Brigid Brophy Quotes

Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey was a British novelist, critic, and campaigner for social reforms, including the rights of authors and animal rights. Among her novels was Hackenfeller's Ape ; among her critical studies were Mozart the Dramatist and Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction ... In Praise Of Ronald Firbank . In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J. Newman described her as "one of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of [the] 1960s symptoms."

She was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex, and pornography. She was a campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England.Brophy married art historian Michael Levey in 1954. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1983. Wikipedia

✵ 12. June 1929 – 7. August 1995

Brigid Brophy: 6 quotes 0 likes

Famous Brigid Brophy Quotes

“Reason can always disarm the irrational. If reason finds itself to be irrational, it can disarm it; and if one finds reason and discovers that eating animals is immoral, unnecessary, and done largely for superstitious reasons, then one is delivered from the compulsion to do it.”

Brigid Brophy

Interview in The Vegetarians by Rynn Berry (Autumn Press, 1979), p. 82.

“I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality and moral choice—and that is precisely why we are under the obligation to recognise and respect the rights of animals.”

Brigid Brophy

Source: The Rights of Animals (1965), p. 21

“Whenever people say "we mustn't be sentimental" you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, "we must be realistic," they mean they are going to make money out of it.”

Brigid Brophy

Quoted in Spiritual Ecology by Jim Nollman (Bantam Books, 1990), pp. 189-190.

“To hold vivisection to be never justified is a hard belief. But so is its opposite. I believe it is never justified because I can see nothing (except our being able to get away with it) which lets us pick on animals that would not equally let us pick on idiot humans (who would be more useful) or, for the matter of that, on a few humans of any sort whom we might sacrifice for the good of the many. If we do permit vivisection, here if anywhere we are under the most stringent minimum obligations. The very least we must make sure of is that no experiment is ever duplicated, or careless, or done for mere teaching's sake or as a substitute for thinking. Knowing how often, in every other sphere, pseudo-work proliferates in order to fill time and jobs, and how often activity substitutes for thought, and then reading the official statistics about vivisection, do you truly believe we do make sure?”

Brigid Brophy

Source: The Rights of Animals (1965), pp. 19-20

“When factory farmers tell us that animals kept in 'intensive' (i. e. concentration) camps are being kindly spared the inclemency of a winter outdoors, and that calves do not mind being tethered for life on slats because they have never known anything else, an echo should start in our historical consciousness: do you remember how the childlike blackamoors were kindly spared the harsh responsibilities of freedom, how the skivvy didn't feel the hardship of scrubbing all day because she was used to it, how the poor didn't mind their slums because they had never known anything else?”

Brigid Brophy

Source: The Rights of Animals (1965), p. 17

“To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deep into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps three thousand years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our oppression of animals.”

Brigid Brophy

Source: The Rights of Animals (1965), p. 17

Similar authors

Christopher Morley photo

Christopher Morley 30

American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet

Marcel Proust photo

Marcel Proust 41

French novelist, critic, and essayist

Herta Müller photo

Herta Müller 28

German-Romanian novelist, poet and essayist

Paul Valéry photo

Paul Valéry 89

French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Emil M. Cioran photo

Emil M. Cioran 531

Romanian philosopher and essayist

Julio Cortázar photo

Julio Cortázar 29

Argentinian writer

Edward Abbey photo

Edward Abbey 146

American author and essayist

Olavo de Carvalho photo

Olavo de Carvalho 6

Brazilian journalist, essayist and professor of philosophy

Romain Rolland photo

Romain Rolland 43

French author

Mario Vargas Llosa photo

Mario Vargas Llosa 30

Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist