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To keep a man (slave or servant) for your own advantage merely, to keep an animal that you may eat it, is a lie. You cannot look that man or animal in the face.

— Edward Carpenter England's Ideal and Other Papers on Social Subjects (1887)

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More quotes by Edward Carpenter

Every human being grows up inside a sheath of custom, which enfolds it as the swathing clothes enfold the infant.

The money-grubber has been floating with the great current of society, while the poor man has been swimming against it.

Defence of Criminals: A Criticism of Morality (1889)

There is no solution except the freedom of woman—which means of course also the freedom of the masses of the people, men and women, and the ceasing altogether of economic slavery.

Love's Coming of Age (1896)

The law is in a sense the consolidated public opinion of society.

Defence of Criminals: A Criticism of Morality (1889)

Let every woman whose heart bleeds for the sufferings of her sex, hasten to declare herself and to constitute herself, as far as she possibly can, a free woman.

Love's Coming of Age (1896)

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All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away.

Mahavira

A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.

Bertrand Russell Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948)

Histories are more full of Examples of the Fidelity of dogs than of Friends.

Alexander Pope

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Attribution

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