shauna

“Facts are important, but they don't, on their own, provide meaning - especIally when they are so bound to linguistic choices. What does a precisely measured pain response in chickens mean? Does it mean pain? What does pain mean? No matter how much we learn about the physiology of the pain - how long it persists, the symptoms it produces, and so forth - none of it will tell us anything definitive. But place facts in a story, a story of compassion or domination, or maybe both - place them in a story about the world we live in and who we are and who we want to be - and you can begin to speak meaningfully about eating animals.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologise years after an offence, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
― Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

“The first person, who having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say, 'this is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: 'do not listen to this imposter, you are lost if you forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to all, and the Earth to no one'.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau