“Such close observations of apes and birds and dolphins remind us that humanity is part of a great animal kingdom. All species within this kingdom differ from one another in significant ways, to be sure, but the kingdom does not seem to be organized on the superior/inferior hierarchy. Species are merely different from one another; they are not better than, nor more or less advanced than, each other. The core experience of all animal life is strikingly similar.”

"ABC Radio Perspective on ABC News 20/20 on May 29, 1994"

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Hugh Downs8

American broadcaster 1921

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“The terms animal protection and species protection are constantly confused and mixed up with one another. Animal protection is the protection of individuals; it is about the individual, suffering creature. Species protection is the conservation of the species; it is about preventing species from becoming extinct or rare. From an ethical standpoint, animal protection is quite different from species protection.”

Werner Kunz (1922) German biologist

Species Conservation in Managed Habitats: The Myth of Pristine Nature (2016), p. 51

“Lower forms merge into higher forms, one species with another, the vegetable into the animal kingdom; in human history one epoch slides into another…Socialism, the stage which follows Liberalism, retains everything of value in Liberalism by virtue of its being the hereditary heir of Liberalism.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Socialism and Society (1905), pp. 164-165
1900s

“Although other animals may be different from us, this does not make them LESS than us”

Marc Bekoff (1945) American biologist

Source: Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect

“Even in the important matter of cranial capacity, Men differ more widely from one another than they do from the Apes; while the lowest Apes differ as much, in proportion, from the highest, as the latter does from Man.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 95

“Is Man so different from any of these Apes that he must form an order by himself? Or does he differ less from them than they differ from one another, and hence must take his place in the same order with them?”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 86

“In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 20.

“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

“It will be seen that I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for mere convenience sake.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter II: "Variation Under Nature", page 52 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=67&itemID=F373&viewtype=image

“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. Serpents, oxen, foxes, and men, however, are all similar in their eagerness to reproduce themselves, and in their emphatic reluctance to die.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Derivation of the Nature of Living Beings, p. 172

“Since Darwin, scientists have agreed that there is no ‘magical’ essential difference between human and other animals, biologically-speaking. Why then do we make an almost total distinction morally? If all organisms are on one physical continuum, then we should also be on the same moral continuum. … The only arguments in favour of painful experiments on animals are: 1) that the advancement of knowledge justifies all evils – well does it? 2) that possible benefits for our own species justify mistreatment of other species – this may be a fairly strong argument when it applies to experiments where the chances of suffering are minimal and the probability of aiding applied medicine is great, but even so it is still just ‘speciesism’, and as such it is a selfish emotional argument rather than a reasoned one.”

Richard D. Ryder (1940) British psychologist

" Speciesism https://books.google.it/books?id=Rz30CgAAQBAJ&pg=PT59" (1970). Reported in Speciesism, Painism and Happiness: A Morality for the Twenty-First Century by Richard D. Ryder (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2011), Chapter 2.

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