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

“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

“Unthinkable to most people today, obvious to most people tomorrow: We are all better off without the whole sorry business. And in the vocabulary of civilized people, who will miss the term "slaughterhouse"?”
― Matthew Scully, Fear Factories: Arguments about Innocent Creatures and Merciless People

“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