J. Howard Moore Quotes (183 quotes, page 3)

“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, have been ordained and established by the immeasurable manufacturer of things.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 137

“Look at the manner in which the aborigines are swept away from continent after continent by the sword and beverage of the Aryans. See how the red children of America have been cheated and debauched and driven from homes where they and their fathers had lived from immemorial generations. When the banner of Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, America was inhabited by a noble, magnanimous, and happy people. They were not like the sodden, suspicious, revengeful remnants that to-day huddle on barricaded reserves, the vindictive survivors of four centuries of injustice. They were kind and generous. They came to the invading Europeans as children, with minds of wonder and with hands filled with presents. They were treated by the invaders like refuse. They were plundered, and their outstretched hands cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. They are gone from the valleys where once their camp-smokes curled to heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle the moonlight of the rivers no more. They that remain are too weak to rise in warlike challenge to the aggressions of the mighty white. But the story of the meeting of the pale and the red, and of the wrongs of the vanquished red, will remain as one of the mournful tales of this world when the kindred of Lo, like fleecy clouds, have melted into the infinite azure of the past.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 133–134

Home , Cheating , Past , Children

“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, and is to-day, the race, and woman his shadow.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 133

Wedding , Women , Men

“Oh, universe! Pitiful spectacle! Aggregation of tragedy, somnambulism, inhumanity, terrorism, and death! It makes one long to seal up his sensibilities and leap out into the gulfs and be swallowed up. The handiwork of an all-wise biophilist? Rhapsody of an idiot! Gods? No! The monstrous kindergarten of an idle-pated knave! A Satanic prank! The surreptitious handiwork of an ass! A universe is, indeed, to be pitied whose dominating inhabitants are so unconscious and so ethically embryonic that they make life a commodity, mercy a disease, and systematic massacre a pastime and a profession.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, pp. 131–132

God , Making love , Universe , Life

“Why are non-human beings ostracized and treated by humans with no consideration save as they administer to selfish human ends? Whence the doctrine that non-human species were made for the hominine species, and that there is no logic or sanity in their existence save as they feed or slave for their human tyrants? Because they are dumb, that is, because their language is not understood by human minds, and because they are wild, that is, because they are for the most part unassociated with human animals, and because the civilized consciousness, which is barely able to realize the kinship of human beings, is yet too feeble and rudimentary to comprehend the solidarity of all beings.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, p. 119

Animals , Selfishness , Parting

“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, supplementation, the social ideal.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Ideal, p. 164

Self-confidence

“There is no sympathy, no consciousness of kind, no realization that the emotions experienced by that valiant little creature struggling to avoid the mouths of those instinct-maddened dogs are similar to the emotions they themselves would experience in an identical predicament.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, pp. 117

Dogs

“The acts of living beings are, as a rule, neither all altruism nor all egoism. They consist generally of blends of the two elements, with a preponderance of egoism. It is frequently impossible, too, to estimate just the amount of each element in a given act. An act which may seem altruistic may be in reality only sly and far-sighted egoism.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, p. 96

Reality

“In the nature of living beings there are two elements—that element which impels a living creature to move in behalf or in the interests of itself, and that which prompts or prevents movement out of consideration for others. The former of these two elements is called egoism, the latter, altruism.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, p. 92

Nature

“There is a kinship of all beings, for the life process has sprung from one source and evolved according to one fundamental principle. Consciousness of kind, therefore, the ability to participate in the psychic states of others, is cultivated by a knowledge of the nature and content of those around us, and anything which tends to increase or complete our knowledge of others, as identity of language, association, or ambition, tends to intensify consciousness of kind, and whatever limits or prevents knowledge of others tends to cause us to consider them of a different order or kind from ourselves.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, pp. 117–118

Knowledge , Life , Nature

“We, you, reader, and I, are parts of nature, and are as liable to deserve the suspicion of infallibility as any other part. Why not? We represent the boldest and most elaborate evolutions. Why should we be the authors of the most disreputable phenomena?”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, p. 87

Parting , Nature

“All conscious beings are struggling, struggling to keep themselves in joint with their environment. Those things and creatures and events that aid them in their struggles are desirable and they call them good, and those things and creatures and events that oppose and defeat the satisfaction of desires are called bad.”

