“We find it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything else, because we make so much about our own sufferings. Since, then, they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them emotionless; and so qua mankind they are; but mankind is not everybody.”

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 23

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Samuel Butler232

novelist 1835–1902

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“ Of all forms of symbolism, language is the most highly developed, most subtle, and most complicated. It has been pointed out that human beings, by agreement, can make anything stand for anything. Now, human beings have agreed, in the course of centuries of mutual dependency, to let the various noises that they can produce […] stand for specified happenings in their nervous systems. We call that system of agreements language. For example, we who speak English have been so trained that, when our nervous systems register the presence of a certain kind of animal, we may make the following noise: "That's a cat." Anyone hearing us expects to find that, by looking in the same direction, he will experience a similar event in his nervous system -- one that will lead him to make an almost identical noise. Again, we have been so trained that when we are conscious of wanting food, we make the noise "I'm hungry."”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

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Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Language as Symbolism, pp. 26-27

“Our way through life should not be difficult — but it is. The fact is that our lives are filled mostly with picking and choosing. "I want this, but not that." And because things are not anything other than the way they really are, we suffer. Nowhere is this more apparent and painful than when we are trying to find life after death. We so desperately want things to be the way they were. But they are not. So the longing itself becomes an additional source of suffering.”

Richard Carlson (1961–2006) Author, psychotherapist and motivational speaker

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“These problems do not disappear just because we do not hear about them. There is so much more happening around the world than what is communicated to us about the top stories we do hear.”

Angelina Jolie book Notes from My Travels

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Context: These problems do not disappear just because we do not hear about them. There is so much more happening around the world than what is communicated to us about the top stories we do hear. We all need to look deeper and discover for ourselves.... What is the problem? Where is it? How can we help to solve it?

“Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

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“Are we no greater than the noise we make
Along one blind atomic pilgrimage
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go
Because our brains and bones and cartilage
Will have it so?”

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) American poet

The Man against the Sky (1950).

“Neither the Government nor the local authorities make any wealth or have any money of their own. If we want them to spend more and more we have to pay. The remedy is in our hands. Stop running to them asking them to do this, that and everything under the sun - and demand instead that they stop doing and spending so much.”

Jo Grimond (1913–1993) British soldier, politician and academic

February 1957, quoted in Michael McManus Jo Grimond: Towards the Sound of Gunfire (Birlinn, 2001) p. 120.

“We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

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“She put up with all our noise in the bedroom, because we started off with a little studio in our bedroom. And our room was right next to her and pops’ bedroom, so they couldn’t stand the noise because we made a lot of racket and we had other rappers coming in all the time, and they put up with that. And plus, she listened to a lot of soul music when we was growing up so that influenced us. And in church. She tried to make us go to church but we just didn’t tend to stick with it.”

Lord Infamous (1975–2013) American rapper

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“Where we can prevent predation without occasioning as much or more suffering than we would prevent, we are obligated to do so by the principle that we are obligated to alleviate avoidable animal suffering. Where we cannot prevent or cannot do so without occasioning as much or more suffering than we would prevent, that principle does not obligate us to attempt to prevent predation.”

Steve F. Sapontzis (1945)

Steve Sapontzis, " Predation https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1220&context=ethicsandanimals", Ethics and Animals, Vol. 5, Iss. 2, Art. 4 (1984), p. 36

“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

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