Emily Hess

“It's no revelation-just a reminder we can all use- that farm animals suffer emotionally as well as physically.  Only various modern theories, like behaviorism, have every really questioned this, and those same theorie imagine a world in which all creatures but us merely mimic conscious feeling, unaware even of their agonies.”
― Matthew Scully, Fear Factories: Arguments about Innocent Creatures and Merciless People

“Our everyday experience does not prepare us to assimilate the gaping hugeness of the Grand Canyon or the crashing grandeur of Niagara Falls..... we have no response at the ready; our usual frames of reference don't fit... which is why the experience of awe has been called a 'reset button' for the human brain.”
― Caroline Paul, Tough Broad: From Boogie Boarding to Wing Walking―How Outdoor Adventure Improves Our Lives as We Age

“A few generations from now, after all, who is really going to care about most of the things we worry and argue about in politics today? No one after we have moved along, will think any more or less of us because we got it right or wrong on tax policy, on this program or that one, or on most of the other political questions, except security issues, that are often just contests for advantage, having not much to do with justice or conscience, and that will someday be as faintly recalled as the silver-versus-gold debates of another era. But how human beings treat the innocent and defenseless creatures under our power- that's one of those revealing marks we leave behind. It ranks with the most fundamental of human responsibilities. As a political cause it can hold its own in any fair tests of comparative importance.”
― Matthew Scully, Fear Factories: Arguments about Innocent Creatures and Merciless People

“How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth,
With its swirling vaporous atmosphere,
Its flowing and frozen climbing creatures,
The croaking things with wings that hang on rocks
And soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas...
How utterly rich and wild...
Yet some among us have the nerve,
The insolence, the brass, the gall to whine
About the limitations of our earthbound fate
And yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky.
We are none of us good enough
For the World we have.

by Edward Abbey”
― Elizabeth Roberts, Life Prayers : From Around the World : 365 Prayers, Blessings, and Affirmations to Celebrate the Human Journey