J. Howard Moore

Right and wrong exist as conceptions of mind, because there are portions of the universe capable of happiness and misery. Erase sentiency from the universe and you erase the possibility of ethics. Every conscious portion of the universe, therefore, has ethical relations to every other conscious portion (man, woman, worm, Eskimo, oyster, ox), but not to inanimate portions (clod, cabbage, river, rose), because the ones are sentient and the others are not.
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 81–82

Bad luck

“If the rest of cosmos were a conspiracy intriguing for the maintenance and entertainment of the sentient creatures it has brought into existence, it would seem to be an arrangement more creditable and more worthy of an all-wise and amicably disposed inventor. But it is not.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, p. 75

“It has been called a problem of adaptation. There is a subjective and there is an objective, a self and a not-self. And between this self and the not-self there is incessant irrelation. That which is not-self is a process, always changing. It never tires of adopting new attitudes toward the self. The self also is a process, and hence is continually losing joint, or is in continual danger of losing joint, with its environment. Life, therefore, at best, since in the nature of things it is a struggle and a search, is an enterprise with exasperating lack of sunshine.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 74–75

Search , Nature , Problem , Self-confidence

“The universe of things in the midst of which we discover ourselves, is to be managed and placated, in so far as it is to be managed and placated at all, by the observation and classification of its phenomena, by the ascertainment of its habits, and by ingenious and business-like manipulations of its tendencies, and in no other way.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Blunders, p. 72

Way , Business , Universe

“Caprice is a hallucination. There is no caprice, only ignorance.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Blunders, p. 55

“Inventions are a blessing. They tame the wild tendencies of the inanimate and train them to do human bidding. They save human bodies hard and laborious exertions by becoming their obsequious aids. But they are not invariable and universal blessings. The sad and peculiar conditions prevailing in human industry cause inventions to be to many human beings a catastrophe and a dread. To those who are able to own them and have lands on which to operate them they are blessings. But to the great disinherited class, who have nothing on earth but their hands, inventions are a disadvantage and an evil.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Problem of Industry, pp. 40–41

Universe , Training , Sadness , Evil

“The human beings who possess the dominion of land and machinery and compel others, in order to obtain the essentials of existence, to serve them, are as truly masters of slaves as they who exact blood from the dorsals of their fellows with literal slave whips.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Problem of Industry, p. 37

“So the disinherited loan themselves to the possessors of things, the landlords and the capitalists, who allow to them a rental for the use of their bodies. The industrial system which allows the unlimited appropriation of land and inventions furnishes to the more powerful and avaricious classes of communities the means by which they compel the rest to labor for them. And not to call such deprivation slavery is to neglect to use the word with its most essential connotation.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Problem of Industry, pp. 36–37

Communication

“Man, in satisfying his desires, in avoiding misery and achieving happiness, strives to do two things with the inanimate universe: to manage it and to foreknow it. The inanimate is not devoted to us. We are not birdlings cuddled in an order of things where we need simply to yawn and be filled. We must bestir ourselves, or be in a position to compel others to bestir themselves for us, or perish. We are waifs, brought into existence by a universe whose solicitude for us ended with the travail that brought us forth. The inanimate universe is our mother, but without the blessed mother-love. The first thing we are conscious of, and about the only thing we ever absolutely know, is that we are whirling around in a very helpless manner on a whirligig of a ball, out of whose substance by the sweat of our brows we must quarry our existence. The universe is practically independent of us. But we, alas, are not independent of it. The food we eat, our raiment, our habitations, our treasures, our implements of knowledge, and our means of amusement are all portions of the inanimate, which we living beings must somehow subtract from the rest. In order to obtain these indispensable portions of the universe about us, we must halter it and control it and compel it to produce to the tune of our desires.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Problem of Industry, pp. 19–20

