Kinship (1906)
Oh this killing, killing, killing—this awful, never-stopping, never-ending, world-wide butchery! What a world! 'Ideal'?—and 'perfect'?—and 'all-wise'? Certainly—to tigers, and highwaymen, and people who are sound asleep; but to everybody else it is simply monstrous.
The New Ethics (1907)
Ethics is the most vital and important of all sciences. It has both its theoretical and applied aspects. Its mission is nothing less than the establishment of harmony among the inhabitants of the earth and the transformation of world-wide contention into peace and happiness.
Ethics and Education (1912)
The most hopeless chains are those of which we are unconscious. The darkest slavery is that which binds the human brain.
The New Ethics (1907)
Our own happiness, and that of our species, are assumed to be so pre-eminent that we sacrifice without hesitancy the most sacred interests of others, in order that our own may be carefully provided for.
The New Ethics (1907)
Deeds are right and wrong in themselves; and whether they are right or wrong, good or evil, proper or improper, whether they should be done or should not be done, depends upon their effects upon the welfare of the inhabitants of the universe.
The Universal Kinship (1906)
Out of the years of the past comes a message from one who towered among us a generation ago—a message voicing in all its fervency the prayer and hope of Humanity: "Young man, young woman, join yourself in your youth with some unpopular cause and grow up loyal in its service."
Ethics and Education (1912)
We should be a little more disposed to move along. We live in a world that is neither petrified or perfect. The universe is a liquid. It is flowing. Humanitarianism is in the air.
The stars of heaven never looked down on a more pitiful sight than that of a horse, after having drudged faithfully all his days in the service of his lord, cast out in his helpless old age to wander and perish.
Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899)
The human beings who possess the dominion of land and machinery and compel others, in order to obtain the essentials of existence, to serve them, are as truly masters of slaves as they who exact blood from the dorsals of their fellows with literal slave whips.
Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899)
This is a gray world. There is enough sorrow in it, even though we cease to scourge each other—the sorrow of floods, famines, fires, earthquakes, storms, diseases, and death. We should trust each other, and love each other, and sympathize with and help each other, and be patient and forgiving.
Henry S. Salt in Seventy Years Among Savages (1921)
Oh this poor world, this poor, suffering, ignorant, fear-filled world! How can men be blind or deranged enough to think it is a good world? How can they be cold and satanic enough to be unmoved by the groans and anguish, the writhing and tears, that come up from its unparalleled afflictions?
The Universal Kinship (1906)