Emily Hess

“Tyrannical anthropocentrism" is a good phrase to keep in mind next time you hear someone describe any animal-protection cause as "anti-human," one of those cliches of disparagement that's tossed off as if it settled anything: "Why don't you go help humans instead?" We're left to ask why such people always seem to think that it is beneath human beings to admit and correct cruelty but not to commit cruelty in the first place. It has the ring of self-satisfied excuse-making, by those who lack empathy and resent the quality in others. Why do the very people who like to rhapsodize most about human dignity so often try to explain away practices and industries so transparently beneath our dignity?”
― 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

“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals." - Theodo Adorno”
― Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

“Wherever you are is home
And the earth is a paradise
Wherever you set your feet is holy land...
You don't live off it like a parasite.
You line in it, and it in you,Or you don't survive.
And that is the only worship of God there is.

by Wilfred Pelletier and Ted Poole”
― Elizabeth Roberts, Earth Prayers: 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations from Around the World