Henry Stephens Salt Quotes

Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt was an English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions, and the treatment of animals. He was a noted ethical vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, socialist, and pacifist, and was well known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist. It was Salt who first introduced Mohandas Gandhi to the influential works of Henry David Thoreau, and influenced Gandhi's study of vegetarianism.Salt is credited with being the first writer to argue explicitly in favour of animal rights, in his Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress , rather than focusing on improvements to animal welfare. He wrote: "If we are ever going to do justice to the lower races, we must get rid of the antiquated notion of a 'great gulf' fixed between them and mankind, and must recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood." Wikipedia  

✵ 20. September 1851 – 19. April 1939
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Henry Stephens Salt: 19   quotes 0   likes

Famous Henry Stephens Salt Quotes

“Have the lower animals "rights?" Undoubtedly—if men have.”

Source: Animals' Rights, Chapter 1

Henry Stephens Salt Quotes about animals

“The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice will bring with it in due course the emancipation of animals also. The two reforms are inseparably connected, and neither can be fully realized alone.”

From an essay in Cruelties of Civilization (1897) as quoted in Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature, University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, p. 29 https://books.google.it/books?id=f9tJZz6jDUIC&pg=PA29.

“Have the lower animals "rights?"”

Undoubtedly—if men have.
Source: Animals' Rights, Chapter 1

Henry Stephens Salt Quotes

“I shall die … as I have lived, rationalist, socialist, pacifist, and humanitarian.”

As quoted in Henry Salt, Humanitarian Reformer and Man of Letters, George Hendrick, Illinois (1977).

“And, after all, the humane spirit, which is the motive power of all true schemes of reform, is, by its very essence, independent of belief in what is commonly called "success."”

Source: " The Poet of Pessimism https://www.henrysalt.co.uk/library/essay/the-poet-of-pessimism/", Vegetarian Review, August 1896
Context: We work for an ideal, not because we believe the ideal is destined to be triumphant, but because we are impelled so to work, and cannot, without violence to our best instincts, act otherwise. We protest against cruelty and injustice for the same reason, not merely because we feel that the dawn of a better day is at hand, but because such a protest has to be made, and we know intuitively that we must help to make it. Of the event we can have no absolute assurance—it rests for other minds and other hands than our—but we can at least be assured that we have done what was natural and inevitable to us, and that, whether successful or unsuccessful, there was no other course for a thoughtful man to take.

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