Food , Universe , Knowledge , Love

“Every pain is to be avoided, except those whose endurance will enable the avoidance of greater pain, and every possible happiness is to be harvested, save those whose foregoing will help the universe to larger happiness. There is no obligation commanding any being to endure misery save to avoid misery, and no consideration demanding any one to neglect happiness save for larger happiness—those ascetics who proclaim the divinity of wretchedness to the contrary notwithstanding.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Problem of Industry, p. 17

Universe , Pain , Help , Happiness

“No wonder the child loves the camp-fire. The camp-fire was the ancestor of the hearth—the first bright spot in that dark world out of which our forefathers groped their way so long ago.”

J. Howard Moore

The Law of Biogenesis (1914)

World , Love , Way , Making love

“I am a vegetarian, therefore, because cannibalism is unnecessarily. I can live just as well and be just as happy without drinking the blood of my fellows and why should I slay them? Why should I not live and let live—especially when I can do it just as well as not? It is not necessary that ten thousand creatures should give up their lives in order that I may keep mine, and if I make any pretensions to morality why should I require them to do it? If you say such a thing is necessary in your case, I say to you it is not—and further, that if it were, it would be your duty as an ethical being to call on your undertaker. There is no sense in carnivora talking about ethics and justice and mercy, for their very existence is a travesty on such things. It makes me indignant and sad when I hear men deplore sin and prate about justice and love and mercy when the very energy they expend in preaching justice and mercy is obtained from the skeletons and sensibilities of their fellows. It is a spectacle that ought to make the imps of netherdom tremble for their laurels—man, the remorseless glutton, going about with a tongue and a knife, with his tongue preaching peace, mercy, and love, and with his knife making the very earth sodden with blood.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895), pp. 39–40

Peace , Drink , Justice , Sense

“I am a vegetarian because I believe that present-day ethics is founded on that puerile, pre-Darwinian delusion that all other kinds of creatures and all worlds were created explicitly for the hominine species. Vegetarianism is the ethical corollary of evolution. It is simply the expansion of ethics to suit the biological revelations of Charles Darwin. Evolution has taught us the kinship of all creatures.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895), pp. 19–20

World

“I became a vegetarian by my own reflection. I did not know at the time of the vegetarian movement, and hence, supposed myself among republics of carnivora. It did not seem to me graceful or ideal that I, an ethical being should maintain my existence at the incessant expense of misery and death to others.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895), pp. 11—12

Death , Time

“The human race is like a snake—it sheds. Ever and anon, as the ages bloom, old forms of thought are superseded by intellectual bran-news. Shrines at which one generation adores become to the succeeding desolate and despised.”

J. Howard Moore

"Preface"
Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895)

Age

“This is a gray world. There is enough sorrow in it, even though we cease to scourge each other—the sorrow of floods, famines, fires, earthquakes, storms, diseases, and death. We should trust each other, and love each other, and sympathize with and help each other, and be patient and forgiving.”

J. Howard Moore

Quoted by Henry S. Salt in Seventy Years Among Savages (1921), p. 244

Forgiveness , Making love , Help , World

“The long struggle is ended. I must pass away. Good-by. O, men are so cold and hard and half conscious toward their suffering fellows. Nobody understands. O my mother! and O my little girl! What will become of you? And the poor four-footed! May the long years be merciful! Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever.”

J. Howard Moore

Suicide note

Singing , Understanding , Girl , Suffering

“Religion has had a natural origin, like coal, and rock salt, and mountains, and river valleys, and everything else. It has been made in the laboratory of human feeling and imagination. The gods did not make men; men made the gods.”

