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Every system of law is a system of education, and, in extending legal sanction to the scientific torture of animals, the State educates the nation in a false view of the relations of man to the lower creatures, encourages selfishness and cruelty and the disregard of the rights of the weak by the strong.

— Frances Power Cobbe The Modern Rack (1889)

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More quotes by Frances Power Cobbe

I could discern clearly, even at that early age, the essential difference between people who are kind to dogs and people who really love them.

My great panacea for making Society at once better and more enjoyable would be to cultivate greater sincerity.

The Duties of Women (1881)

Love naturally reverses the idea of obedience, and causes the struggle between any two people who truly love each other to be not who shall command, but, who shall yield.

The Duties of Women (1881)

We can benefit our kind in no way so much as by being ourselves pure and upright and noble-minded.

He who does most to cure woman of her weakness, her frivolity and her servility, will likewise at the same stroke do most to cure man of his brutality, his selfishness and his sensuality.

The Duties of Women (1881)

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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: Frances Power Cobbe (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.