22 quotes
Vacation days may be much more beautifully spent communing with the transcendent spirit of Nature than in the butchery and terrorisation of her simple-hearted children.
The New Ethics (1907)
No being will do his most luminous and exalted thinking with his stomach a morgue.
The New Ethics (1907)
In the ideal state, man treats the races of beings affiliated with him, not as objects of pillage, but as beings with rights and feelings and capabilities of happiness and misery, like himself.
The New Ethics (1907)
There are not ten men on the continent of America at this moment who will not, two hundred years from now, be considered as 'back numbers.'
The New Ethics (1907)
The Great Law of Love—the abstaining from that which we do not like when done to ourselves—Reciprocity—is the only relation to exist among associated beings of any kind.
The New Ethics (1907)
In short, man, when he acts ideally, treats these beings at all times as associates, not as slaves or machines, as his best friends and most faithful and valuable allies.
The New Ethics (1907)
The philosophies of this world have all been framed by, and from the standpoint of, a single species, and they are still managed and maintained in the interests of this species.
The New Ethics (1907)
A being who can look without weeping on the heart-rending facts that fill the cities of our so-called civilisation has a psychology granitic enough to gaze unmoved on a hellful of roasting souls.
The New Ethics (1907)
The inhabitants of the earth are bound to each other by the ties and obligations of a common kinship. Man is simply one of a series of sentients, differing in degree, but not in kind, from the beings below, above, and around him.
The New Ethics (1907)
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)
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)
In the ideal universe the life and happiness of no being are contingent on the suffering and death of any other, and the fact that in this world of ours life and happiness have been and are to-day so commonly maintained by the infliction of misery and death by some beings on others is the most painful fact that ever entered an enlightened mind.
The New Ethics (1907)
The question that arises in the mind of the ordinary man when a change in the arrangements of the world is suggested to him is not what will be the effect of the change on the universe, but what will be its effect on him—on that remarkable atom of the universe so zealously partitioned off from the rest by his own skin.
The New Ethics (1907)
The horse, the mule, the camel, and the ox have pretty nearly made man what he is. They have contributed to human welfare and achievement to an extent that can never be estimated. They are the bone and sinew of civilization—the plodding, faithful, indispensable allies of man in almost everything he undertakes, whether of war or peace, pomp or pleasure.
The New Ethics (1907)
Oh, this primitive, just-born, brutal ball! How long—oh! how long—how many suffering centuries and centuries, before the simple laws of social well-being, which men have at such expense worked out for themselves, will extend their benedictions consistently over the pain-plagued races of universal life?
The New Ethics (1907)
If man acted unkindly toward non-human beings only when he had to do so in order to avoid harm to himself—if he were as economical in his injuries to others as he would be if he had to endure them himself—the violence which to-day marks his dominion of the planet would be reduced to a mere vestige of what it is.
The New Ethics (1907)
Civilization is not exclusively a human thing. It is a joint product — ^the result of the combined labors and sacrifices of many races of mammals and birds. And no one of these races has the right to take more than its share of the blessings of civilization nor to shift upon others more than their portion of life's ills.
The New Ethics (1907)
Cotton is to-day by far the most important textile used by mankind, and wool is next. And we may expect that this sartorial reform, already so far advanced, will go on, and that the more enlightened generations of the future, for both moral and economic reasons, will clothe themselves entirely in fabrics of bloodless origin.
The New Ethics (1907)
The function of punishment is to do good, to improve the universe, to add to the sum total of happiness. And punishment which does not do this is not justified. It is a crime in itself. The penal acts of society should be judged just as other acts of conduct are judged—by their utilities.
The New Ethics (1907)