J. Howard Moore

"The Source of Religion", International Socialist Review, Vol. 16, Iss. 12, Jun. 1916

God , Religion , Imagination , Mountain

“Religion is essentially pre-scientific. It will pass away. It represents a certain stage of mental development. It has been tinkered with and tinkered with until it is about ready for the scrap heap. The more men know of chemistry and physics and evolution and natural law, the less use they have for supernaturalism. No true scientist can pray. Prayer is unscientific. No evolutionist can believe in the divine origin of anything.”

J. Howard Moore

"The Source of Religion", International Socialist Review, Vol. 16, Iss. 12, Jun. 1916

Nature , Religion , Law , Men

“Religion is a strictly human infirmity. No other animal has it. It originated far back in the past, when the human world was young and the mind just beginning to open. It is an anachronism today, with our science and understanding. It survives solely by the force of tradition.”

J. Howard Moore

"The Source of Religion", International Socialist Review, Vol. 16, Iss. 12, Jun. 1916

Religion , Understanding , Past , Animals

“I sit here tonight in this great city and think back along the years. Life is so full and so different now – full of teaching, writing and problem solving. But, oh, those precious memories away back there in the morning! The prairies are gone, where we used to gather wild strawberries and tiger lilies, but the old school house still stands, I am told, where the High Bank lifts its formidableness above the singing stream.”

J. Howard Moore

"A One Time Resident Writes", Atchison County Journal, 23 Mar. 1916

School , Singing , Housing , Problem

“I came to the conclusion out there on the Kansas prairies that the animals were not treated right by human beings. I thought we had not even a right to kill them for food and came to the University of Chicago to study the matter. At that time I had never heard of vegetarianism.”

J. Howard Moore

The National Humane Review, Vol. 4–6, American Humane Association, 1916

Study , Time , Food , Universe

“If I were making a world and could arrange it as I wanted to, only humanitarians would be allowed to practice vivisection. Only those would be allowed to practice it who would be as economical in inflicting pain on others as they would be in inflicting it on themselves. Vivisection in the hands of those without sympathy, in the hands of those who are still in the mists of anthropocentrism, will always be abused, will always be, what it is to-day, largely a pastime and a hobby.”

J. Howard Moore

"Discovering Darwin", Proceedings of the International Anti-Vivisection and Animal Protection congress, held at Washington, D.C. December 8th to 11th, 1913 (1913), p. 158The only consistent attitude, since Darwin established the unity of life (and the attitude we shall assume, if we ever become really civilised), is the attitude of universal gentleness and humanity.

World , Pain , Making love

“The trouble with all ethical systems of this world has been their partiality. They have been arranged with undue regard for those who invented them. And this defect vitiates the prevailing systems to-day as it has vitiated the systems that have been produced in times gone by.”

J. Howard Moore

"Discovering Darwin", Proceedings of the International Anti-Vivisection and Animal Protection congress, held at Washington, D.C. December 8th to 11th, 1913 (1913), p. 156

World , Time

“Men have had the same origin as other animals; they have the same general architecture of body and mind; and they have the same destiny. And they stand on the same general level of ethical claim and obligation.”

J. Howard Moore

"Discovering Darwin", Proceedings of the International Anti-Vivisection and Animal Protection congress, held at Washington, D.C. December 8th to 11th, 1913 (1913), p. 156

Animals , Men

“Men are like May-flies. The most of them see things only during the brief breath of a day. The ages of history and biology are unknown and unconsidered. No wonder the universe is misunderstood. The human mind is without longitude. Even a cannonball, photographed with an exposure of one-five-thousandth of a second, seems suspended in mid-air.”

J. Howard Moore

"Discovering Darwin", Proceedings of the International Anti-Vivisection and Animal Protection congress, held at Washington, D.C. December 8th to 11th, 1913 (1913), p. 152

Universe , Age , History , Men

“Much of the vagueness of the human mind is due to the fact that the mind is largely composed of material derived second-hand from books. The ideas are not read.”

