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The professional and financial interest in continuing animal experimentation helps to explain at least some resistance to the notion that animals have a complex emotional life and are capable of experiencing the higher emotions, such as love, compassion, altruism, disappointment and nostalgia. To acknowledge such a possibility implies certain moral obligations. If chimpanzees can experience loneliness and mental anguish, it becomes more wrong to use them for experiments in which they are isolated and anticipate daily pain.

— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson When Elephants Weep (1994)

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More quotes by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Unlike a human smile, purring cannot be, as far as anyone knows, faked.

The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (2002)

The idea, to a cat, that somebody else owns him is ludicrous.

The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (2002)

"Every day I get many calls, from all over the world about how awful you are. How awful this article is. How bad it all is for psychoanalysis."

Almost all analysts in America are physicians and psychiatrists, and the medical profession is layered into a strict hierarchy. Every psychiatrist in a hospital is chief of some service, or head of some department.

The cat does not merely experience contentment, he exudes it. You cannot be in the presence of a contented cat and not have some of that contentment rub off on you. Which surely is a good part of the reason we love cats so.

The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (2002)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.