J. Howard Moore

If human beings could only realise what the hare suffers, or the stag, when it is pursued by dogs, horses, and men bent on taking its life, or what the fish feels when it is thrust through and flung into suffocating gases, no one of them, …

The psychology of the exploitation of nonhuman beings by human beings is not different in kind from the psychology of any other act of exploitation. The great first cause of man's inhumanity to not-men is the same precisely as the great …

Deeds are right and wrong in themselves; and whether they are right or wrong, good or evil, proper or improper, whether they should be done or should not be done, depends upon their effects upon the welfare of the inhabitants of the …

All the barbarism is not behind us nor around us. History looks dark and discouraging to us, as we turn its terrible pages, but we would see something just as discouraging if we would look into a mirror.

The evolution of consciousness in its social and ethical aspects consists in the evolution of the ability to make real and vivid the phenomena that are more and more distant in both space and time.

The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of individuals with each other and against others is a significant fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of the earth. To this fact is due the restricted …

I saw the fishes playing there; I saw all that was in the whole world round; In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field, All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth. All these I saw, and say to you, That nothing lives …

The frail, narrow, fantastic character of human sympathy is the most mournful fact in human nature. 'Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn,' and his inhumanity to not-men makes the planet a ball of pain and terror.

The universe is an evolution. Change is as extensive as time and space. The present has come out of that which has been, and will enter into and determine that which is to be. Everything has a biography. Everything has …

Who, that has pity, is disposed to censure a child for rebelling against the useless and absurd rumination, thru painful years, of mummified languages and fearful mathematical formulae, which have no more real bearing, and which to the …

Living beings who love themselves no more ardently than they love others are prodigies, and it will never be otherwise so long as beings are born as they are and live in like conditions.

From the time an individual human comes into the world a sprawling, squalling, unpeepered vagrant, to the hour he goes out in tragedy and pain, life is one continuation of the very conditions which brought him into the world a confirmed …

The twofold function of individual culture is so to develop beings that they shall be able to perceive their proper relations to the rest of the uiniverse, to the inanimate about them, and to other beings in space and time, and realizing …

The purpose of all penal schemes should be, not reciprocity, but reformation pure and simple; not the relentless and absurd infliction of misery commensurate with the crimes committed, but the achievement of the largest possible …

An ox is of a very different nature from a fox, and men (some of them) are very unlike serpents, because the classes of impulses in the consciousnesses of these animals are for the most part very different in one animal from another. …

Since impulses are simply sensations which have become motor, and since sensations are only tendencies from without become conscious, the nature of any being may be said to be the manner in which it correlates the tendencies which it …

And what is it to act upon others as you would that others would act upon you? It is to put yourself in the place of others. It is consideration of others as ardent as consideration of self. It is the balancing of abilities, …

One thing is certain, however, and that is, that the most powerful instinct of human nature, the instinct to struggle and survive, the instinct to be superior, must be destroyed or greatly subordinated before the state here outlined can be …

Justice is more than equity: it is benevolence. It is not enough to live and let live. We should live and help live. There is as much grace and utility, as genuine moral glory, in the lifelong succor of the helpless by the strong as there …

The earliest examples of human association were those practically of autocentricism. Each individual considered himself the only or chief end for which the universe existed. Each's own individual welfare was the end for which he struggled, …

The weak submit because they are helpless and because they are ignorant, because they are incarcerated and disarmed, and because they have been taught and intimidated into believing that the conventional and the legal, whatever they are, …

Women are everywhere systematically deprived of privileges which men have fought and bled and died to obtain for themselves. In many lands a woman legally ceases to exist the day she is wed—if she ever existed before. Man has always been, …

The stars of heaven never looked down on a more pitiful sight than that of a horse, after having drudged faithfully all his days in the service of his lord, cast out in his helpless old age to wander and perish.

All over the non-human world, with few exceptions, each being seeks the satisfaction of his own desires, if not with positive disregard for the happiness and misery of the rest of the universe, at least with sincere unconcern. There is no …