To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their facility when they are too large.
People think of animals as if they were vegetables, and that is not right. We have to change the way people think about animals. I encourage the Tibetan people and all people to move toward a vegetarian diet that doesn’t cause suffering.
Well has it been said that man is the only animal that naturally looks upwards; every other animal naturally looks down. That looking upward and going upward and seeking perfection are what is called salvation; and the sooner a man begins to go higher, the sooner he raises himself towards this idea of truth as salvation.
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.
The Animals of the planet are in desperate peril and they are fully aware of this. No less than human beings are doing in all parts of the world, they are seeking sanctuary.
In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with all the objects of creation, there is a whole great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to human ethics.
A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.
What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle's, and of a rabbit, rabbit's. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another.
My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.
People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of expiring victims or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there.
Ecology more important than saving animals from slavery??? Humans suffer the raping of the earth but animals suffer DOUBLY: the raping of the earth PLUS their own raping by humans. They are innocent/they are not the ones who raped the earth/they enrich it for us all from the tiniest microscopic beings to the largest ones.
What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.