J. Howard Moore

"Human Nature is Defective", speech to the Young People's Socialist League, The Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct. 1910

Idea , Books , Reading

“Every being is incomparably precious to himself. This is the most mournful feature in human psychology. We did not invent it. It was handed to us along with our fingers and our fondness fo eating. It is the psychic calamity of the animal kingdom.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: "Human Nature is Defective", speech to the Young People's Socialist League, The Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct. 1910

Animals

“Human nature is defective. It is selfish. It is cruel and revengeful. It is a product of militancy and hate. It is much better adapted to a fighting life, in which it was generated, than it is in cooperation and peace.”

J. Howard Moore

"Human Nature is Defective", speech to the Young People's Socialist League, The Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct. 1910

Selfishness , Peace , Hate , Revenge

“We should be a little more disposed to move along. We live in a world that is neither petrified or perfect. The universe is a liquid. It is flowing. Humanitarianism is in the air.”

J. Howard Moore

Source: " Humanitarianism in the Schools https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89081128/1909-10-13/ed-1/seq-5/", New Ulm review, 13 Oct. 1909

World , Perfection , Universe

“Is murder stripped of its blackness by become a fine art? All assassination is practically instantaneous and painless, the assassination of men as as well as that of birds and quadrupeds. What would the author of such nonsense think if the assassination of his brother or mother blandly attempted to relieve himself of all guilt by means of the assurance that his victim had experienced no suffering? The crime of extermination does not consist in the creation of pain, but in the destruction of that precious and mysterious essence called life.”

J. Howard Moore

Debate with Laurence Gronlund, quoted by Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo in Vegetarian America: A History (2004), p. 121

Pain , Suffering , Art , Bird

“Well may we be dazed by the horrific metamorphosis. Dark days are upon us. The pendulum of civilization trembles, as if to swing back to the inglorious twilight of the past. Imperialistic tendencies are laying their damning clutches on the unsuspecting form of the republic. Fearful questions confront us. Whether we are to be compelled henceforth to read with downcast gaze the matchless axioms of Jefferson and to mumble in confusion the heroic history of our dead—whether the Fourth of July is to be henceforth a day of embarrassment and shame instead of, as hitherto, an occasion for spontaneous and boundless pride—whether Yorktown and Monmouth are to become events which, instead of inspiring a continent to eulogy and song, shall provoke no higher eloquence than that which gutturals from the limping lips of apology—whether the political wisdom of the founders of the republic, gleaned in terrible hours, by anxious eyes, from the travail of ages past, shall be swept away by the heartless levity of upstart statesmen—whether, in short, we shall turn our backs inexorably upon the past—a past glorious achievement and unrivaled in precept—and become the wretched exemplars of a policy, ruinous to ourselves and to our children, repulsive to every truly civilized mind and destructive of the fairest hopes of humanity—these.”

J. Howard Moore

are questions that assail with relentless emphasis the consciences of a great people.
"America's Apostasy", Chicago Chronicle, 6 Mar. 1899

Reading , History , Question , Past

“This is a gray world. There is enough sorrow in it, even though we cease to scourge each other—the sorrow of floods, famines, fires, earthquakes, storms, diseases, and death. We should trust each other, and love each other, and sympathize with and help each other, and be patient and forgiving. We preach the Golden Rule with an enthusiasm that is well-nigh vehement, and then freckle the globe with huge murder-houses for the expeditious destruction of those who have as good a right to live as we have.”

J. Howard Moore

" The Unconscious Holocaust https://archive.org/details/theunconsciousholocaust-jhowardmoore", Good Health: A Journal of Hygiene, Vol 32, Iss. 2, 1 Feb. 1897, p. 75

Forgiveness , Housing , Making love , Help

“[This work] would be inexcusable to suppose it to be exhaustive. It is not even defensive. It is a projectile, and projectiles do not apologize.
It intends to be followed.”

J. Howard Moore

"Preface"
Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895)